Patrick Colquhoun, in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, estimated in 1797 that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London (approximately 10% of the total female population). The numbers didn’t lessen during Jane Austen’s lifetime. ‘It is a truth, dishonourable to the nation, that the dreadful sin of prostitution is more prevalent among us than in countries immersed in superstition and idolatry’, it was claimed in 18132. Covent Garden, where Jane stayed with her brother Henry in his Henrietta Street home, abounded with prostitutes. She could hardly have avoided seeing these ‘women of the town’ almost every time she went outdoors.
There were, of course, many different grades of prostitutes. The available talent ran from ‘the Splendid Madam at 50 guineas a night down to the civil nymph with white thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’4. On the bottom rung of the ladder was the streetwalker.
There were a huge number of brothels on the north side of the Strand and around Covent Garden. There was even a barge moored in the Thames, which ran a restaurant on the first floor and a brothel on the second. There were homosexual brothels. There was a black bawdy house. There were even brothels, of a sort, inside ‘Houses of Correction’, where the women prisoners were given the choice of starving to death or prostituting themselves to the prison staff. Male visitors could have a female prisoner, willing or unwilling, for the whole night if they tipped the keeper a shilling. Such places were hunting grounds also for Madams: ‘the place may be considered a great brothel kept under the protection of the law... [It is] common for the keeper of a bagnio to come to this place, call for a bottle or two of wine [and] look over the girls ... pay their fees and take them home’8. The world of brothel keeping is not so far removed from Jane Austen’s character Mrs Younge in Pride and Prejudice. She helps Wickham when he tries to elope with an under-age girl, she makes a living by renting out rooms and she would have been only too happy to have Wickham and Lydia stay with her had she space available.
At the top end of the ladder of women who traded sex for money was the kept mistress. Thanks to the example set by the Royal princes, the role of the mistress during the years of the Regency acquired a cachet that was almost respectable. Certainly, the official mistress became an established figure with her own position in society and was regarded as an asset to a man of fashion.
Emma Hamilton as the Goddess of Health
