Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

To show her new clothes and to take the fresh air;

Her shape, her attire, raised a shout in loud laughter:

Away waddles Madam, the mob hurries after.

Quoth a wag, then observing the noisy crowd follow,

'As she came with a hoop, she is gone with a hollow.'"

The hoopskirt was the characteristic feature of eighteenth-century styles, and it grew to such enormous proportions as seriously to inconvenience the wearer and to interfere with the cubic feet of space which a pedestrian might reasonably claim as his right on a crowded thoroughfare. But there were eighteenth-century styles which were more reprehensible than the oft-caricatured hoop.

There was a class of votaries of fashion, in contrast to the mass of society, whose only notion of dress was display, and toward the middle of the eighteenth century these imported the most extravagant and immodest of French styles. As they paraded the public gardens, to which all classes resorted, the staid people were scandalized by their appearance. T. Wright, in his Caricature History of the Georges, says that "what was looked upon as the beau-monde then lived much more in public than now, and men and women of fashion displayed their weaknesses to the world in public places of amusement and resort, with little shame or delicacy. The women often rivalled the men in libertinism, and even emulated them sometimes in their riotous manners." Women of the town were greatly in evidence, and a trustworthy traveller of the times affirms that they were bolder and more numerous in London than in either Paris or Rome. Not only at night, but in broad daylight, they traversed the footpaths, selecting out of the passers-by the susceptible for their enticement, particularly directing themselves to foreigners. Archenholz says: On compte cinquante mille prostitueés à Londres, dans les maîtresses en titre. Leurs usages et leur conduite déterminent les différentes classes où il faut les ranger. La plus vile de toutes habite dans les lieux publics sous la direction d'une matrone qui les loge et les habille. Ces habits mêe pour les filles communes, sont de soie, suivant l'usage que le luxe a généralement introduit en Angleterre.... Dans la seule paroisse de Marybonne, qui est la plus grande et la plus peuplée de l'Angleterre, on en comptoit, il y a quelques années, treize mille, dont dix-sept cents occupoient des maisons entières à elles seules.

Such a picture of social vice in the metropolis is a sad commentary upon the tendency of the young women of the country districts to drift to the city. The "lights o' London" had already begun to possess that fascination for the weak in morals, the light-headed and frivolous, which has made them a wrecker's beacon on a rockbound shore, luring to destruction untold hosts of inexperienced country youth. Nor was the drift Londonward due altogether to the fascination which the gay and pleasure-pandering city possessed, for there were not wanting methods of enticement such as are still employed, in spite of legal penalties. The example of city dwellers of outward respectability did not tend to elevate the moral tone of those who came fresh from the country, with its purer home life; for while the sanctity of the home was an appreciable fact of the seventeenth century, it was much less so in the metropolis and in the cities generally than it was in the country.

A notorious fact that attracted the notice of continental visitors to England was that lax morality prevailed in many English families. Muralt, a Frenchman, even asserts that he found it customary for husbands generally to maintain mistresses and also to bring them to their homes and place them on a footing with their wives. This is doubtless an exaggerated statement of the case; but when the king was not faultless, the people were apt to pursue folly. Although no king after Charles II., except George II., disgraced the nation by the profligacy which he exhibited, yet Charles's successor, James II., kept a mistress, as did most of the kings following him.