These females are kept from ages varying from sixteen and upwards, and live chiefly in the suburbs of the metropolis—Brompton, Chelsea, St. John’s Wood, Haverstock Hill, and on the Hampstead Road.
This class of ladies are often kept by elderly men, military, naval, or otherwise, some of them having wives and families. In such cases the former sometimes have a younger fancy-man. They visit him by private arrangement, and keep it very quiet. Occasionally such things do come to light, and the elderly gentlemen part with them.
They dress very expensively in silks, satins, and muslins, in most fashionable style, glittering with costly jewellery, perhaps of the value of 150l., like the first ladies in the land. Sometimes they become intemperate, and are abandoned by their paramours, and in the course of a short time pawn their jewels and fine dresses, and betake themselves to prostitution in the Waterloo Road, and ultimately go with the most degraded labouring men for a few coppers.
Many of them are very unfortunate, and are discarded by the gentlemen who support them on the slightest caprice, perhaps to give way to some other young woman. To secure his object he occasionally maltreats her, and attempts to create a misunderstanding between them, or he absents himself from her for a time, meantime taking care to introduce some person stealthily into her company to ensnare her, and find some pretext to abandon her, so that her friends may have no ground for an action at law against him.
In some instances these females after having run their fashionable career, get married; in others they may have managed to save some money to provide for the future. But in too many cases they are heartlessly abandoned by the men who formerly supported them, and glide down step by step into lower degradation, till many of them come to the workhouse, or the hospital, or to some secluded garret, or it may be rush into a suicide’s grave. Volumes might be written on this tragical theme, where fact would far transcend the heart-rending recitals of fiction.
Having briefly adverted to the higher order of prostitutes, kept as seclusives by men of wealth, high station, and title, we shall now turn our attention to the open prostitutes who traverse the streets of the metropolis for their livelihood. With this view, we shall not treat first of the lower order of prostitutes, and proceed to the higher, but keeping in mind the principle with which we started—the progressive downward nature of crime,—we shall commence at the higher order of prostitutes, and afterwards notice the more debased. At the same time we shall select several of the more prominent localities as a sample of the whole districts of this vast metropolis. We shall notice the Haymarket, Bishopgate Street, and Waterloo Road, the Parks, Westminster, and Ratcliff Highway. We shall first advert to
The Prostitutes of the Haymarket.
A stranger on his coming to London, after visiting the Crystal Palace, British Museum, St. James’s Palace, and Buckingham Palace, and other public buildings, seldom leaves the capital before he makes an evening visit to the Haymarket and Regent Street. Struck as he is with the dense throng of people who crowd along London Bridge, Fleet Street, Cheapside, Holborn, Oxford Street, and the Strand, perhaps no sight makes a more striking impression on his mind than the brilliant gaiety of Regent Street and the Haymarket. It is not only the architectural splendour of the aristocratic streets in that neighbourhood, but the brilliant illumination of the shops, cafés, Turkish divans, assembly halls, and concert rooms, and the troops of elegantly dressed courtesans, rustling in silks and satins, and waving in laces, promenading along these superb streets among throngs of fashionable people, and persons apparently of every order and pursuit, from the ragged crossing-sweeper and tattered shoe-black to the high-bred gentleman of fashion and scion of nobility.
Not to speak of the first class of kept women, who are supported by men of opulence and rank in the privacy of their own dwellings, the whole of the other classes are to be found in the Haymarket, from the beautiful girl with fresh blooming cheek, newly arrived from the provinces, and the pale, elegant, young lady from a milliner’s shop in the aristocratic West-end, to the old, bloated women who have grown grey in prostitution, or become invalid through venereal disease.
We shall first advert to the highest class who walk the Haymarket, which in our general classification we have termed the second class of prostitutes.