Here and There in London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Once upon a time there was a rascally old nobleman who lived in a big house in Piccadilly. Mr. Raikes describes him as “a little sharp-looking man, very irritable, and swore like 10,000 troopers, enormously rich, and very selfish.” He sat all day long at a low window, leering at beauty as it passed by, and under his window was a groom waiting on horseback to carry his messages to any one whom he remarked in the street. If one did not know that we lived in a highly moral age, one would fancy many such old noblemen lived in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, for in the streets leading thence, and reaching as far back as Tottenham-court-road, we have an immense female population, all existing and centred there, who live by vicious means—all with the common feeling of

their sex rooted out and destroyed; all intended by nature to diffuse happiness around; all a curse on all with whom they have to do. In this small circle, there is enough vicious leaven to leaven all London. It is impossible to get a true estimate of their number. Guesses of all kinds have been made, but none are exactly to be depended on. In a great capital like ours, where wealthy sensualists can and do pay enormous sums for the gratification of their whims—(I have seen it stated that on one occasion a gentleman went into a house in Norton-street with a £500 bank-note, and after staying a few hours received but £20 change)—it is not alone the professedly vicious—the class whom we call prostitutes—who prostitute themselves. As fine shops are pointed out in fashionable streets, which are said to be houses of the most infamous description, in spite of the display of lace and millinery in the window, so there are thousands of women, supposed to be respectable, and to live in a respectable manner, who yet are to all intents and purposes prostitutes, though they would not be classified as such. Now the number of this latter class is much exaggerated. Towards the close of the last century, when the population of London amounted to about a

million, Dr. Colquhoun, magistrate of the Thames Police, asserted the number of prostitutes to be at least 50,000. If prostitution has followed the same ratio of increase as the population, the number now must be considered as truly appalling. But evidently the Doctor’s estimate is exaggerated. At a period much nearer to our own, Mr. Chadwick puts down the number, excluding the City, at 7,000; Mr. Mayne, at from 8,000 to 10,000. The City Police estimates the number at 8,000, and this estimate is supported by Dr. Ryan, and Mr. Talbot, secretary to the Association formed in London for the protection of young girls. This is a very high figure; but a recent French writer tells us that in London, in the higher ranks of life, the proportion of vicious women to virtuous are as one to three! and in the lower ranks virtue does not exist at all!!! At any rate, there is reason to believe that in London there are 5,000 infamous houses. If besides we reckon up the procuresses, the keepers of low gin-palaces and beer-shops, where women are the bait, we are lost and bewildered, and dare not trust ourselves to give in numbers any idea of the persons directly and indirectly connected with prostitution, or of the

sum spent annually in London on that vice alone. And all this is carried on in the most methodical way. There are men and women whose constant employment is to search all parts of the metropolis for fresh victims; and to them young girls from the country and servant maids-of-all-work are easy prey. Then letters are written and sent to the clubs and to the patrons of such infamy, and they are furnished with all the particulars, and the price of the victim’s willing or unwilling seduction and shame. This state of things is progressive. Last year the returns of the City missionaries show an increase in their districts of fallen women to the number of 1,035. Of course it is only with the dregs that the City missionary comes in contact. While a woman preserves her health, and youth, and good looks, she lives in better quarters than those into which the City missionary generally finds his way. For a time she is gay; she dresses fine, spends money freely, drinks, and sings, and then prematurely becomes old, and sad, and poor.

Is this ever to be so? Is woman always to sell herself to man? And is man to dream that the smile thus bought is no lie, but a precious truth? I don’t suppose that if men were temperate

universal chastity would be the result; but that we should have less immorality is, I think, an admitted fact. Why are women, prostitutes? Chiefly, we are told, because of poverty; and of all causes of poverty, is not intemperance the greatest? Would you see how one vice is connected with another? Come up Portland-place at night. True, there are no public-houses here, but they are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood; and in them all night the men and painted women from Portland-place madden themselves with drink. Yes, here are the women that should have been British wives and mothers utterly perverted, and dragging down with them many a heart that might have emerged into a noble life. Lust and intemperance have slain them. “Lost, lost, lost for ever!” is the cry that greets us as we look at them.

An association has been formed in this neighbourhood to wipe away this plague spot. In their report, the committee state, when the movement commenced, which issued in the establishment of the association at the close of 1857, the condition of the districts (All Souls and Trinity), comprising the streets lying immediately

to the eastward of Portland-place, was perfectly appalling. It was then calculated that in those streets there were not less than 140 notorious houses of ill-fame, containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of prostitution was swelled by a large number of young women, lodging in the districts, who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by working for shops, but principally by the means of night prostitution. One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses, utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the passenger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was as pure and as much resorted to as any of

the most favoured districts of western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers, gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the principal part, were females grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter destitution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover, ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were

sold over from time to time to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.