Review of Georgian Harlots and Whores, by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword Books
“Bum-shops are opened in many parts of Westminster for the sale of cork bums. Tall ladies and short ladies, fat ladies and lean ladies, must have bums.”
Thus the December 1779 number of the Town & Country Magazine records a fashion for padding one’s rear with cork. The thought of entire shops being devoted to these appliances gives some idea of the importance of fashion at the time. It was an age when, thanks to the growing reach and affordability of engravers and printers, not to mention newspapers and magazines, ordinary people could for the first time inform themselves (sometimes very inaccurately) of the doings of the rich and famous, and even see images of how they looked and dressed. There could, in fact, be a cult of celebrity, much as there is today.
What is interesting is that the influencers, role models and fashion leaders whom female readers wished to emulate were not only titled ladies but famous actresses/courtesans. (Occasionally they might be both; the celebrated courtesan Nancy Parsons became a viscountess and the actress Elizabeth Farren, Duchess of Derby.) In the primmer, or more hypocritical, Victorian era, this might not have been so much the case; there was more disapproval of the wages of sin being made to look so attractive. But the Georgians were more laid-back, if that is not an unfortunate term in the context, and mostly saw nothing amiss in fashionable bonnet styles being called the Fanny Murray or the Kitty Fisher, after the legendary ladies who sported them. This is of course the point of the title: the ladies owned these terms and declined to be embarrassed about their profession.
Mike Rendell has been immersed in the study of the Georgian period for many a year, as devotees of his blog “Georgian Gentleman” will know. He makes a convincing case for the likeness between the celebrity cults of then and now – driven by the popular press, capable of being manipulated by the celebrities at its centre if they had the nous to do so, or of destroying them if they did not. He also shows one great difference from modern times: how little choice they had, in an age when women were lucky if they had an education or any means of making a living other than the obvious. Mary Robinson’s mother, deserted by her husband for another woman, opened a school in which her well-educated daughter taught. Mary might have remained a teacher for aught we know, had her father not objected to his wife running a business, which she could not legally do without his consent, and had it closed down. In the circumstances it would be singularly inappropriate to tut-tut at Mary’s decision, instead, not only to take to the stage as Perdita but to accept the Prince Regent, watching besotted from his box, as a rather portly Florizel.
For while Rendell is properly non-judgmental, he does not deny agency to these enterprising women. Kitty Fisher’s celebrity status was cemented when, riding in Hyde Park, she fell in such a way as to make it clear that, as was normal at the time, she had no drawers on. Since Kitty was a good horsewoman, it is most unlikely that this was anything but a planned publicity stunt, which succeeded brilliantly and was all over the papers in a way a Kardashian might envy. Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Armistead exercised considerable intellectual talents apart from the physical; Mary was an author while Elizabeth could hold her own intellectually with her lover and eventual husband Charles James Fox, who had no time at all for fools. Meanwhile Frances Abington, after a childhood of poverty and a failed marriage, earned enough on and off stage to reverse the “kept mistress” stereotype by “keeping” male lovers of her own. These ladies were of course at the top of their profession and Rendell does not minimise the miseries faced by those further down the line. But there is much pleasure to be had from seeing how women sometimes turned the tables on the kind of men who could describe them, in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, as “a good side-box piece – will show well in the flesh market”.
The one criticism I have of the book’s presentation is that I would have liked an index. But the illustrations, albeit not in colour, are a delight - portraits by Reynolds and others, cartoons by Rowlandson and Gillray and some exquisite fashion plates - for that reason I would choose the hardback rather than the Kindle. I also like the tone of the writing, which manages to be properly scholarly while retaining a trace of humour eminently appropriate to the racy ladies who form its subject. And who wouldn’t want to know more about those cork bums?
