CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Glossary of Eighteenth-Century Terms
1. The Curtain Rises
2. The Legend of Jack Harris
3. The Irish Poet
4. The Birth of a Venus
5. The Rise of Pimp General Jack
6. Slave to Grub Street
7. The Complexities of Love
8. Inspiration
9. An Introduction to Harris’s Ladies
10. The List
11. The Pimp Pays
12. The Fleet and O’Kelly
13. Harrison’s Return
14. Santa Charlotta of King’s Place
15. ‘The Little King of Bath’
16. ‘Whore Raising, or Horse Racing; How to Brood a Mare or Make Sense of a Foal-ly’
17. Full Circle
18. The Respectable Mrs Kelly
19. The Last Days of the List
20. Ladies of the List
Picture Section
Appendix: A List of Covent Garden Lovers
Notes
Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Extract from Mistress of My Fate
About the Author
Also by Hallie Rubenhold
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
In 1757, a down-and-out Irish poet, the head-waiter at Shakespear’s Head Tavern in Covent Garden, and a celebrated London courtesan became bound together by the publication of a little book: Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. This salacious publication detaling the names and ‘specialities’ of the capital’s prostitutes eventually became one of the eighteenth century’s most successful and scandalous literary works, selling 250,000 copies. During its heyday (1757-95) Harris’s List was the essential accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure. Yet beyond its titillating passages lay a glimpse into the sex lives of those who lived and died by the List’s profits during the Georgian era.
The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of three unusual characters: Samuel Derrick, John Harrison (aka Jack Harris) and Charlotte Hayes, whose complicated and colourful lives were brought together by this publication. The true history of the book is a tragicomic opera motivated by poverty, passionate love, aspiration and shame. Its story plunges the reader down the dark alleys of eighteenth-century London’s underworld, a realm populated by tavern owners, pimps, punters, card sharks and of course, a colourful range of prostitutes and brothel-keepers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hallie Rubenhold is a historian and broadcaster and an authority on womens’ lives in the 18th century. She has worked as a curator for the National Portrait Gallery and as a university lecturer. Her first novel, Mistress of My Fate was received with great acclaim and her biography, Lady Worsley’s Whim, was made into the hit BBC drama The Scandalous Lady W. She lives in London with her husband.
Chat with her on Twitter @HallieRubenhold
List OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Samuel Derrick. By permission of the British Library.
2. Charlotte Hayes (engraving after Joshua Reynolds). By permission of the British Museum.
3. Engraving by William Hogarth: The Times of the Day, ‘Morning’. Author’s collection.
4. Engraving by William Hogarth: The Distrest Poet. Author’s collection.
5. Engraving by William Hogarth: Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. Author’s collection.
6. Engraving by William Hogarth: The Harlot’s Progress, Plate I. Author’s collection.
7. Mrs Lessingham in the character of Ophelia: ‘There’s rue for you’. By permission of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
8. Frontispiece and title page from the Harris’s List, 1761. By permission of the National Libraries of Scotland.
9. Frontispiece from The Harris’s List, 1779. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
10. The Harris’s List, 1761. A page from the earliest existing copy. By permission of the National Libraries of Scotland.
11. Frontispiece and title page from the Harris’s List, 1793. By permission of the British Library.
12. Miss Smith. By permission of the National Libraries of Scotland.
13. Engraving by William Hogarth: Industry and Idleness, ‘The Idle ’Prentice return’d from Sea & in a Garret with a common Prostitute.’ Author’s collection.
14. Engraving by William Hogarth: Before. Author’s collection.
15. Engraving by William Hogarth: After. Author’s collection.
16. Engraving by William Hogarth: The Laughing Audience. Author’s collection.
17. Charlotte Spencer. Author’s collection.
18. Fanny Murray. Author’s collection.
19. Betsy Coxe (or Cox). Author’s collection.
20. Dennis O’Kelly with Philip O’Kelly and others at Newmarket, by Thomas Rowlandson. By permission of the Earl of Halifax.
21. Engraving by William Hogarth: The Rake’s Progress, ‘The Rose Tavern’. Author’s collection.
22. A Late Unfortunate Adventure at York. Author’s collection.
23. Miss S—t—n, the beauty of Arlington Street. By permission of the National Libraries of Scotland.
24. Canons Park, 1782. Author’s collection.
25. The yard of the Fleet Prison, c.1749. Courtesy of Jonathan Reeve.
26. Covent Garden (eastward view), 1786. Courtesy of Jonathan Reeve. JR813b42p241 17501800.
27. St James’s Square, c.1770. Courtesy of Jonathan Reeve. JR816b43p187 17501800.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The researching and writing of this work has been a fascinating voyage of discovery, not only for me but for a number of others involved. First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to Jonathan Reeve at Tempus for his insight, his assistance and for his unwavering faith in this book. An expression of thanks is also due to Frances Wilson for taking the time to read the manuscript in its early incarnation.
Similarly, the completion of my research would not have been possible without the contributions of several individuals. Elizabeth Denlinger’s generosity in sharing her unpublished research and engaging with me in lengthy ‘e-conversations’ about the Harris’s List has not gone unappreciated. Neither has the interest and assistance demonstrated by Susan Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library. Kieran Burns, Helen Roberts, Sarah Peacock, Paul Tankard, Robin Eagles, Matthew Symonds, James Mitchell, Declan Barriskill and Elen Curran have all been instrumental in helping to pull together the various strands of this history. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the staff at the British Library, the National Art Library, the London Metropolitan Archives and the Westminster City Archives, where the majority of my research was conducted.
Finally, but certainly not least on my roll of honours, my husband, Frank deserves a special commendation for agreeing to share his home and his life with Jack Harris, Samuel Derrick and the O’Kelly family for two long years. Without his support and that of my parents it is unlikely that their stories would have been given the airing they deserve.
1
THE CURTAIN Rises
ALTHOUGH YOU MAY not recognise it, you are standing in Covent Garden. It may look strange to you without its glass and steel market arches and its swirl of tourists. The buskers are gone, as are the rickshaw bicycles and shops peddling plastic gadgetry. What is left behind is the Piazza in puris naturalibus, in its mid-eighteenth-century state, complete with cobblestones, dust and open drains.
It’s a colourful place, even by the first thrust of morning light. At this early hour, the market square is alive with London life. Fruit and vegetable sellers, carters, ballad singers, knife grinders and milkmaids circle one another in their daily dance of work. Under wide-brimmed straw bonnets, women with red elbows balance baskets of produce on their hips. Men in wool frock coats or leather aprons toil, with their tri-cornered hats pulled over their sleepy eyes. There are children running barefoot chasing dogs. There are old men hobbling on makeshift walking sticks as crooked as their backs. There are toothless, wrinkled women, who are much younger than they look. Many of those who have come to haggle, wrapped up against the dawn’s chill, belong to the metropolis’s army of domestic servants. They will scurry back to their employers’ homes with heavy baskets before their masters and mistresses have stirred from their beds.
Of course, this visual carnival is not without its scents and sounds. The market, stacked high with fresh and rotting produce, emits a sweet stench of cabbage and apple. The wet pungency of horse droppings is equally unavoidable, as is the constant presence of yellowy coal smoke and the incense of burning wood. It is, however, the murky puddles that give off some of the more unexpected odours. In the absence of an operational sewage system, London droops under its own stink. The wealthy have become quite adept at fending off the sudden olfactory assaults of decomposition and human waste, hiding their noses against perfumed handkerchiefs and nosegays. The poor, on the other hand, have just learned to live with the unpleasantness. Those of the labouring classes discovered long ago that many of their hardships could be smothered through song, and it is their melodies that take to the Piazza’s air. Many of the tunes whistled or hummed come from those heard at the two local theatres. Music is one of the mainstays of an evening’s entertainment at the Covent Garden theatre, sitting at the eastern edge of the Piazza, and its rival, the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. This part of town has always been a spot for instruments and voices, day or night. When the stage lights are extinguished, the market provides a chorus of sound instead. Higglers cry their wares, their tones floating together discordantly. Between melodic solicitations to buy quinces and oranges, they flirt and banter, challenging one another boisterously. Above their declarations can be heard yet another type of music, the urban clatter of horses’ hooves, the squeak and bounce of wooden wheels, doors slamming, the roll of barrels, the cries of babies, the squeals and brays of animals. There are no silently ticking engines, no electricity or automation to do their work for them, only the grunts and sweat of men and beasts.
Despite the pulsing activity of the market place, there is much more to Covent Garden than this hustle of morning commerce. Not everyone comes here to purchase fruit for their pies and puddings. As morning matures into afternoon and the vendors have sold the last of their wares, the Piazza’s more lucrative trade begins to stir from its slumber. The centre of the action shifts from the ring-fenced vegetable exchange at the square’s heart to the stone-faced buildings at its periphery.
From our vantage point looking northwards, a number of the more infamous haunts are visible. In the most north-easterly corner, slightly obscured behind the arcaded walk, lies one of the set pieces of our story. Beneath a magnificent swinging signboard, featuring the face of England’s best-loved bard, is the entrance to a tavern known as the Shakespear’s Head. The sordid details of what transpired in its dim rooms I will leave for later. Next door, to the south of the Shakespear’s Head, is the Bedford Coffee House, a slightly more respectable establishment, although only just. Its distinguished dramatic and literary clientele bestow on it a certain fashionable cachet, which barely saves it from sharing its neighbour’s dubious stigma. On the opposite side of the Shakespear, to the north, are the elegant premises of the bawd, Mrs Jane Douglas. As the tavern drunks ensure that Mother Douglas’s girls never go patron-less, business thrives well into the early 1760s. After that time, any woman of Jane Douglas’s profession will be turning her sights towards the more fashionable parts of town, first Soho and then St James’s, Mayfair and Piccadilly. For the moment, however, Jane Douglas and her sister Covent Garden procuresses are doing quite well, nestled in this nook of sin. The keepers of Haddock’s Bagnio, on the Piazza, just south of the corner of Russell Street, are also doing a booming trade. The aristocratic set finds the novelty of indulging in a Turkish bath, a meal and the company of a prostitute all under one roof quite pleasing. On any given night they can be seen bumbling between Haddock’s and the adjoining Bedford Arms Tavern (not to be confused with the Bedford Coffee House, or the Bedford Head Tavern on Maiden Lane). In fact, there is so much here in the way of carnal diversion that you might be forgiven for omitting to notice the parish church, St Paul’s Covent Garden, in all of its austere beauty, occupying the west side of the square. It has sat there, silently observing, for over a hundred years.
Even under the censorious gaze of St Paul’s, the Piazza seems quite at home with abandonment. There are many more wanton establishments that hug the perimeter of the square. In fact all of the neighbouring streets are infested with brothels, rowdy taverns, noisy coffee houses and warrens of cheap accommodation for ‘working girls’. Bow Street, Drury Lane and Brydges Street, to the east of the square, are the most notorious. The Shakespear’s Head’s rival tavern, The Rose, is situated on the corner of Brydges Street (Catherine Street, as you know it) and Russell Street. This is a lewd and low place, where ‘posture girls’ writhe around naked on the tables. Here, glasses and tankards fly through the air, people lose eyes and have their noses broken. It’s not a very safe place, but then again, neither are the streets at night. Thoroughfare and alleyway alike are the haunts of foot pads and muggers. Even the cherubic-faced link-boys who offer to light you home with their lanterns frequently work with robbers. People in this part of London try to get what they can by any means. Gentlemen wise to ways of Covent Garden are certain to keep an eye on their watch and a hand on their purse when enjoying the services of one of its ‘ladies’.
As baffling as it might seem, right at the heart of this village of sin, on Bow Street, sandwiched between a brothel and a tavern, are the headquarters of the area’s law enforcement. Justice John Fielding, ably assisted by his brother Henry before his death, is the magistrate here. A police force as we know it does not exist. The night watch is virtually useless and easily bribed. Nevertheless, Justice Fielding is committed to tackling crime and has employed a team of eight men to apprehend law-breakers. At the moment, they haven’t made much of a difference. It’s a villain’s paradise.
Of course, those who first lived in Covent Garden would never have envisioned its future as being quite like this. In the 1630s the 4th Earl of Bedford had commissioned the architect Inigo Jones to lay out a genteel, Italian-style square. Initially, this was a place where the nobility had their London homes, but the neighbourhood took a turn for the worse when the Theatre Royal opened in 1663. The ever-immoral theatre and its companies of actors brought the rabble, and the rabble liked drinking and whoring, or so the story goes. However, it does not require more than a brief glance around the Piazza to confirm that the aristocracy are as much the devotees of debauchery as anyone else. Certainly, it was their money that helped fan the flames of its prosperity. By the time the produce market had pitched its stands in 1670, the purveyors of flesh had already set up shop.
Just as morning is a time for marketing in Covent Garden, so night is the time when other wares are plied. In the evening, when the lamps are lit and the bowed tavern and coffee house windows glow dimly orange, the Piazza shows its painted face. There is laughter and shouting, pranks are played and punches thrown. Walls and floorboards shake to the motion of urgent coupling. There are children conceived, and fortunes lost at rounds of cards. Both men and women succumb to the enticements of gin, wine, beer and brandy. Some slide under tables, some are sick on their own clothes. Many have their pockets picked. The pursuit of pleasure is this society’s greatest leveller. It brings together the sons of dukes to drink with the daughters of tailors and penniless poets. Wealthy city merchants and military officers, lawyers, painters and common criminals interact freely with one another. In a Britain wholly governed by the divisions of class, what transpires here in Covent Garden is quite remarkable. Even those who witness it agree, as one anonymous scribe observed:
Here buskin’d Beaus in rich lac’d Cloathes
Like Lords and Squires do bluster;
Bards, Quacks and Cits, Knaves, Fools and Wits
An Odd surprising Cluster.
This ‘Odd surprising Cluster’ is made more luminous by a sprinkling of eighteenth-century celebrities. At the Bedford Coffee House or at Charles Macklin’s Piazza Coffee House, David Garrick, the A-list actor of his day, along with Dr Samuel Johnson, the acclaimed lexicographer, might have been spotted deep in conversation. Samuel Foote would also have been seen, accompanied by a crowd of aspiring actresses and playwrights. Undoubtedly, Samuel Derrick would have been among this last group. There is more of his story to come. When he finished with Foote, he most likely moved on to Ned Shuter, who would have been sighted arm in arm with the dancer Nancy Dawson. With no long-lensed paparazzi angling for perfect shots, what an easy life such superstars must have enjoyed.
On an evening in the Piazza, it might also occur to you that the men outnumbered the women quite considerably. There are no genuine ladies to be found here, late at night. Even the ones that appear respectable, in their elegant hats and glimmering jewels, are merely the more successful members of ‘the fallen sisterhood’. Society has many names for these tainted women, who have sacrificed their prized virtue and the sanctity of their bodies in order to service the men of this nation. Among other epithets they are known as ‘women of the town’, ‘members of the Cyprian Corps’, ‘impures’, ‘strumpets’, ‘light girls’, ‘thaises’, ‘wantons’, ‘demi-reps’, ‘demi-mondaines’, ‘jades’, ‘hussies’, ‘tarts’, ‘votaries of Venus’, ‘nymphs’, ‘jezebels’, ‘doxies’, ‘molls’, ‘fallen women’, ‘trollopes’ and ‘harlots’. They have come from a variety of locations and backgrounds. Some, like Charlotte Hayes, a devotee of Venus who features prominently in this tale, were born into prostitution. Others are its recruits: orphans, seduced servants, poor seamstresses, trained milliners, hopeful actresses and rape victims. They come from London and all points beyond it, from the outlying counties and from Scotland and Ireland. Some have washed up on these shores from as far afield as the American colonies and the West Indies, as well as from France, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. In this city of immigrants, they represent a cross section of races and ethnicities.
Contrary to popular belief, not all the ‘ladies’ who work in Covent Garden started their lives nuzzled at the breast of poverty. In the eighteenth century, one’s standard of living is a mutable thing. There are no guarantees for anyone. There are no state benefits or worker’s pensions, no unemployment or disability pay. If you lose your job, you don’t eat. If you want to eat, you work until you die. The concept of nationalised healthcare wasn’t even a twinkle in a moral reformer’s eye. This is an awkward age to be a Londoner: change is afoot in all respects, economically, socially and politically. Britain stands on the cusp of losing an old empire in America and gaining a new one in India. Raw materials are pouring into the country, while useful and interesting goods continue to decorate the shop fronts. New buildings, streets and squares seem to appear with each passing season. It feels as if opportunities to make money are everywhere, but do not be fooled. The newspapers, with their shameful lists of the bankrupt, tell another story. London is populated by speculators and debtors. Quite a number of middle-class families buckle under the weight of loan repayments. The pressure to own the latest household items is inescapable. Everyone wants to appear in the finest clothing and to have a home furnished with status symbols, but meeting the cost of the rent can be difficult and levels of personal debt are spiralling out of control. (Sound familiar?)
Being middle-class is a fairly new phenomenon, and these people are still a strangely amphibious group. Those at the top are often as wealthy as the aristocracy. Those towards the middle and at the bottom – the small shop-keepers, the master craftsmen, the apothecaries, publishers, schoolmasters and petty clergy – are more often than not struggling to hang on. It is this ‘precarious middle class’, and those families that bounce up and down the lower end of the social ladder, that have donated a number of their daughters to the metropolis’s more exclusive brothels. A lack of financial security means that a bad year of trade could bring ruin, as could a fire, a legal battle or an imprudent night at the gaming tables. As the debtor’s prison known as the Fleet beckons, the china, table linens, fine silks and furniture may have to go to the pawn shop. The family that have enjoyed the luxuries of their own house may now live in two rented rooms. From this plateau, the dip into criminality is only a wrong foot away. The following year, the unfortunate individuals may recover their fortunes, retrieve their goods and move back into their terraced house. Alternatively, they may slip further into the ranks of the poor.
In the eighteenth century, there is nothing worse than being poor. Unless you have had the opportunity of travelling to parts of Asia, Africa and South America, you with your soft modern sensibilities could not begin to imagine what the realities of this state entails. True poverty means constantly fending off disease as it feeds on the malnourishment of your body. It means continuous hunger and physical discomfort. It means horrific living conditions, sharing your bed not only with other unwashed humans but with rats, mice, lice, fleas and bedbugs. It means feeling the cold acutely through ragged clothing and not even owning a change of undergarments. In eighteenth-century London it means having no voice, no vote and virtually no legal protection or access to true justice. More than anything, it means being feared and reviled by those above you. You are disrespected, regarded as subhuman by some and ignored by others. You are likely to be a victim of violence and to numb your soul with large quantities of cheap gin. It is a degrading and miserable existence to which not everyone is willing to submit. Hard work may help raise you out of this sink, but most available jobs are not well paid. A life of crime is always a viable possibility. Prostitution helps quite a few women; some even scale the social heights by its profits. Pickpocketing, robbery, housebreaking, dealing in stolen goods, procuring women for lascivious men and forgery can also be quite profitable. As can cheating at cards. These may be your only hopes of survival in brutal London if you have the misfortune of being born into its lowest ranks.
The story of the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies is the tale of these people. They are the ones who linger at the fringe of eighteenth-century society. Their footing on the social ladder is a perpetually unsure one and their acceptance into the ‘normal’ circles of the respectable population will never be sanctioned. John Harrison (a.k.a. Jack Harris), Samuel Derrick and Charlotte Hayes are our representatives of this realm. In this parable, fate has provided us with an interesting cross section of history’s minor players, or outcasts, if you like: the hardened criminal, the determined but impoverished poet, and the daughter of a bawd. In the telling of it we must remember that these personalities are as much the products of their era as are we. Their judgements and biases belong to a time less forgiving than our own. Do not make the mistake that moralists of their own age might be inclined to – that it is their badness that motivates them. This reeks of the simple-mindedness that sent petty pickpockets to the nooses at Tyburn. You have been provided with a glimpse into their world, the extreme difficulties, the cruelties, abuses and inequalities. In the heart of each of them beats an indomitable desire not to suffer these miseries, even if, paradoxically, it means bringing about the suffering of others. Be warned, this is not a tale where wrongdoers are punished and the exploited are vindicated. This has nothing to do with the gilded, safe and privileged Georgian era of Jane Austen. She and others like her are on the inside of society looking out, and their sight does not extend as far as these dark corners. There is no comfortable moral to be found within the lurid biographies of the Harris’s Lists, nor between the covers of this book. But history rarely provides a comfortable moral to a good yarn.
2
THE LEGEND OF Jack Harris
JACK HARRIS WAS born in the very cradle of illusion, in the space that existed between two theatres. Nothing was as it seemed in Covent Garden, where actors assumed the identities of imaginary characters and masked men and women moved through the pleasure-seeking swarms anonymously. Against such a backdrop it was easy to vanish or to become someone else. Until he grew proud and foolish, he had never stepped into the direct glare of the limelight; he had never allowed anyone to truly know him or his story. Jack Harris had hidden well, and what little he revealed to the world about himself was complete fabrication.
After his sensational arrest in 1758, those who had only ever seen him as a silhouette moving against the backdrop of Covent Garden wanted to hear his tale. Although no one had ever demonstrated any interest in him before, he decided with the assistance of a hack journalist to recount his narrative and offer an explanation for his wickedness.
Long before his parents brought him into being, destiny had marked out his family for suffering. His father, he claimed, came from ‘a good Somersetshire family’, but had the misfortune of being born a younger son with no inheritance and few prospects. The marriage he contracted with Harris’s mother had been formed out of love and consequently had fallen foul of his upstanding relations. Cast adrift with no money and no position, the young couple set out for London, where Harris senior had been given ‘many promises from great men of places, sinecures and pensions’. As a member of the landed class, he believed that he had no shortage of allies within the government willing to assist his ambitions. Unfortunately, upon his arrival in the capital he found that doors were shut to him, that men who had at one time guaranteed him their favour could only shrug their shoulders and wish him the best of luck elsewhere. With the birth of Jack in the mid-1720s, the young family found their resources rapidly expiring. In order to keep the wolf from the door, his father had no choice but to turn to his pen for support. Fuelled by his sense of anger and betrayal at those who had lured him to London on false hopes, Harris senior lashed out in a series of invectives and ‘failed not to abuse those who had so abused him’. As a Whig by birth, Harris’s father also began to rethink his political affiliations. If his traditional associates among the aristocracy would not have him, he would cross the floor and wound them as a member of the opposition. Shunned by his own society, Harris senior ‘soon made himself very remarkable among the anti-ministerial writers of those days; and the Country Party enlisted him under their banner’.
In spite of stringent libel laws, Harris’s father flaunted the dangers inherent in being so vicious an antagonist of the parliamentary leader, Sir Robert Walpole. Once he had whetted his sharp pen, he found it difficult to put down, especially as his hostile epistles were at last bringing in money and winning him the support of several wealthy backers. It seemed that the situation had begun to brighten for the Harrises, who were now contemplating an appropriate education for their eldest son. Then quite unexpectedly, when his father ‘was upon the point of sending me to Westminster School’, events took a turn for the worse; Harris senior was arrested.
Harris’s father had made the fatal error of attaching himself to Nathaniel Mist, a notorious thorn in the side of the establishment. Mist’s Weekly Journal, a scurrilous publication renowned for spouting unabashed Jacobitism, rolled off a secret printing press until the authorities sniffed it out and smashed it to bits in 1728. Despite stints in prison and in the stocks, Mist and his numerous colleagues continued to publish their libel, this time in the form of Fog’s Weekly Journal. A series of raids soon put an end to this enterprise as well. Among the handful of anti-ministerial writers rooted out during the course of these arrests was Harris’s father.
Once again, Harris senior, this time locked away in the local compter, looked to his friends and political associates to assist him in his time of need, but no one ever came. ‘He was there for some weeks in want of bail, all his party deserting him, as soon as they had notice of his misfortune’, Jack recounted. His father soon sank into an irretrievable depression. Matters were only to grow worse. The authorities looked upon Harris senior’s crime with gravity and, as such, he was transferred to the King’s Bench Prison where ‘he was sentenced to be imprisoned for three years’. Additionally, he was ‘fined the penalty of five hundred pounds’, a crippling amount for a family in the Harrises’ position. It was during this time, in the mid-1730s, that Jack made regular visits to his father, ‘although his keeper pretended that he had strict orders to let nobody see him’. In later years, Jack admitted that observing his father in such a despondent and weathered state profoundly affected him. Harris senior had been broken:
His misfortunes had so sowered his natural temper that he had become a perfect misanthrope. The ill treatment he had received from both parties had given him an utter detestation of all; and he seemed now to languish at his confinement, only because he had not an opportunity of imposing upon the world, as much as they had imposed upon him.
Betrayed, exhausted and ill, Harris’s father bid him to learn from the mistakes he had made and not to waste himself in pursuit of an honest life. In a final paternal gesture, Harris senior reached for his pen and committed his instructions to paper. In his ‘Wholesome Advice to His Son for His Conduct in Life’, he summarised those thoughts he had expressed to his child as they sat together in his cell. Harris senior reminded his boy that as he had no fortune, a conventional education would be of no use to him. At any rate, it was his experience that there was ‘nothing so great an obstacle to getting money as learning’. ‘No, no my son’, he continued, ‘I have taken care to prepare you for quite another employment’:
Would you get money, my son – study men’s passions; ply them. Is a man ambitious of fame – go through thick and thin, to make him the greatest patriot that ever existed; but be sure of your reward before you give the finishing stroke to his reputation. Does he love wenching – pimping is a thriving calling, it must be orthodox, or some who do would not possess it. Does he want a seat in the House – vote for him, bribe for him, swear for him; there is no harm in all this. A scrupulous man, indeed may object to an oath because it is false, but it may be true; read it not, and then you can not tell which it is, and they administer it so fast that you can not understand it, even if you would. If your patron loves Play, learn dexterity of Hand and cheat as much as you can; take care, do not be detected, if you are, swear and bluster, challenge, fight and kill, and then your honour is retrieved. This is done every day with success; there is nothing washes off the slur of infamy, but the man’s blood you have offended! Let no scruple of your conscience preponderate with you; to thrive in this world, a man must not have a grain of that commodity.
Although shocked at first by his father’s recommendations, Jack Harris eventually came to understand the logic in it. It was a message touched with poignancy, one that had been placed in his hand upon his father’s death.
In death, Harris senior had left his family nothing but the prospect of starvation. He had also laid the seeds of vice in his eldest son. Armed with his father’s advice, which he ‘looked upon as my only personal estate’, Jack plunged himself headlong into a career of criminality. In order to gain the confidence of society, his first act was to appear convincing. With the appropriate attire and gait, Harris assumed the respectable persona of a gentleman, ‘without any other pretensions to that rank, but impudence and ignorance; which indeed make so great of the modern man’s accomplishments’. Unfortunately, he admitted, it required some trial and error before he alighted upon his true calling. In the first instance, he looked into becoming a political bully, one who lived by the extraction of bribes. For this purpose, he states that he ‘took a house in Westminster in hopes of making my fortune by elections; but no general one soon ensuing, I was obliged to lay aside, with my house, all my hopes upon that score’. Harris then tried his luck as a cardsharp, teaching himself how to ‘cheat at play’, but sighed that, ‘having no head for calculations and no knowledge of figures, it was of little avail to me.’ It was sometime shortly thereafter that he realised where his true talents lay. With a flattering, obsequious bent to his personality, his destined path unfurled before him. ‘Nature’, he announced quite frankly, ‘designed me for a pimp’.
This was Harris’s sad tale. Those who read it when it featured as part of The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray would have been quite taken in by the narrator’s earnestness. It was a history that suited his identity well; it added flesh to the bones of his legend. But as Jack Harris generally preferred to lead his life unobtrusively, lingering behind the dim yellow light of the tavern candles rather than in the full blaze of public view, these few snippets were all that most of his clients ever learned of him. Only a select handful knew the truth. In 1779, twenty years after Jack Harris’s story appeared in print, one ripe old member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club decided to dispel the ambiguity once and for all. In his chronicle of London’s sexual underworld, Nocturnal Revels, he decried ‘No such man as Harris (as he is called) a Pimp, now or probably ever did exist’. He was right, of course. Harris’s real name was John Harrison, and his story was very different from the one he had invented to fit his alias.
Unlike Harris’s early years, Harrison’s were distinctly unremarkable. He had been born the son of George Harrison, keeper of the Bedford Head Tavern in Maiden Lane, a street that just trimmed the outskirts of Covent Garden Piazza. While John Harrison could hardly boast of a landowning lineage, there were a few very loose parallels in his tale. As with Harris, it seems that the Harrison family at the time of John’s birth were not local to the parish of St Paul’s Covent Garden. John would have been a child when the Bedford Head (one drinking establishment of several going by that name in the area) threw open its doors to business in 1740. When Harrison assumed the role of proprietor, the tavern with its freshly cut wooden interiors had been a new venue, unsoiled by the stench of coal smoke, the sourness of alcohol and the odour of bodies. For a publican, there were few other locations as ideal as Covent Garden for setting up shop. Here he could draw from the circulating pool of carelessly spent wages and inherited wealth and make a tidy income for himself. As taverns were regularly managed as family businesses in the eighteenth century, it is possible that the Harrisons may have been in the tankard-serving trade for generations, and possibly moved their enterprise from somewhere not so very distant from the Piazza. Irrespective of its location, however, London taverns on a whole were not ideal nurseries for rearing scrupulous, law-abiding children. In the dinginess of the taproom, young John Harrison would have learned through observation about the libidinous and violent sphere into which he had been brought.
As the child of a tavern-keeper, he also would have been put to work from an early age. His first defined role within the Bedford Head would have been as a pot-boy, or a general assistant, helping to ferry drinks to customers and carry away their empties. As reading, writing and figuring would have also been considered skills necessary for the management of a public house, a taverner’s son would have received some formal education, most likely provided through a local charity school. Most of his truly useful learning, however, would have been acquired by shadowing his father or any other elder male family member as they performed the tasks essential to their trade. When not assisting at the tap or counting the profits of his labour, George Harrison would have stood at the background of his operation, overseeing the work of the waiters who tottered from table to table with their containers of ale, and keeping a narrowed eye on suspicious characters. As he approached an appropriate age, John would have joined his father in these duties and eventually joined the ranks of the Bedford Head’s devoted male waiting staff. As a tavern waiter, young Harrison would have assumed the role of a compliant servant to his father’s clientele. In doing his best to see that their demands for drink and food were fulfilled, he could come to expect remuneration in the form of tips. While respectfully laying plates of meat and glasses of port before gentlemen may have earned him a few pennies, he would have learned that gratifying their less legitimate requests might supply him with far more handsome sums.
Simply because the Bedford Head Tavern was a family-run business did not make it an honest one. There is nothing to suggest that its reputation was any better than those of its sister establishments, the notorious watering holes that blighted Maiden Lane. Only a few doors down from the Bedford Head throbbed a stinking sore of a public house, Bob Derry’s Cider Cellar. Bob Derry, with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, just about managed the alcohol-fuelled traffic that pushed in and out of his rancid den. ‘As its name implied’, wrote John Timbs, a recorder of tavern history, the interior and fittings of the Cider Cellar ‘were rude and rough’. Bob Derry’s was open all night and accepted into its fold the dregs of an evening out: those already too intoxicated to walk or talk straight. There, under Derry’s blind eye, pickpockets and disease-ridden streetwalkers did a roaring trade. As Samuel Derrick wrote in 1761, the establishment was noted for its regular hiccups of violence – spectacles of brutality where men bludgeoned their rivals and ladies of the night tore at each other’s faces. Patrons of Derry’s were not known for interceding in a good fight, but rather for placing bets on its outcome. On one occasion, the outcome was the double murder of two drinkers, who after a fierce argument were mercilessly stabbed to death.
Although the annals of Covent Garden never placed the Bedford Head’s name on a par with that of its vice-riddled neighbour, in its day it would hardly have been considered a paragon of lawfulness. The majority of the area’s establishments would have involved themselves in some form of criminal trade, whether this entailed permitting prostitutes to solicit openly (a generally accepted practice), receiving stolen goods or harbouring known criminals from the watch. Frequently, far worse activities committed by proprietors or their staff, such as coin-clipping, counterfeiting, theft, extortion, violent assault and incidents of rape, were allowed to transpire in upstairs rooms and cellars. In an environment where the orderly and the unlawful were woven inextricably into a single fabric, John Harrison would have been initiated into the realm of the law-breaker before he could have even differentiated between the two. As tavern-waiting and pimping were virtually inseparable practices, it is unlikely that George Harrison would have discouraged his son from earning money by ‘making introductions’. Not unlike his alter ego, it would have been circumstance as well as a father’s encouragement that made him a pimp.
In the eighteenth century, the urban tavern and its cousin the coffee house were primarily male domains. They could at times be quite close in definition, serving as social meeting houses and as a forum where business and news could be discussed between gentlemen. Although certain professions might hold preferences for specific locations, generally a range of occupations and social strata brushed elbows under their roofs. While the coffee houses’ main attraction was the caffeinated novelty tipple they peddled, they also, like the cafés of continental Europe, provided alcohol. The better venues of both variety offered food in addition to liquid refreshment, which could be taken either in the communal taproom or in a private, above-stairs space, if the patron was wealthy enough. Over the course of the century, the activities of these upstairs rooms took on a history of their own. They were ideal areas for the members of gentlemen’s societies to host their monthly or yearly gatherings. These events, which frequently began in the evening hours with discussions of politics, science or art over a formal meal, had a habit of degenerating into a night of wholesale debauchery. Respectable society dictated that men could not be considered either dignified or safe when soused with liquor, and therefore any woman who had pretensions of calling herself a lady would not venture near the door of such an establishment. Nevertheless, women abounded in taverns and coffee houses, especially those around Covent Garden. These were the women that writers of the age might argue were designated by virtue of their class to entertain men. For centuries, where men drank prostitutes would follow. Once satiated with alcohol and a full belly of food, the only urge left to be fulfilled was the venereal one, making the prostitute’s job of searching for punters as straightforward as fishing in a barrel. The man who just happened to be standing between the inebriated customer and his much-desired sexual release was the waiter.
‘Passing an evening a few weeks ago at a certain tavern near Covent Garden, the wine operated so strongly upon the blood of some of my companions, that they rang for the gentleman porter and actually asked him if he could get them some girls’, wrote a young journalist inexperienced in the customs of contemporary procuring. Although a number of means existed whereby lustful men could satisfy their needs, seeking a sexual partner through the intermediary of a procurer might offer fractionally more protection against disease than an encounter with a random streetwalker. This, at least, was the theory. A waiter-pimp’s job in the most basic sense might only amount to ushering over the appropriate women currently within the tavern, or those local girls nearby with whom the waiter was familiar. As Jack Harris himself clarifies, ‘By pimp, nothing more was signified than to run about the neighbourhood and bring the first bunter to the gentlemen then come a table at the tavern I belonged to’. This gesture fell within the remit of keeping customers content while they sojourned in the tavern-keeper’s rooms. As long as patrons were willing to continue spending their money at his establishment, a taverner would have little cause for complaint.
Unfortunately, the epithet of pimp, one which conjured (and still conjures) some of the nastiest, most remorseless images of men, was applied even-handedly to any man who ‘introduced women into company’. While the author E.J. Burford’s assessment of pimps throughout history as being ‘evil, heartless, vile creatures, without any redeeming features – wretched men living off wretched women’ is not incorrect, the position of the eighteenth-century waiter-pimp digresses somewhat from this commonly held perception. Just as there existed a range of different statuses within the profession of prostitute, so the same held true for procurers. Not every pimp was a brutish bully lurking in dark, filthy alleys. The practice of pimping, or what the era occasionally called ‘pandering’, beneath the veneer of table-waiting sought to remove at least the whiff of ugliness from this pursuit. In any case, Harrison had come to believe that there was no harm in simply bringing two willing parties together. In later years, this was all that he as Jack Harris had claimed to have done as a pimp. It was in itself, he reasoned, something that he ‘need not be ashamed of’.
Rather than actively seeking to become a procurer, purveying sex was a vocation that found John Harrison once he assumed the responsibilities of a waiter. Fortunately for him, it was a calling that suited his circumstances. Many of the young women who haunted the Bedford Head would have been those he had known since childhood, as neighbours and playmates. The daughters of needy families within the parish, those who lived in nearby houses or who worked as servants or marketers in the Piazza, were the girls who would one day turn to prostitution in order to earn their bread. Stories of their entrée into the life would have been common public house banter; Harrison may have even heard about their circumstances from their own mouths. In many cases he would have been intimate with their parents or their siblings. It is equally likely that he would have known their debauchers and, eventually, their keepers. Harrison’s ears would have hummed with the gossip of the neighbourhood – whose daughter’s belly was looking unusually round, and who had been caught with his hands up his kitchen maid’s skirts. He would have had a better idea of who was poxed than most punters, a valuable insight for a pimp to possess. Irrespective of when he began ‘making introductions’, Harrison did not come to recognise himself as a pimp until around 1751, shortly before the creation of his alias, Jack Harris.
As easy as it may have been to prosper in his role at his father’s tavern, John Harrison did not earn his infamous name at the Bedford Head. Fate had another venue in mind for him. In 1753, something occurred in Harrison’s life that catapulted him from his familiar Maiden Lane surroundings into an altogether different sphere. Whether through death or financial mismanagement, by 1754 George Harrison was no longer the proprietor of the establishment where John had passed his youth. What may have become of the members of the Harrison family, where they lived or how they continued to win their bread, is a mystery. Only John chose to remain in Covent Garden, a place that he, perhaps more than the others, chose to recognise as his home. Now released from the ties of his family’s enterprise, his future lay elsewhere. Fortunately, he did not have to travel far in order to find it. In the eastern corner of the Piazza, under a colourfully embellished sign, sat the Shakespear’s Head Tavern.
3
THE Irish POET
JUST AS THE rough taverns and back streets of Covent Garden had already pressed their indelible ink onto John Harrison’s character, so the theatres and bookstalls of Dublin were in the process of leaving their mark upon another young man. At about the time that the youthful Harrison was ferrying pots of ale to the patrons of the Bedford Head, a privileged Irish schoolboy was frantically scribbling rhyming couplets. Already, by the age of thirteen, Samuel Derrick had determined that he would be a poet. Not a second-rate poet or an author of menial, insignificant works, but rather one whose name would be recorded alongside that of Jonathan Swift and William Congreve in the pantheon of Anglo-Irish literature. His tutors, as well as ‘some ingenious men in the world of letters’, had seen promise in his early works. One of them, Swift’s publisher George Faulkner, and perhaps even the celebrated author himself, had offered praise. Little were these ‘ingenious men’ to know that their early ‘approbation’ would set into motion a chain of events that would take Samuel Derrick far off his prescribed path.
Verse-writing would not be a skill required in the life that others intended for Sam. His aunt and guardian, the formidable widow Mrs Elizabeth Creagh, had resolved to make a linen merchant (or draper) of her