The Godliman Immoralist

Descending into the depths of depravity in order to prevent the educated reader from doing so. About the author of this blog

[godliman]

V&A Design a Wig

In the late 18th century, women's hair styles went crazy! Create and share your own hair-raising design.

Because we all deserve to look fabulous. My darlings, I am honoured to present to thee the V&A Design a Wig workshop, where everyone's dreams of powdered curls can become true! Make those wigs as gigantic as you can and do not restrain thyselves when it comes to the decorations.

[godliman]

William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress 3: The Tavern/The Orgy

Hailed as one of the most influential artists of 18th Century Britain, William Hogarth is most famous for his depictions of members of English society who were far from exemplary. A Rake’s Progress 3: The Tavern Scene is one of his finest works in the depiction of debauchery.

The picture and engraving, sometimes also called The Orgy is the third part from a series called The Rake’s Progress, which follows the rise and fall of a young man who inherits a sizeable amount of money and proceeds to consume it entirely by indulging in worldly pleasures. Tom Rakewell finds himself in the Rose Tavern brothel in Covent Garden late at night. The protagonist is drinking and enjoying the company of two women who are stealing his watch in the same fashion as Charlotte Walker did. He is adorned with swords, a possible object he uses to convey a dignity that is long gone and has besides him the lantern and stick of a night watchman obtained during a night excursion —the Rake defies authority. The women have syphilitic sores all over their faces, and the one in the lower right corner has left her dress in the floor along with her corset; she is posing on the (almost) nude. The women in the scene also seem to have lost some degree of control over themselves: the one over the stripper cannot even drink correctly and the other women on the table are playing tricks on each other.

The globe map in the background is perhaps there to remind us that these people are engaging in the worldliest of pleasures, seeking to alleviate their immediate needs and desires without a care and slowly consuming themselves the same way the lady who is lighting the map will probably consume it in flames. A man in the background holds a metal bowl and a candle —is it for the stripper to look at her poses? Is it for everyone in the picture to see themselves and their perdition? Or is it directed at us, the spectators, inviting us to see ourselves in this painting/engraving and reflecting on the degree to which we have a control over ourselves?

[godliman]

Important links

There is much to be said about the world of crime during the 18th Century in England, and not everything can be written down by the Godliman Immoralist. Henceforth, let it be known that the following links provide further information about crime in 18th Century England.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE CRIMINAL CORPSE

The online exhibition for the University of Leicester's, Wellcome Trust funded, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse Project.

Criminalcorpses.com, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse, is about the bodies of people who were executed in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The horror does not end in the gallows.

An ambitious project that digitized all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913 and the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts from 1676 to 1772.

An unofficial database for all executions performed in the United Kingdom from 1735 to 1964. Specialized, although not limited to, capital punishment in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

[godliman]

Getting Away With Theft: Mary Clayton on Charlotte Walker, Prostitute and Pickpocket

In The Life and Crimes of Charlotte Walker, Prostitute and Pickpocket, Mary Clayton analyzes the life and trials of Charlotte Walker, renowned pickpocket, who kept getting acquitted for decades.

A tale like many others: a young woman from the provinces arrives to London, and she becomes a criminal. Charlotte Walker is described by the ‘Criminal Register of the Felons in Newgate’ of 1800 as a short woman of bright hair who hails from Liverpool and was probably born in 1756. By 1776 she was first accused of aggression, though she never made it to a trial. Indeed, according to Clayton, only a small amount of those accused made it to a trial. Being sent to a correction house before any trial, being sentenced for a minor non-capital offense, and even outside agreements to return the stolen items were all possibilities for someone accused of larceny.

The crimes of Charlotte Walker fit with the most common characteristics of larceny committed by women: she would steal small valuable items, often from men she would socialize with as they drank, slept, or were accosted in the streets by her. That is the likeliest reason why she was acquitted from any crime in her 1780 and 1781 trials, in which the papers depict the drunkenness and promiscuity of the prosecutor as grounds for her acquittal. Often the offences were ‘not found’ and even in one time, she was acquitted due to the fact that a mouse ate the indictment. She was acquitted for stealing a silver watch and other items in 1790 by claiming to have found the prosecutor sleeping on her bed. Her success often relied on the fact that the belongings of the prosecutor were not found on her, and her decision to steal money made it difficult for the prosecutor to claim ownership over coins. Clayton describes Walker as inventive and unintimidated by the court setting, often using evidence to her advantage by questioning the sobriety of the prosecutor and his ability (or lack thereof) to recognize her as the culprit.

After twenty-three years of pickpocketing and getting away with it, ever since appearing before the court for the first time in 1777, she was tried for stealing a silver watch in 1800, was found guilty and was given the death penalty. Like she had done several times, she accosted a drunk man and reached to his pocket to steal a silver watch. This time a watchman was called, and the silver watch was found in her bosom. The death penalty was commuted for transportation and she arrived to Sydney (New South Wales) in late 1801, where she died in 1806 at the age of fifty.

Mary Clayton analyzes the career of Charlotte Walker and the characteristics of England’s society and justice system that made it possible for her to get away with decades of pickpocketing.

Clayton, Mary. “The Life and Crimes of Charlotte Walker, Prostitute and Pickpocket.” London Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 3–19.

[godliman]

Attention: England's Priciest Wig is Lost. Hefty-Reward-No-Questions to Whomever Turns It In.

These malefactors are becoming smarter with time! Lady Mary Anne Kettering-Lutherworth was on her way to a ball in St James's Palace when tragedy struck upon her. Lady Mary Anne would don what is now considered to be England's most valuable wig: a family heirloom of the Kettering-Lutherworth family made with hair of several of its members and adorned with up to fifty pound sterling of decorations, which includes fans, diamonds and a replica of HMS Royal Sovereign. The wig was last seen when Lady Mary Anne was traveling from her London Home to St James's Palace in a custom-made coach to fit the wig, when the coach was halted by a monkey riding a hound, a frightful sight to behold for the horses. Four men and three women surrounded the coach and grabbed the decorations, and successfully caught the wig in one piece. His Majesty George the Second, By the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Archtreasurer and Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg is offering a hefty reward for whomever turns in the wig and all of its decorations in St James's Palace, no questions asked. We petition the community to aid in the recovery of the wig and help the London Social Season return to normality .

[godliman]

Heads on the Nude: Wig Snatching in 18th Century England

Getting your fingers inside powdered curls could feed your family for a month in 18th Century England. 

Perhaps the most notorious statement of 18th Century aesthetics is the commonplace use of wigs among noble and rich people. Though the wig is often said to have been a common way to hide syphilis, the truth is that the puffy powdered wigs that characterized the 17th and 18th Centuries were a fashion statement pioneered by French Royalty, with Louis XIV employing dozens of perruquiers. The Sun King would go great lengths to avoid being seen without his increasingly large wigs on, and other courts of Europe followed suit; England was no exception. Charles II is the earliest English king to be depicted with a periwig, and the use of wigs in different styles caught on with other affluent spheres of English society. The use of wigs was restricted only for those who could pay the price: William Andrews quotes Malcom’s Manners and Customs, where the price of a white wig —the most fashionable and valuable color then— for the year 1734 is stated as being of four guineas: little less than £500 in 2021 money. There was certainly no shortage of people who would seize the opportunity to make money by snatching powdered curly locks from their owners.

The most common scheme, according to Andrews, would need three accomplices. A boy would be carried in a butcher’s tray by an adult man, and the boy would snatch the wig. A third person would step in to ‘aid’ the bewildered wig owner in the finding of their lost hairpiece, with no other purpose than helping the man and the child escape from the scene. Georgiana Hill describes men who would get in the way of hackney coaches to slow them down and snatch the wigs of the people inside, both men and women. Not coins, not jewels, highwaymen were often content enough with putting their fingers into the powdered wigs of people. People would also have to be careful when walking by the streets, as any hand could snatch their wig at any moment. Monkeys, dogs, children, everyone was after the eccentric hairpieces that adorned the heads of England’s upper echelons of society. With the increasingly short styles worn by men, and the final abandonment of the wig in the last decade of the 18th Century —as wigs rolled along with the head of the wearer in Revolutionary Paris— thieves had to reinvent themselves.

Works Cited

Andrews, William. At the Sign of the Barber's Pole: Studies In Hirsute History. Cottingham: J.R. Tutin, 1904.

Hill, Georgiana. A History of English Dress from the Saxon Period to the Present Day. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1893. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/historyofenglish02hill.

[godliman]

My darlings, I just came across this barbarity in a Dublin newspaper. And I say that it is a barbarity not because of the “crime” depicted, but because of the intolerance towards Methodists shown in the style. Now we do not only deal with intolerance from fellow Protestants, but also from Popists. Seriously, what was that about bulls and gazelles? Disgusting. 

On regards to the “crime” depicted in such a rude way I have got to say that I find it hilarious. Be on the look, everyone, for inverted Methodists can soon find their way into thy beds! 

[godliman]

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: A Quick Guide to the Prostitutes of 18th Century London

London was already a bustling metropolis in the 18th Century and getting around the city would probably be a daunting task to foreigners or people from the provinces, especially for those who desired to indulge in the sex scene of the city. 

           That is why, from 1757 to 1795, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar was published yearly in December as a catalogue of the women who worked as prostitutes in London. The book would describe the physical appearance, specialties, and workplace of over one hundred of London’s prostitutes —a small number, if Colquhoun’s estimate of London having around 50.000 prostitutes by the turn of the century is to be believed.

           A typical volume of Harris’s List would contain an introduction that would praise the act of prostitution, sometimes using rather dubious information about prostitution in foreign and ancient lands in order to legitimize the act of selling sex. This would be followed by a note by the author, a list of newly added girls, and a table of contents. Though the table of contents listed the prostitutes in alphabetical order (by surname), this is not the logic that the book followed, and the table of contents would help the reader find the woman in the book. The book intended to protect the privacy of London’s prostitutes while at the same time publicizing them, as can be inferred by the dashes used to mask the names: Miss L-cy, Miss R-ss, and more. The description of women would be flattering most of the times, and the appraisal of their beauty was followed by short stories on how they ended up in the world of prostitution. In the 1765, Miss M-th-m is described as a “tall, genteel, well made woman” who ended up in prostitution due to being “debauched by her master’s son”.

           The original authorship of the list is often attributed to Samuel Derrick, a poet, and to Jack Harris, a pimp and head waiter at Shakespear’s Head Tavern. Though both men were arrested in repeated occasions —the most notorious arrest, in 1758 as part of Saunders Welch’s efforts to remove visible prostitution from the city— the publishing of the book was allowed to continue for decades, changing hands along the way. X points to a 1787 royal proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness, and immorality’ along with the foundation of William Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society as the end of the List. The Proclamation Society of Wilberforce —who is otherwise better known for his abolitionist activism— entered in conflict with then publishers and sellers of the List, James Roach and John Aitkin. Roach was condemned to spend one year in Newgate, while Aitkin was jailed in Marshalsea until a £200 was paid and he was liberated in 1797. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies did not see any new editions after that.

[godliman]

The Harlot and the Press: Depictions of Prostitution in 18th Century English Journalism

As it had become the capital of an ever-growing empire, London was in an expansive phase during the 18th Century, and with the intense economic activity and flow of people, came prostitution. 

In The Secret History of Georgian London : How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital, Dan Cruicksank quotes foreign visitors such as Baron Zacharias von Uffenbach, struck “by the great quantity of Moors of both sexes (...) hawking their bottoms round the Strand and Covent Garden”. Towards the end of the century, Patrick Colquhoun, Scottish magistrate and founder of the first preventive police in the city, estimated the number of prostitutes at around 50,000 in a city of now a million. And even though this was recognized as a problem by some people like Saunders Welch, high constable of Holborn and friend of Henry Fielding, who wrote A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis, prostitution remained a common sight in London. This did not escape writers and printers of all sorts, who sought to make a shilling out of prostitute-related violence.

Of violence and papers

Analyzing the depiction of violence in newspapers of the time, Jessica Steinberg notes that newspapers tended to report on stories about prostitution-related violence to sell more copies, especially if the prostitute was the aggressor, rather than the victim.

The competitive nature of the newspaper industry in the eighteenth century meant that papers focused less on mundane crime stories than on those likely to boost sales. (…) Hence, when a lower-class woman perpetrated a crime against an elite — as would have been the case with a prostitute assaulting a gentleman — editors and publishers would have considered the news particularly newsworthy”. 

Steinberg, 245.

This contributed to a situation in which prostitutes were depicted as deviants rather than victims, as a social ill, rather than as victims of violence. According to Steinberg, even in rare cases in which prostitutes were be depicted as victims of violence, the papers would attribute a degree of fault to the victim. Scrutiny would fall upon the moral character of the women who would notify the authorities of being victims of a violent crime, and the accusation would be doubted if the accuser was a prostitute, which further discouraged prostitutes from reporting crimes.

Steinberg contradicts the assertion made by various authors about a more sympathetic attitude towards prostitutes as the century went on by looking at several cases. The 1756 murder of Highway Moll was depicted as a result of her giving a disease to her clients, and The Sun showed the murder of a prostitute found in a well in 1796 as “the inevitable fate of every woman who worked as a prostitute”, according to Steinberg. Prostitutes became newsworthy only when they were the assailants or when the murder was particularly gruesome, and even when that happened, they were depicted as guilty of their own deaths.

Cited Works 

Cruickshank, Dan. “Satan’s Harvest. The Nature of the Sex Industry”. The Secret History of Georgian London : How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital. London : RH Books, 2009. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/secrethistoryofg0000crui.

Steinberg, Jessica. “She Was ‘“a Comon Night Walker Abusing Him & Being of Ill Behaviour”’: Violence and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century London. Canadian Journal of History, vol. 50, no. 2, Sept. 2015, pp. 239–61. EBSCOhost,https://doi.org/10.3138/cjh.50.2.239.

[godliman]

The author of this blog is Mr. Benedict Gallowbent, better known as the Godliman Immoralist, a pen name he has garnered for his expertise on the crimes and living of the malefactors that plague London. Mr. Gallowbent was born in the Midlands as the fourth son of the bookkeeper at Shenningham Manor. Upon becoming a man, he traveled extensively through England, knowing people whose wisdom and experience in earthly matters left a deep impression in him. But no other influence has been as decisive in his life as the godly words of Mr. John Wesley, an unjustly maligned man of God whose preaching the author was able to experience during his journeys. Thanks to this, Mr. Gallowbent has acquired an evangelical tendency which has led him to make an effort at preventing the largest possible amount of people from falling into the hands of evil and instead, follow their path to Salvation. No other place in the Kingdom has as many evil people as London does, and with this understanding, the author has established in Godliman Street the headquarters from which he examines the wicked nature of humanity. He hopes that his works might prevent an educated reader from engaging in the acquaintance of the undesirable liaisons that might guide them astray from the path of enlightenment and benevolence.  Mr. Gallowbent himself has descended into the depths of depravity with the purpose of making detailed accounts of the things he sees and experiences. Shaking the hands of the most masterful pickpockets of London, learning tricks from the wisest harlots of the Kingdom, rejoicing in the company of the fine gentlemen who frequent molly houses, and sharing a pint with the most legendary pirates, there is no circle of hell which Mr. Benedict Gallowbent shall leave without exploring.