England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [27]
Henry Angelo saw Emma in Soho, but she was soon working nearby in the area around Drury Lane.2 Although it seems likely that she did work in prostitution, she may simply have been a tavern waitress or barmaid. Either way, it was only a temporary job for a few months, common for girls of her class, and it never deserved the stress put on it by her detractors and most Nelson scholars and biographers since. One in eight of all London's adult females worked as prostitutes in the late eighteenth century. Reliable commentators put the number at well upward of 50,000 out of a population of around 850,000. Such estimates didn't count the kept mistresses nor the many maidservants and wives who supplemented their income with casual sex work. Sailors, builders, soldiers, workmen, and students thronged the city, as well as visiting merchants, travelers, and businessmen, most of whom were single or far away from their wives. A contemporary wrote that "there are few men who in some period of their lives have not dealt in mercenary sex." Since well-bred girls waited until marriage, or at least evidence of a long-term commitment, most men chose to pay for sex.
Nearly all of London's prostitutes were, like Emma, single teenage girls without male relations, recent migrants to the city. Around a third had been domestic servants who turned to the streets when they were fired. Most were under eighteen, some hardly older than twelve, and nearly all had lost their virginity, usually about one or two years before beginning work. Many had been pregnant at least once.
Girls such as Emma had few options. They needed money to be apprenticed, and they usually lacked the skills to become a seamstress or a milliner. Work in the soap factories or brick kilns meant a twelve-hour day in steaming conditions, risking acid burn and injury. Many women believed prostitution less dangerous than factory work and more bearable than domestic service: there were no early starts, backbreaking scrubbing, lascivious masters who considered their maids fair game, or need to be perpetually servile. A prostitute was her own mistress, and to mistreated servants, weary of obeying, any independence was alluring. We might think nowadays that we would rather steal or beg. Beggars, however, were usually attacked, and crimes against property were so stringently punished that a girl who stole a handkerchief could be executed or deported. While the authorities prosecuted theft with vigor, they let off those they found soliciting for sex—particularly the younger girls—with a caution. Society turned a blind eye to prostitutes, for it was thought that without them, men would resort to sodomy or to assaulting respectable "innocent" girls. It was also thought to have economic benefits: if men paid for sex, they would be less anxious to marry and thus spare employers the burden of paying out the larger wages due to married men.
Young girls took to the streets without understanding the dangers. Most prostitutes were addicted to opium and gin within months of starting work, and nearly all had been viciously beaten (clients were usually acquitted for any crime on a prostitute) or had suffered from botched abortions. Since most men in large cities had syphilis or gonorrhea, nearly all prostitutes were infected within a year of walking the streets. Some caught pneumonia and all lived hand to mouth, pawning their clothes to buy drink. Only those who stole from their clients broke even. Many graduated to petty crime and were, as was common for a young female criminal, deported to Australia for stealing a trinket. Some girls did marry or progress to different employment, but many died within five years from disease, abortion, or assault by a client.
Attractive girls attached themselves to a tavern. Only the old and diseased women operated solely on the streets, often resorting to dark corners or colonizing one of the many deserted, crumbling