England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [28]
More than thirty thousand of London's prostitutes operated in Covent Garden and the streets in the boundaries marked by St. Martin's Lane, Longacre, Drury Lane, and the Strand. "Drury Lane ague" was the slang term for syphilis and "Drury Lane vestal" a prostitute. The area depended on a constant influx of girls such as Emma. Newly built after much of it burned down in 1769, Covent Garden was a playground for the young. Resplendent in silk dresses of garnet, violet, and rouge pink, beribboned and bejeweled, prostitutes mingled with the fashionable crowds around the theater and the poorer Londoners enjoying the sideshows and sword swal-lowers, girls selling oranges or garish hothouse blooms. One Frenchman claimed that the "women of the town" were "more numerous than at Paris, and have more liberty than at Rome." The street echoed with lewd invitations, and in backstreets the women waited almost naked. Male prostitutes, ornate in elaborate costume jewelery, loitered on corners. Procuresses and their bouncers or bullies shadowed girls to ensure they did not run away. Aristocrats came from miles around to watch the show or, like biographer James Boswell commented only a few years before, to seek young actresses and demimondaines. Even if she was only a barmaid, Emma had become a part of London's biggest and most popular tourist spectacle.
Covent Garden even had a guidebook. From 1765, Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies was published every year, the work of a variety of hacks. Harris's List detailed the prostitutes' appearances, their lodgings, and their particular talents. Up to eight thousand copies were apparently sold every year by tavern keepers or from the kiosks around the piazza that also sold contraceptives, tobacco, sweets, pornography, and pills for venereal disease. The book often indicated the clients they preferred, such as "Miss G----------N," who was "particularly fond of sailors." All used stage names (even a young lady who dubbed herself Sarah Siddons, after the most famous actress of the day), so we would be unable to identify Emma, even if the Harris's List from 1777-78 had not been lost. In 1788, after Emma had long left the city, an enterprising lady in Queen Street adopted the name of "Miss H-m-lt-n" and claimed to be "very fond of dancing." By 1788, Emma's fame had spread so far that prostitutes were imitating her.
Emma had been turned away from the Linleys'just in time to catch the Christmas trade. London was packed with gentlemen, workmen, and servants. "Every house from Cellar to Garrett is inhabited by Nymphs of different orders, so that Persons of every Rank can be accommodated," declared one commentator. There were girls costing thousands of dollars in today's money, and girls for a few cents. Emma now understood the true profession of the fine ladies who sauntered around Drury Lane. Without warm underwear, she was heated only by gin. Lead-based white paint and beauty spots coated her face, her lips gleamed red with cochineal, and her hair was piled high on her head. Her dress was brightly colored, but the style was two or three seasons out of fashion. Made from fabric woven on looms by children in the sweatshops of Spitalfields and sold to fine ladies by Cheapside drapers, gowns cut for ladies who never walked outside, came to Emma after they had been worn out and passed to maids who sold them to the secondhand clothes markets in Monmouth Street or Rag Fair. She would have owned only two dresses at most, but the small wardrobe was an advantage: it helped men to recognize her.
The room of a tavern barmaid or prostitute bore the traces of the hundreds who had passed through: