Improper Victorians

THE GIRL WITH THE SWANSDOWN SEAT (263 pp.)--Cyril Pearl--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.95).

It seems that more things went on behind Queen Victoria's billowing black bombazine skirts than her spiritual grandsons have been led to believe. It is probably too late to set matters straight, but Australian Cyril Pearl has made an industrious try at striking "Victorianism" from the lexicon as the synonym for middle-class prudery.

The legend of Victorian domestic virtue and strict private morals was literally a fiction. Pearl suggests. Dickens, the prose laureate of the era, and Trollope, who boasted that "no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before,'' handed down a false moral portrait of the Victorian middle and upper classes which has persisted to this day. They were abetted. Pearl argues, by biographers and historians who "suppressed and distorted shamefully," in a "conspiracy against truth."

A Seraglio. The Victorian era, according to Pearl, was "an age when prostitution was widespread and flagrant; when many London streets were like Oriental bazaars of flesh; when the luxurious West End nighthouses dispensed love and liquor till dawn; when fashionable whores . . . rode with duchesses in Rotten Row, and eminent Victorians negotiated for the tenancy of their beds; when a pretty new suburb arose at St. John's Wood as a seraglio for mistresses and harlots." In the rising tide of Victorian morality, one female Londoner in every 16 became a whore; there were 6,000 brothels and about 80,000 prostitutes*(the Lancet's estimate).

Dickens installed his mistress in a "bower in Ampthill Square." Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), who proposed several times to Florence Nightingale, compiled such an extensive mass of pornography for his Yorkshire home that he called the place Aphrodisiopolis. Queen Victoria's favorite poet and laureate, Tennyson himself, enjoyed rude limericks--those five-line exercises in lubricity that still enjoy a large oral circulation. Algernon Swinburne had a great taste for erotica ("Shall I tell our visitor about the man of Peru?"). Whistler's saucy Finette, who introduced the cancan to England, was clearly not his mother. The Queen herself comes out of Pearl's researches unscathed (save for a regal tendency, noted by Gladstone, to spike her claret with whisky). But Edward VII, her son and heir, was such a celebrated patron of the tarts that La Goulue (Lautrec's model) would call out at the Jardin de Paris: "Allo, Wales! Est-ce-que tu vas payer man champagne?"

The Fortunate Unfortunates. Far from believing with William Blake that "the harlot's cry from street to street shall weave old England's winding sheet," Pearl takes a dry delight in proposing that the "unfortunates," the "soiled doves," not only had a better time of it than their virtuous sisters sweating in domestic slavery or the nightmare of piecework needlework, but were better people in some ways than the severely swathed ladies and broadcloth gentlemen who regarded them as a "social evil."

Through a London that was "a vast sink of sweated female labor," the ladies of easy virtue rode through Hyde Park in such splendid carriages or on such fine horses that the popular euphemism for rich prostitutes of the time was "pretty horse-breakers." One, Lizzie Howard, became the mistress of Napoleon III, and a French countess, and died a rich woman. Cora Pearl (born Crouch and no kin to Author Pearl), one of the few prostitutes to win mention in the Dictionary of National Biography, also made good in Paris. The book's title is provided by Catherine

Walters, who was described by an admirer as "a whore, sir, much sought after by fast young swells." The public knew her as "Skittles," and her rich patrons called her "Skitsie." As "the self-crowned queen of mid-Victorian harlotry," she maintained herself in London in such magnificence that the toilet seat in her bathroom was upholstered in swansdown. She was one of the most accomplished horsewomen of the time, was among the first to become proficient in the sport of roller skating (newly imported from America), had the Prince of Wales at her Sunday afternoon parties. Lord Kitchener, with his splendid mustachios, occasionally walked alongside when, in her 60s. Skittles made her parade through Hyde Park in a Bath chair. In her 70s, living in quiet respectability as Mrs. Bailey, she was deaf and partially blind, but "unconquered in talk" when old friends came to chat. In 1920 Skittles died; she was past 80 and "comfortably unrepentant."

*In 1793, an official estimate tallied London prostitutes at 50,000 when the total population was about 750,000; in 1951, with the population over 8,000,000, London was estimated to have 10,000 prostitutes.

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