The Covent Garden Ladies Read Free

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