The Covent Garden Ladies Read Free Page A

not well paid. A life of crime is always a viable possibility. Prostitution helps quite a few women; some even scale the social heights by its profits.Pickpocketing, robbery, housebreaking, dealing in stolen goods, procuring women for lascivious men and forgery can also be quite profitable. As can cheating at cards. These may be your only hopes of survival in brutal London if you have the misfortune of being born into its lowest ranks.
    The story of the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies is the tale of these people. They are the ones who linger at the fringe of eighteenth-century society. Their footing on the social ladder is a perpetually unsure one and their acceptance into the ‘normal’ circles of the respectable population will never be sanctioned. John Harrison (a.k.a. Jack Harris), Samuel Derrick and Charlotte Hayes are our representatives of this realm. In this parable, fate has provided us with an interesting cross section of history’s minor players, or outcasts, if you like: the hardened criminal, the determined but impoverished poet, and the daughter of a bawd. In the telling of it we must remember that these personalities are as much the products of their era as are we. Their judgements and biases belong to a time less forgiving than our own. Do not make the mistake that moralists of their own age might be inclined to – that it is their badness that motivates them. This reeks of the simple-mindedness that sent petty pickpockets to the nooses at Tyburn. You have been provided with a glimpse into their world, the extreme difficulties, the cruelties, abuses and inequalities. In the heart of each of them beats an indomitable desire not to suffer these miseries, even if, paradoxically, it means bringing about the suffering of others. Be warned, this is not a tale where wrongdoers are punished and the exploited are vindicated. This has nothing to do with the gilded, safe and privileged Georgian era of Jane Austen. She and others like her are on the inside of society looking out, and their sight does not extend as far as these dark corners. There is no comfortable moral to be found within the lurid biographies of the Harris’s Lists , nor between the covers of this book. But history rarely provides a comfortable moral to a good yarn.

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    THE LEGEND OF Jack Harris
    JACK HARRIS WAS born in the very cradle of illusion, in the space that existed between two theatres. Nothing was as it seemed in Covent Garden, where actors assumed the identities of imaginary characters and masked men and women moved through the pleasure-seeking swarms anonymously. Against such a backdrop it was easy to vanish or to become someone else. Until he grew proud and foolish, he had never stepped into the direct glare of the limelight; he had never allowed anyone to truly know him or his story. Jack Harris had hidden well, and what little he revealed to the world about himself was complete fabrication.
    After his sensational arrest in 1758, those who had only ever seen him as a silhouette moving against the backdrop of Covent Garden wanted to hear his tale. Although no one had ever demonstrated any interest in him before, he decided with the assistance of a hack journalist to recount his narrative and offer an explanation for his wickedness.
    Long before his parents brought him into being, destiny had marked out his family for suffering. His father, he claimed, came from ‘a goodSomersetshire family’, but had the misfortune of being born a younger son with no inheritance and few prospects. The marriage he contracted with Harris’s mother had been formed out of love and consequently had fallen foul of his upstanding relations. Cast adrift with no money and no position, the young couple set out for London, where Harris senior had been given ‘many promises from great men of places, sinecures and pensions’. As a member of the landed class, he believed that he had no shortage of allies within the government willing to assist his