The Good Old Days
May. 9th, 2005 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenSome of you will be familiar with Mage: the Ascension, part of White Wolf's "World of Darkness" roleplaying setting. (Don't worry, this post isn't about gaming, this is just a handy illustration.)
Greatly abridged background, as heard from a typical Tradition mage: once upon a time the world was a cool place, where the Dreamspeaker mages spoke to spirits and the Verbena used Secret Rune Magic and so on, and everybody had meaningful and fulfilling lives. And then the Technocracy - a coalition of science-mages - gradually took control of the consensus paradigm, laying down rules for everything and killing the wonder and freedom of it all. (Except for the hacker-mage Virtual Adepts, who broke away from the Technocrats around 1950 because Iteration X wouldn't pay to get ADSL, or something.) The world became a prison, where the sheep-like masses follow the ruts set out for them by the Technocracy and only a rare few find the courage to challenge the dominant paradigm...
To which my response is "well, screw that." Although it does a nice job of encapsulating that mindset, M:tA is by no means the only place where you'll find people convinced that the world was so much richer and more beautiful a generation or two back. The most glaringly stupid manifestation of this is a form of technophobia - I'm still not clear on how being deaf from childhood ear infections and near-blind from uncorrected myopia would've made my life richer than it is now - but it's really just as bad when applied to social considerations.
The picture we get of the past is not a representative one. It comes from the people who had the time to sit down and describe their world, the education to do it well, and more often than not the status to make their lives of interest to those who followed after.
Even when we do find material on the lives of people who aren't all of rich, white, male, and straight, it's all too easy to come away with an overly rosy picture or things. Modern readers often write off the work of Jane Austen* as chick-flick fodder about women who don't have to work for a living and have nothing more serious to do than flit about trying to snare a husband. In fact, these are women who can't work for a living - except in the most degrading of occupations, more on that later - and who are in real danger of dying in poverty if they can't find a husband by age 25 or so. All too often marriage was based not on love or mental compatibility but on security (see Charlotte Lucas' marriage to Mr. Collins for a prime example), and even then you were in trouble if your husband died before you did.
Jane Austen skirts around most of the worst consequences of losing at this particular game, but they're certainly there. For genteel women who couldn't find a husband, there were three main ways to stay afloat: finding work as a governess (c.f. Jane Eyre), depending on the kindness of relatives, or prostitution.
Prostitution. Since I'm sick to death of hearing how gays and divorce and extramarital sex and what-have-you have ruined the fabric of the family, I'm going to bludgeon y'all with a few statistics about the Good Old Days.
In 1801, when Jane Austen was 26, the population of London was roughly 960,000**. (It's now about seven million.) In 1797, London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun estimated (Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis) that there were about fifty thousand prostitutes in that city - ten percent of the entire female population.
What does this tell us about the "fabric of the family" at the time Jane Austen was writing politely-worded novels about well-spoken young ladies, that one woman in ten had to resort to prostitution? (Austen was in Bath, not London, but Bath doesn't seem to have been much better in this regard.) What more does it tell us, that there were enough men to keep this many prostitutes in business?
In 1871, the population was about 3.3 million; the year before, William Acton (Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, 2nd edition 1870) had written:
The number of prostitutes in London has been variously estimated, according to the opportunities, credulity, or religious fervour of observers, and the width of interpretation they have put upon the word. To attempt to reconcile or construct tables upon the estimates I have met with would be a hopeless task. I can merely give a few of the more moderate that have been handed down by my predecessors. Mr Colquhoun, a magistrate at the Thames Police Court, rated them at 50,000 some sixty years ago. The Bishop of Exeter spoke of them as reaching 80,000; Mr Talbot, secretary of a society for the protection of young females, made the same estimate.
His 1868 figures list just 6515 prostitutes known to police - little changed from 1839 - but he notes: The police have not attempted to include - in fact, could not have justly included, I might almost say - the unnumbered prostitutes whose appearance in the streets as such never takes place; who are not seen abroad at unseemly hours; who are reserved in manners, quiet and unobtrusive in their houses or lodgings, and whose general conduct is such that the most vigilant of constables could have no pretence for claiming to be officially aware of their existence or pursuits... these returns give but a faint idea of the grand total of prostitution by which we are oppressed, as the police include in them only those women and houses whose nature is well and accurately known to them. There can be little doubt that numbers of women who live by prostitution lead apparently respectable lives in the lodgings or houses which they occupy; but all such are necessarily excluded from the returns. Were there any possibility of reckoning all those in London who would come within the definition of prostitutes, I am inclined to think that the estimates of the boldest who have preceded me would be thrown into the shade. (In case you're wondering, BTW, the age of consent at the time was 13.)
In the 21st century, most of London's prostitutes are illegal immigrants (mostly from Eastern Europe); police estimate around ten thousand such prostitutes for the whole of Britain. While it's hard to draw a direct comparison without better data on the patterns of prostitution, it seems pretty clear that prostitution plays a far smaller role in modern-day London than it did in the time of Austen and Dickens.
Getting back to Dickens, let's look at the 'healthy family fabric' of a 19th-century gentleman. He was born in 1812; he seems to have had a happy childhood until age twelve, when his father went bankrupt and was imprisoned, and young Charles went to work in a boot-blacking factory, ten hours a day, to pay for his lodgings and support his family. Eventually, thanks in part to an inheritance, his father was released, but his mother kept him working in the factory.
At age 15 he began work as a law clerk; he got fidgety, branched out into journalism and fiction, and around age 20 achieved success with The Pickwick Papers; I'll skim over his literary career, except to observe that it made him rich and famous. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, and proceeded to have ten children with her.
In 1857, Dickens co-sponsored the production of Wilkie Collins' The Frozen Deep, and one of the actresses hired for the production was Ellen Ternan, who soon became his mistress. (Besides being her employer at the time, Dickens was also employer to Ellen's mother and sister, and was forty-five years old to her eighteen, a combination which makes me wonder just how free she would have felt to say no.) Dickens seems to have been an adventurer well before that, and quite likely helped keep a few of those thousands of prostitutes in business.
The next year, not long after a mixup in which a bracelet ordered for Ellen was sent to Catherine by mistake, he separated from Catherine. He fulfilled his financial obligations to her, paying for her housing and upkeep; while his oldest son went to live with Catherine, he kept custody of the rest (Catherine's sister Georgina stayed with Charles to look after them) and he did not encourage them to see their mother. In separation, Catherine effectively became an unperson, confined to her house and unable to remain in the social circles she had been part of; she lived another twenty years, but never seems to have picked up her life again. Ellen did somewhat better - conveniently finding employment that kept her near him - but was still officially a secret, and Dickens had to avoid appearing at an inquiry into the Staplehurst railway crash of 1865 to avoid publicising the fact that he had been travelling with her and her mother.
And this, dear reader - not atypical for a man of Dickens' time, except in the degree of his wealth and fame - is why I don't enthuse about times past, and why I don't have a very high regard for propriety; in my experience, when people wax rhapsodic about the "propriety" and "family values" of yesteryear, what they're *really* nostalgic about - whether they know it or not - are the days when the unfortunate kept their damn mouths SHUT and made it easier for the fortunate few to maintain a state of denial.
I won't say my family is the best in the world. We have our failings, some of which I'm aware of, some of which I'm not. But I'm mighty glad I'm not Charles Dickens... and in his time, he was one of the lucky ones.
*Who died at 42, probably from now-treatable Addison's Disease.
**To the best of my knowledge, Colquhoun & Acton's estimates refer to Inner London rather than the Greater London area, so I'm using Inner London figures - see here for comparisons.
Some sources for the above:
http://www.jasa.net.au/london/prostitution.htm
http://www.victorianlondon.org/crime/numbersofprostitutes.htm
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/year1/numerical/problems/london/london-pop-table.html
http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/victorian/HTML/prostitu.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,901001,00.html
http://www.peacewomen.org/un/pkwatch/News/03/misery.html
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/Dickens_and_Sex_Lecture.html
Greatly abridged background, as heard from a typical Tradition mage: once upon a time the world was a cool place, where the Dreamspeaker mages spoke to spirits and the Verbena used Secret Rune Magic and so on, and everybody had meaningful and fulfilling lives. And then the Technocracy - a coalition of science-mages - gradually took control of the consensus paradigm, laying down rules for everything and killing the wonder and freedom of it all. (Except for the hacker-mage Virtual Adepts, who broke away from the Technocrats around 1950 because Iteration X wouldn't pay to get ADSL, or something.) The world became a prison, where the sheep-like masses follow the ruts set out for them by the Technocracy and only a rare few find the courage to challenge the dominant paradigm...
To which my response is "well, screw that." Although it does a nice job of encapsulating that mindset, M:tA is by no means the only place where you'll find people convinced that the world was so much richer and more beautiful a generation or two back. The most glaringly stupid manifestation of this is a form of technophobia - I'm still not clear on how being deaf from childhood ear infections and near-blind from uncorrected myopia would've made my life richer than it is now - but it's really just as bad when applied to social considerations.
The picture we get of the past is not a representative one. It comes from the people who had the time to sit down and describe their world, the education to do it well, and more often than not the status to make their lives of interest to those who followed after.
Even when we do find material on the lives of people who aren't all of rich, white, male, and straight, it's all too easy to come away with an overly rosy picture or things. Modern readers often write off the work of Jane Austen* as chick-flick fodder about women who don't have to work for a living and have nothing more serious to do than flit about trying to snare a husband. In fact, these are women who can't work for a living - except in the most degrading of occupations, more on that later - and who are in real danger of dying in poverty if they can't find a husband by age 25 or so. All too often marriage was based not on love or mental compatibility but on security (see Charlotte Lucas' marriage to Mr. Collins for a prime example), and even then you were in trouble if your husband died before you did.
Jane Austen skirts around most of the worst consequences of losing at this particular game, but they're certainly there. For genteel women who couldn't find a husband, there were three main ways to stay afloat: finding work as a governess (c.f. Jane Eyre), depending on the kindness of relatives, or prostitution.
Prostitution. Since I'm sick to death of hearing how gays and divorce and extramarital sex and what-have-you have ruined the fabric of the family, I'm going to bludgeon y'all with a few statistics about the Good Old Days.
In 1801, when Jane Austen was 26, the population of London was roughly 960,000**. (It's now about seven million.) In 1797, London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun estimated (Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis) that there were about fifty thousand prostitutes in that city - ten percent of the entire female population.
What does this tell us about the "fabric of the family" at the time Jane Austen was writing politely-worded novels about well-spoken young ladies, that one woman in ten had to resort to prostitution? (Austen was in Bath, not London, but Bath doesn't seem to have been much better in this regard.) What more does it tell us, that there were enough men to keep this many prostitutes in business?
In 1871, the population was about 3.3 million; the year before, William Acton (Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, 2nd edition 1870) had written:
The number of prostitutes in London has been variously estimated, according to the opportunities, credulity, or religious fervour of observers, and the width of interpretation they have put upon the word. To attempt to reconcile or construct tables upon the estimates I have met with would be a hopeless task. I can merely give a few of the more moderate that have been handed down by my predecessors. Mr Colquhoun, a magistrate at the Thames Police Court, rated them at 50,000 some sixty years ago. The Bishop of Exeter spoke of them as reaching 80,000; Mr Talbot, secretary of a society for the protection of young females, made the same estimate.
His 1868 figures list just 6515 prostitutes known to police - little changed from 1839 - but he notes: The police have not attempted to include - in fact, could not have justly included, I might almost say - the unnumbered prostitutes whose appearance in the streets as such never takes place; who are not seen abroad at unseemly hours; who are reserved in manners, quiet and unobtrusive in their houses or lodgings, and whose general conduct is such that the most vigilant of constables could have no pretence for claiming to be officially aware of their existence or pursuits... these returns give but a faint idea of the grand total of prostitution by which we are oppressed, as the police include in them only those women and houses whose nature is well and accurately known to them. There can be little doubt that numbers of women who live by prostitution lead apparently respectable lives in the lodgings or houses which they occupy; but all such are necessarily excluded from the returns. Were there any possibility of reckoning all those in London who would come within the definition of prostitutes, I am inclined to think that the estimates of the boldest who have preceded me would be thrown into the shade. (In case you're wondering, BTW, the age of consent at the time was 13.)
In the 21st century, most of London's prostitutes are illegal immigrants (mostly from Eastern Europe); police estimate around ten thousand such prostitutes for the whole of Britain. While it's hard to draw a direct comparison without better data on the patterns of prostitution, it seems pretty clear that prostitution plays a far smaller role in modern-day London than it did in the time of Austen and Dickens.
Getting back to Dickens, let's look at the 'healthy family fabric' of a 19th-century gentleman. He was born in 1812; he seems to have had a happy childhood until age twelve, when his father went bankrupt and was imprisoned, and young Charles went to work in a boot-blacking factory, ten hours a day, to pay for his lodgings and support his family. Eventually, thanks in part to an inheritance, his father was released, but his mother kept him working in the factory.
At age 15 he began work as a law clerk; he got fidgety, branched out into journalism and fiction, and around age 20 achieved success with The Pickwick Papers; I'll skim over his literary career, except to observe that it made him rich and famous. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, and proceeded to have ten children with her.
In 1857, Dickens co-sponsored the production of Wilkie Collins' The Frozen Deep, and one of the actresses hired for the production was Ellen Ternan, who soon became his mistress. (Besides being her employer at the time, Dickens was also employer to Ellen's mother and sister, and was forty-five years old to her eighteen, a combination which makes me wonder just how free she would have felt to say no.) Dickens seems to have been an adventurer well before that, and quite likely helped keep a few of those thousands of prostitutes in business.
The next year, not long after a mixup in which a bracelet ordered for Ellen was sent to Catherine by mistake, he separated from Catherine. He fulfilled his financial obligations to her, paying for her housing and upkeep; while his oldest son went to live with Catherine, he kept custody of the rest (Catherine's sister Georgina stayed with Charles to look after them) and he did not encourage them to see their mother. In separation, Catherine effectively became an unperson, confined to her house and unable to remain in the social circles she had been part of; she lived another twenty years, but never seems to have picked up her life again. Ellen did somewhat better - conveniently finding employment that kept her near him - but was still officially a secret, and Dickens had to avoid appearing at an inquiry into the Staplehurst railway crash of 1865 to avoid publicising the fact that he had been travelling with her and her mother.
And this, dear reader - not atypical for a man of Dickens' time, except in the degree of his wealth and fame - is why I don't enthuse about times past, and why I don't have a very high regard for propriety; in my experience, when people wax rhapsodic about the "propriety" and "family values" of yesteryear, what they're *really* nostalgic about - whether they know it or not - are the days when the unfortunate kept their damn mouths SHUT and made it easier for the fortunate few to maintain a state of denial.
I won't say my family is the best in the world. We have our failings, some of which I'm aware of, some of which I'm not. But I'm mighty glad I'm not Charles Dickens... and in his time, he was one of the lucky ones.
*Who died at 42, probably from now-treatable Addison's Disease.
**To the best of my knowledge, Colquhoun & Acton's estimates refer to Inner London rather than the Greater London area, so I'm using Inner London figures - see here for comparisons.
Some sources for the above:
http://www.jasa.net.au/london/prostitution.htm
http://www.victorianlondon.org/crime/numbersofprostitutes.htm
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/year1/numerical/problems/london/london-pop-table.html
http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/victorian/HTML/prostitu.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,901001,00.html
http://www.peacewomen.org/un/pkwatch/News/03/misery.html
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/Dickens_and_Sex_Lecture.html
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 09:14 am (UTC)Men had it slightly better - but they had their own joys.
After WW2 there was a very successful propaganda campaign run to get women out of their (war-time) jobs and into the home, so that they could a) free up the jobs for the returning soldiers, b) have babies to repopulate and c) consume goods to stimulate economic demand. It's this 1950s idealised white picket fence fantasy that bears the closest relationship to the "traditional family values" often touted, but people often forget that it was short-lived and didn't benefit all the family.
As we now know, this was an environment that fostered and protected domestic, sexual and child abuse, as well as hastening the second-wave of feminism as women discovered that the limited role of home-maker and mum didn't necessarily bring them personal happiness or fulfilment.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 10:01 pm (UTC)It's like that "what medieval person would you have been?" quiz where everybody gets 'Cardinal' or 'King' or 'Jester' or whatever, and nobody gets 'Peon' :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-05-09 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-10 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-10 10:36 am (UTC)Well said.
Date: 2005-05-09 02:42 pm (UTC)Quite.
I was going to rant along the lines Froufrou already did. So I'll just say, well writ.
Re: Well said.
Date: 2005-05-10 03:03 am (UTC)When people ask you that entertaining theoretical question where in history you would take a time machine that went backwards-only, the correct answer if you're a woman is 'probably no more than 20 years into the past', and not much further if you're a man (Vietnam conscription, yaaaaay!!!). Sure it sounds dull, but things are definitely not all doom and gloom as time goes on and things progress.
And - hey! If you don't have a time machine at your disposal, don't worry - just go to a fundamentalist/communist state and check out life there. Read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" or "Not Without My Daughter", and you'll get the gist of life in a conservative paradise. It's not pretty for men, and women are lucky to make 35...
Re: Well said.
Date: 2005-05-10 02:06 pm (UTC)Unless you have a disability that would get you out of it. Poor eyesight and the like would get you out of the conscription then. And then you could do fun things like attend riots, anti-war protests and get gassed by the *local* government instead!
It's not pretty for men, and women are lucky to make 35...
Apparently we (non Australians) already have a shorter life span on this side of the spinning ball of dirt because of our insistence to NOT institute universal health care. But that's another story.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-16 08:33 am (UTC)