London, 1871: Lucie Dumas of Lyon has accepted a stipend from her former lover and his wife, on condition that she never returns to France; she will never see her young son again. As the money proves inadequate, Lucie turns to prostitution to live, joining the ranks of countless girls from continental Europe who'd come to London in the hope of work in domestic service.
Escaping a Covent Garden brothel for a Magdalen penitentiary, Lucie finds only another form of incarceration and thus descends to the streets, where she is picked up by the author Samuel Butler, who sets her up in her own establishment and visits her once a week for the next two decades. But for many years she does not even know his name.
Based on true events.
Five Minute History with Katherine Mezzacappa
I have always been fascinated by Victorian London as a city and time of contrasts. It had a veneer of respectability and moral probity, but this concealed a very dark side. Lucie Dumas, who was a real person, was a part of that. She was found by the writer Samuel Butler streetwalking in Islington. She then abandoned the street in favour of receiving gentleman callers in her lodgings and seems to have done so very discreetly. The census of 1891 records her, by her own description, of course, as a widow, living on her own means.’ The census details the other people who lived in the same building. There was a baker and his family, a journalist, a clerk – all normal people.
Butler visited her once a week on Wednesday afternoons, paying her a pound a week, including when he was away on holiday, in a relationship that lasted twenty years. Some years into this arrangement he introduced his friend and biographer, who was to call on Tuesdays; Butler would pay for him. Lucie’s response to this arrangement isn’t recorded. When Lucie became ill with tuberculosis, Butler paid her bills at the French Hospital. Most of what we know about Lucie comes from an interview the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge had with Alfred Cathie, Butler’s former manservant, years after Butler’s death. ‘The Governor’ as Alfred called him, never replaced Lucie (though his friend fairly quickly did, something Alfred clearly didn’t approve of).
Lucie left France with a small stipend provided by the father of her child and the man’s wife, but she left behind her little boy. Were she to return, she would lose that money, and she never did go back. There are great swathes of Lucie’s story that I had recreate, as we do not know what happened to her son, or exactly how she came to be streetwalking; the most likely explanation is that the stipend simply wasn’t sufficient, and so Lucie, like many women at the bottom of the economic food chain (such as seamstresses) had to turn to prostitution at least on a part-time basis, in order to make ends meet. The routes out of the profession were largely punitive; women could seek refuge in the Magdalen penitentiaries, as they were called, where they would be laundresses or embroiderers, and might be trained to go into service. The penitentiaries, run by nuns usually (both Catholic and Anglican orders) would normally only accept women and girls they thought could be reformed. These places existed all over the country. There might well be a building in your town that has since been put to some other use, but which was once one of these institutions. Needless to say, there were no penitentiaries for the men who bought these women.
Lucie appears to have escaped venereal disease, but it was a real risk for anyone working in prostitution. The first effective cure for syphilis lay in the future (Salvarsan, first used in the 1910s). Women showing signs of disease could not remain in the penitentiaries but were consigned to the Lock hospitals (there were separate Locks for men). The word lock doesn’t imply that they were locked in. It probably derives from the French word loque, describing a rag wrapped around leprosy sores.
This was too late for my purposes, but is a nugget of research too astonishing not to share. The male Lock Hospital in Covent Garden in the 1920s employed three male nurses who specialised in a urethral irrigation treatment (which sounds very painful). Their surnames were Rodwell, Catchpole and Hardstand…
The Lock Hospital at Hyde Park Corner
Thomas Shepherd, engraved by W Wallis.
Wikimedia Commons: Wellcome Collection
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