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woman suspected of being a prostitute). ‘Prostitution’ was a blanket term to cover many frailties – even including ‘fast’ behaviour. At the upper end, ‘demi-mondaines’ and courtesans such as Polly Evans in Manchester and ‘Skittles’ Walters in London earned £50 a week, with servants and carriages, mingling with the unfastidious well-to-do. Many women in the lower classes were in effect concubines, living in serial, semi-permanent individual relationships; others sought to supplement inadequate regular incomes, or looked for better opportunities and variety, or were driven by sheer poverty. Child prostitution made a busy trade: in 1848 The Times suggested that 90 per cent of fourteen-year-olds released from workhouses went on the street. In 1885, the journalist W.T. Stead’s well-publicised purchase of a thirteen-year old brought about the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent from twelve to sixteen, making procuration criminal, and increasing penalties for underage sexual assault.
    Meanwhile, the ‘gay ladies’ and ‘soiled doves’ of the West End – one night in 1857 some 200 were counted in the Haymarket and Regent Street area – earned a workman’s weekly wages in one night; many others worked in the industrial and dock areas, usually in mean, dirty brothels, for whatever they could get, for food and shelter.
    They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
    But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
    How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
    A.H. Clough, ‘Spectator Ab Extra’ (1863)
    * * *
    THE DINING ANIMAL
    (I)
    Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines. It has also been said that he is a cooking animal; but some races eat food without cooking it. . . . It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a dinner at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating their women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble.
    Isabel Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861)
    ENGLISH DINNER
    As you never were in England, I must say a few words on the routine of an English dinner, which, as I have said, is ‘à peu de chose près’, everywhere alike. . . .
    The gentlemen lead the ladies into the dining-room, not as in France, by the hand, but by the arm; and here, as there, are emancipated from the necessity of those antiquated bows which, even in some of the best society in Germany, are exchanged every time one hands out a lady. On the other hand, there is a most anxious regard to rank . . .
    After the soup is removed, and the covers are taken off, every man helps the dish before him, and offers some of it to his neighbour; if he wishes for anything else, he must ask across the table, or send a servant for it . . .
    It is not usual to take wine without drinking to another person. When you raise your glass, you look fixedly at the one with whom you are drinking, bow your head, and then drink with great gravity. Certainly many of the customs of the South Sea Islanders, which strike us the most, are less ludicrous. . . .
    At the conclusion of the second course comes a sort of intermediate dessert of cheese, butter, salad, raw celery and the like; after which ale, sometimes thirty or forty years old, and so