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Journal of Women's History,
Autumn 1999 v11 i3 p78
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Indiana University Press In 1696, John Dunton began publishing his eccentric serialized expose of London prostitutes, The Nightwalker: or, Evening Rambles in search After Lewd Women, With the conferences Held with Them, Etc. To Be publish'd Monthly, `Till a Discovery be made of all the chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet.(1) In the process of "discovering" these young women, Dunton manages to find time to comment on a host of other moral ills connected, at least in his mind, to the prevalence of whoring: England's vulnerability to foreign invasion, the corruption of the landed class, and students' inattention to their studies. But among the most remarkable of these ills is one that opens Dunton's October 1696 issue. In this episode, Dunton tells the story of a young man-about-town who dupes a dim though honorable merchant. Smitten with the merchant's wife, who "according to the present mode, expos[es] herself in her Shop dect and dressed more like a Lady or Person of Quality than a good Housewife," the young man tricks the good citizen into holding 400 [pounds sterling] for him and then "accepts" the merchant's wife as guarantee for the money. Needless to say, the "Sparkish Lecher" gets "use" of the merchant's wife for free.(2) To this tale Dunton attaches the following moral. This may certainly be a warning to our Citizens, to take heed how they expose their fine Wives in their Shops; and in truth 'tis an abominable shame to see Tradesmen's Wives now a days sit behind their Counters, with their Heads three or four story high fluttering with Ribbans, their Hair powdered as if their Locks had been in a Meal-tub, their faces Anointed, Painted, or Patcht, and their Mouths set in Pimlico, and so much affraid are they of putting it out of set, that they dare scarcely adventure to speak, but either Hiss or Chipp; and by this means they have rendred our Language as well as our Nation Effeminate, and in somethings more soft than the Amorous sounds of the French themselves.(3) It would be hard to miss either Dunton's moral indignation, or the fact that it sends him running headlong from a breach of social protocol to the excesses of fashion to the decline and apparently imminent collapse of the English language. But the dizzying speed with which he traverses this field of disastrous consequences raises questions about what kind of ground Dunton is trying to cover. How does this woman's desire to dress like her social superiors transform her into a whore and her husband into an unwitting cuckold? Superficially, Dunton's cautionary parable about the perils of class cross-dressing has its roots in the more or less endemic anxiety that prostitutes' "excellent Art ... can easily turn a Sempstress into a waiting Gentlewoman."(4) By 1696, that narrative paradigm was in fairly regular circulation, having appeared in such pornographic satires as The Character of a TownMiss (1680) in which the title character is "the Cub of a Bumkin, lickt into a Genteel form.(5) Recent scholarship on eighteenth-century prostitution and pornography interprets the time-honored conflation of women's bodies and the clothes they wore largely in economic terms, emphasizing English culture's treatment of prostitution as a degraded expression of capitalist production and consumption.(6) Literary scholar Laura Brown, for instance, has argued that "public" women's bodies offered late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century English culture a kind of representational model for capitalist semiotics and imperial accumulation: "the fantasy of a universal collaboration in the dressing of the female body" that deployed imperial largesse to discipline both class and gender distinctions.(7) Extending this line of inquiry, Felicity Nussbaum, a scholar in cultural studies, has documented imperial England's designation of women's cultural labor as either "sexual" or "maternal," a strategy that, as Nussbaum points out, limited women's civic participation to maternal production while justifying England's imperial expansion as a reformative strategy for "redeeming" the "torrid zones" of its mushrooming empire.(8) But Dunton's allegory eludes this economic account of clothing's relationship to prostitution and pornography. Not only do Dunton's "good Housewi[ves]," invert the class valences ordinarily attached to haute couture whores, revealing the woman beneath the clothes as middle class rather than working poor, Dunton insists that clothing causes middle-class women's social and sexual degradation, rather than masking it. This insistence, as I will show, situates Dunton's warning within a half-century-long tradition of antidemocratic political pornographic satire which used clothing as a political rather than a social or economic signifier. Most scholars have assumed that English pornography derived from such continental antecedents as Pietro Aretino's Postures (1524).(9) But English pornography has a much different provenance, emerging first from the pens of Crown satirists during the 1642 and 1648 civil wars.(10) Primarily, these satires supported the Crown by viciously lampooning republicanism as a corrupt form of patriarchal governance in which republicans and parliamentarians were adulterers and cuckolds hardly fit to be fathers, let alone wear the mantle of state.(11) Pornographic satires continued to support the patriarchal state throughout the Restoration by satirizing republicanism's democratic energies, but the genre also expanded its purview by aiming obstreperous complaints against the looming specter of seventeenth-century class insurgency. In practice, republicanism and democracy are far from synonymous. But the complex tapestry of antimonarchist interests that dominated English politics at mid-seventeenth century; nonetheless, coalesced under republicanism's banner and crystallized nearly a generation later in the minds of Restoration crown loyalists as the effort to establish a "state Democratical."(12) Restoration pornographic satires tellingly characterized whores as the daughters of families who were both "zealous Stickler[s] for the Parliament" and, more often than not, also involved in England's aggregate textile industry as haberdashers, weavers, or clothiers.(13) In this article, I trace the way Restoration political pornography; predisposed to antidemocratic indictments, converged with Restoration textile policy to construct the prostitute's body as an emblem of democratic, class transgression and thus a site of social discipline.(14) Dunton's anxious fantasy about middle-class social ambition elaborates these mid-seventeenth-century political pornographic satires to suggest that clothing is one mean by which democracy might be kept in check.(15) Teeming Masses What Dunton's allegory foregrounds, as do most other pornographic satires from the period, is a kind of class-driven xenophobia--the abiding fear that emulating "persons of quality" in manners and dress would degrade middle-class identity, collapsing it into that of the working poor. What his allegory is less candid about is that the late-seventeenth-century middle class' fixation on clothing and its fear of the working class was the double effect of civil war politics. Largely owing to historian E. P. Thompson's work, the English working class conventionally has been seen as an effect of nineteenth-century industrialization.(16) But the constitutive features of working-class consciousness--collective identification and awareness that social status derives from one's relationship to the means of economic production--had already begun to take shape by the 1640s and were fully operative by the 1650s. Parliament's war against Charles I in 1642 forced the rigid hierarchical relationships that had originally bound master and apprentice to be sidelined and they came together with other factions and constituencies in the loosely federated antimonarchist coalition that won the first civil war.(17) To the municipal merchant guilds fell the lot of financially supporting Parliament. In 1642, for instance, the Haberdashers' Company paid Parliament 7,700 [pounds sterling], close to 10 percent of a municipal loan that totaled 100,000 [pounds sterling]. The following year, the company had loaned the city another 3,850 [pounds sterling], even as Royalist forces closed in on London. By the time the Commonwealth had been established, the Haberdashers' Company was in debt to its members for 18,000 [pounds sterling] and was paying 1,500 [pounds sterling] of annual interest on that debt.(18) Lacking the financial resources of their well-heeled masters, London's apprentices nonetheless gave crucial ideological and military support to Parliament's complaints against the monarchy. The political alliance, however, broke down shortly after the Scots delivered Charles I to Parliament and the first civil war ended. London's apprentices continued to press the boundaries of political radicalism by aligning themselves with the Levellers, who advocated, among other things, the abolition of private property as a condition of enfranchisement.(19) But it was probably Leveller apprentices' decision to forge a new coalition with the most radical elements among the New Model Army's motley collection of "masterless men" (rogues, vagabonds, beggars, Protestant sectaries, cottagers, and squatters on commons) that irrevocably widened the gap between themselves and their masters.(20) Together with army agitators, London's apprentices argued for greater democratic enfranchisement and submitted "The Agreement of the People" to the Army Council in October 1647. Parliamentarian grandees like Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton, however, had other ideas. Recognizing that apprentices' and agitators' hopes of greater social equity were incompatible with Parliament's more conservative constitutional inclinations, the generals quickly quashed this brief sociopolitical experiment in order to wage war against the king one last time.(21) This is more or less a matter of record. What is less frequently acknowledged is that by 1659, London's apprentices had come to understand their own political radicalism as a response to their socioeconomic position. In a broadside complaining about the economic depression England suffered during the later 1650s, London's apprentices bitterly inveighed against Cromwell's betrayal of their support during the civil wars, seeing this "debasement" of their "good intentions" as part of a cynical policy to enforce apprentice political loyalty by "keeping [them] poor."(22) It was this equation between working-class poverty and democratic radicalism that late-seventeenth-century England's merchant class saw as its biggest threat, although they did not come to that conclusion on their own. Never political laggards, Crown loyalists readily exploited apprentices' perception that their poverty had driven them to political action. In truth, apprentices' participation in the 1668 Messenger riots and 1675 weavers' riot did little to disabuse their fellow Londoners of this impression.(23) But in terms of understanding how London's working class became associated with women, the most important of these riots was the Messenger or bawdy house riot, for it is this event that first revealed an operative merchant-class disavowal of their apprentices. Over a four-day period beginning on Easter Monday 1668, an enormous mob--totaling 40,000 according to some reports--destroyed most of the city's brothels.(24) Needless to say, the riots confirmed the prevailing opinion that to be a member of the urban working class in Restoration London meant possessing a seething economic resentment toward the Crown which constantly threatened to boil over into armed insurrection. Predictably, the riots touched off a wave of antidemocratic anxiety. Nearly everyone, including presiding King's Bench Chief Justice John Keyling, assumed that the riots had been organized and led by four apprentices who subsequently were tried, convicted, and executed for high treason. Although the London Gazette later recanted its claims that apprentices had organized the uprising, casting doubt on the King's Bench verdict, most Londoners accepted the testimony of eyewitnesses who claimed to have heard crowd members cry that "they had been Servants before, but now would be Masters."(25) There is no evidence to suggest that anyone contradicted the London Gazette's initial assumption that the mob had been "nursed in the late rebellion."(26) Most broadsides that responded to the riots hewed to the Royalist party line and interpreted the civic unrest as a court/common dispute which merely replayed the civil wars in a different register.(27) But among the five extant broadsides, The Citizens Reply to the Whores Petition and Prentices Answer (1668) suggests that London's merchant class were also politically astute enough to see the riots as an opportunity to jettison some of their own civil war baggage by turning the apprentices' sense of victimization into evidence that the merchants had not gone down the same radical road as their underlings.(28) The broadside tellingly begins with citizens "confessing" their civil war past and self-deprecatingly describing themselves as "loosers" who have little recourse but to invoke the proverbial "freedome" given the vanquished to explain "why [they] suffer in [their] Reputation." They expand this privilege, however, in order to account for how "Such things [as the riots] should acted be in this our Nation" and, in so doing, cement their alliance with the patriarchal state. Indeed, The Citizens Reply offered what must have seemed irrefutable evidence of citizens loyalty as they washed their hands of their own rebellious "boyes," proclaiming, "Let insurrections have the Tiburn swing,/ We for our parts doe cry, God Save the KING."(29) The bawdy house riots' production of the merchants' loyalty oath belies the idiomatic shape of Dunton's Nightwalker's bourgeois misogyny. For The Citizens Reply not only emphasizes middle-class urban allegiance to the Crown, but it also manifests a willingness to subordinate apprentices through a patriarchal system of power relations that equates young working-class men with sexually "corrupt" women. Clearly; most of those involved in the riots were adults, yet The Citizens Reply describes apprentices as "boyes," thus transforming their professional subordination to their masters into a crypto-familial subordination. That characterization, though, served two other important purposes. Most obvious, the familial subordination of "boye" apprentices to "father" citizens reinforced the homosocial hierarchy of class and political relations.(30) Less obvious, although perhaps more important, the paternal dominance of The Citizens Reply works because apprentices' infantalization is actually tacit feminization. Through their identification as rebellious "boyes," the apprentices become "as bad [an] example" as the whores against whom they "raile," rendering prostitutes and apprentices symmetrical in their relation to citizens. The question is why. Surely apprentices' past democratic radicalism was sufficient ground on which to vilify them as a class. Why make their political perfidy further contingent upon demonstrating that inasmuch as London's apprentice working class and its whores lay together, little political difference lay between them? To some degree, Restoration Londoners' suspicion that the city's whores and apprentices were secretly colluding every time civil unrest erupted might have been predictable from late Renaissance poor law, which treated apprenticeship as an antidote to vagrancy and was resurrected early on in the Restoration.(31) The poor laws originally had been enacted to mitigate the negative effects that populations displaced by the enclosure of formerly common lands might have had on social stability. But in practice, these statutes were almost the only means by which England controlled prostitution; most streetwalkers subsequently were arrested under charges of indigence, not prostitution. In this context, it is not surprising that Restoration political pornography is peppered with winking descriptions of the Restoration whore as "a great Enemy to all Enclosures, for whatever she has, she makes it common."(32) Charles II's recapitulation of 39 Eliz., cap. 4 and Jac. 1, cap. 7, A Proclamation, For the due Observation of certain Statutes made for the suprressing [sic] of Rogues, Vagabonds, Beggers, and other idle disorderly persons, and for Relief of the Poore (1661), which insists that "not binding ... forth Apprentices" causes "poor childrens' idleness, wandering and wickedness in the whole course of their lives," also functions as a tacit exhortation to use apprenticeship as a disciplinary tool against prostitutes.(33) This gendered dimension to poor-law policy has generally escaped historical notice. Ultimately, such policies as the antivagrancy statute fanned the flames of a fire already fueled by one of Crown polemicists' favorite tropes: the republican whore. Because London's prostitutes never engaged in organized public political action, there is little extant evidence of their political allegiances during the civil wars. Crown polemicists, however, saw this dearth of information as an impediment neither to their general proliferation of antirepublican pornographic satire nor to nearly libelous questions such as those asked in Select City Queries: "Whether Harry Martin [the notorious regicide] loves the Kings Bench Rules better than Aretino's Postures?"(34) Indeed, the equation between whores and republicanism had become such a fixture that even John Garfield's largely apolitical pornography, The Wandring Whore (1660), notes among London's vast repertoire of brothels, the notorious republican bawd "Mrs. Creswel" who "admit[s] of very few but Citizens and Citizens wives," evidently yet unwilling to grant London's freeholders and merchants the pardon they so desperately sought in 1668.(35) The equation of whoring with republicanism became the organizing trope in Restoration political pornographic satires.(36) Citizens' polemical feminization of their apprentices during the bawdy house riots was not then merely an attempt to degrade erstwhile laborers; rather, it was an attempt to emphasize apprentices' republican roots over and above merchants' past disloyalties to the Crown. Legislating the Body Politic Although Restoration London's apprentices and whores found themselves increasingly excoriated as republicanism's lunatic fringe by Crown polemicists, the merchant class fared better with Crown policy. Despite their crucial financial support of Parliament during the civil wars, Restoration merchant guilds, particularly aggregate textile interests, came to play a central role in sustaining the very vision of a patriarchal state whose destruction they had helped finance thirty years earlier. The question is why. The preponderant weight of the textile interests' political past supplied Charles II's government with sufficient reason to cast aside merchant guilds in favor of emerging joint-stock companies, which clothiers bitterly opposed.(36) But England had long predicated its trading strength upon textile production and marketing, which made the textile industry symbolically significant. Clearly, English and Scottish policy were not necessarily the same, though Scottish national investment in textile mercantilism offers some measure of the way England might also have treated cloth and clothing as signifiers of national identity.(38) On 13 September 1681, the Impartial Protestant Mercury reported that "The [Scottish] parliament being this day assembled past an Act for Regulating Apparel, Importing. That after the first day of April next, no person of what Degree of Quality soever, shall wear any Foreign Commodities, viz. Flowered Silk or Stuffs, Silver or Gold Lace, &c. This is done to encourage the Manufacture of this Kingdom."(39) The English Restoration state, like its northern neighbor, had a vested interest in nurturing domestic manufacturing. But that concern was hardly as magnanimous as the Imperial Protestant Mercury's protectionist picture initially suggests. Unlike the Scottish Parliament, the English Parliament was less interested in what clothes bodies wore than in which bodies produced the cloth. Virtually every piece of Restoration protectionist textile law invoked Renaissance poor laws and made it clear that merchants and manufacturers would receive the Crown's protection at the price of their ability to secure social order. Often sanctioning forced labor, protectionist policies put idle hands to work, leaving little time, conventional wisdom held, for rabble-rousing. The same guilds that Crown polemicists scolded so roundly in the popular press for their allegiances to republicanism were, by proclamation and statute, to be the patriarchal state's chief instrument of social and political discipline. In this light, it is less surprising that the Cavalier Parliament, arguably the most virulently antirepublican of all the Restoration parliaments, passed one of the earliest protectionist statutes, An act for prohibiting the exportation of wool, wool-fells, fullers-earth, or any kind of scouring-earth (1660), which proclaims its aim to "better setting on work the poor people and inhabitants of the kingdoms and dominion."(40) In 1663, Parliament augmented its earlier legislative effort, passing An act for encouraging the manufactures of making linen cloth and tapistry, which repeated similar language. Whereas vast quantities of linen cloth, and other manufactures of hemp and flax, and of tapistry-hangings, are daily imported into this kingdom from foreign parts, to the great detriment and impoverishment thereof, the monies and quick-stock of this kingdom being thereby daily greatly exhausted and diminished, and the poor thereof unimployed, while the materials for the making of such hangings are here more plentiful, and better and cheaper than in those places from whence they are imported; and flax and hemp might be had here in great abundance, and very good, if by setting up the manufactures of such commodities as are made thereof, it would be taken off the hands of such as sow and plant the same.(41) In 1670, Parliament further protected textile merchants by passing An act for the taking away the benefit of clergy(42) from such as steal cloth from the rack, and from such as shall steal or imbezil his Majesty's ammunition and stores, a measure designed specifically to discourage many "evil-disposed persons" who "practised the cutting of cloth and other woollen manufactures in the night-time off from the racks or tenters ... and feloniously steal and carry away the same, to the utter undoing and impoverishing of many clothiers, and the great hindrance of the trade of clothing."(43) Many historians agree that the increasing volume of protectionist textile legislation during the late seventeenth century resulted from M.P.s responding to their constituencies and the "clamour from established industries."(44) We might expect, then, that the pattern of Restoration textile policy would emerge only as an eclectic blend of competing interests that do not reflect much coherent political sensibility. Yet the legislative language of the policies is remarkably consistent. And the manifold sources of textile policy underscores a consensus about both the patriarchal state's validity and the validity of subordinating the textile industry to the patriarchal state's political authority. Unlike protectionist legislation passed after the Glorious Revolution (1688), Restoration trade regulation was enforced through a combination of royal proclamation and parliamentary statute, meaning that the textile interests theoretically owed a debt not only to the "government" but also to the monarch as governor.(45) Clothes and the Woman In 1738, Joshua Gee railed against "idle vagrant Persons" and noted that "Clothiers ... have had great Difficulty to get their Spinning, and other Work done ... when Corn has been cheap" as their own economic prosperity disinclined the poor to work, being able to "buy Provision enough with two or three Days Wages to serve them a Week."(46) The great danger of such unrestrained vagrancy, Gee continued, was "the Frights and pernicious Impression, which such horrid Sights have given pregnant Women, (and sometimes even to the disfiguring of Infants in the Womb)."(47) Although published fifty years after the period I consider here, Gee's diatribe makes explicit the Restoration patriarchal state's construction of the well-disciplined textile laborer's body as the economic and social foundation that allows paternal reproduction to continue unfettered. When indigent working-class bodies were in full view, Gee, like many Restoration Crown polemicists, presumed those bodies to be "lewd," "idle," and tacitly pornographic. Only by employing "this Sort of People ... in such profitable Works and Manufactures as would enrich the Kingdom" could working-class minds be turned from "Lewdness to Virtue."(48) And only then might "tender Husbands" cease to worry about threats to their unborn children.(49) Normative heterosexuality suffused and organized textile mercantilism's complex negotiations with the patriarchal state and reached its apotheosis during the protracted Exclusion Crisis (1681-1683). Since Charles II had no legitimate children, Whig republicans pressured the king to exclude the Duke of York (his Catholic brother and heir presumptive) from the line of succession and to name instead his illegitimate but obligingly Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth. Not surprisingly, Crown partisans saw this attempt to nullify the king's "Right of Hereditary Succession," as a back-door effort to change the outcome of the civil wars and render the "Government Elective.(50) Tory political pornography was particularly well-positioned to yoke the paternal theme of the Exclusion Crisis to the already established equation between textile mercantilism, class identity, and civic peace. One of the most vividly suggestive pornographic satires to do so was The Whores Rhetorick (1683).(51) Published during the final year of the Exclusion Crisis, The Whores Rhetorick, allegorizes the political conflict between Tories and Whigs over who would inherit Charles II's throne as a dialogue between Dorothea, the daughter of a dissipated cavalier, and Whig Mother Cresswell who seduces her into the "art" of prostitution.(52) Challenging republican insistence on the citizenry's right to participate in the king's decision, the satire uses clothing to reveal the class-based distinction between aristocratic women and "other" women, illustrating class mobility's threat to the patriarchal state's stability. Unlike Dunton's "Tradesmen's wives," whose sexual degradation occurs because they are on display, Dorothea's aristocratic predilection for whoring initially takes hold because she has been barred from public display. "Obliged to one continued retirement," Dorothea spends her days haunting her father's home--a vestigial remnant of her family's former Royalist glory. In fact, one of the very first things we discover about Dorothea is that "The want of ornaments suitable to her age, sex and quality, were motives strong enough to engage her in this sad and miserable confinement: but alas! this fair Creature's Fate was yet much harder: she wanted even that provision of necessary attire, sufficient to repulse the injuries of heat and cold."(53) Tory ideology's constitution of aristocratic women's civic identity in terms of their public visibility raises obvious questions about how such display differed from that of their illicit sisters and how textile mercantilism would discipline the whore's equally public but democratic body. The difficulty in distinguishing between these two forms of public women may partially explain the lack of statutory response to prostitution in England during the late seventeenth century. But, cultural narratives about court women being court whores notwithstanding, Crown polemicists tended to differentiate between aristocratic women and "common women" on the grounds that whores' bodies failed to validate the patriarchal state's investments in family and wealth. Indeed, prior to her family's financial ruin, Dorothea's ornamentation performed a kind of public labor as it signified to the world at large her wealth, social position, and relative value on the marriage market. Highly self-reflexive, aristocratic display differed from pornographic display because it aimed less at producing women's bodies for public consumption than at reiterating a social semiotic in which women's bodies ciphered family, nobility, and wealth. Aristocratic women's ostentatious and public display thus produced and reaffirmed class distinction, promoting marriages among social equals and securing the prevailing social structure against challenge, whereas prostitutes' display constitutively undercut social structure precisely because it failed to produce familial bonds. Therefore, when Dorothea no longer performs her class-based cultural "work," she becomes a traitor to the nobility and the Crown's political policies by allying herself with Whig whores who displace the patriarchal state with an "amorous Republick."(54) Interestingly; antiprostitution treatises from the 1690s tend to sublimate political anxieties about republicanism into class anxieties. Heightening whores' paternal transgressions, such tracts worry that, far worse than not reproducing at all, the "spurious Brood" of such women would inherit aristocratic estates and that "the Ancient Honour and Gallantry of the English Nobility and Gentry" would be "miserably tarnisht."(55) As Dorothea's body (and not the children her body might bear) becomes the commodity circulated on the market, she becomes increasingly opposed to the patriarchal state and available to the rhetoric of republican ideology that organizes Cresswell's "lessons." Deploying Parliamentarian rhetoric, Mother Cresswell condemns class-exclusive circuits of exchange, such as those in which Dorothea formerly moved, as part of an exclusive economic system that specifically inhibits "universal suffrage." "The niggardly and covetous Miser has been ever condemned by the universal suffrage of all mankind; in that his wealth serves only to feed his own eyes, and is never permitted to see the Sun. The same guilt does a fair Virgin incur, in an equal degree does she injure the publick, who being Mistress of large possessions of Wit and Beauty, does hide those precious talents, and conceals that inestimable Treasure, from whence the principal part of mankind might probably expect such infinite satisfaction."(56) Not surprisingly, the Tory political vision underwriting The Whores Rhetorick constructs Dorothea's descent into the liberalized and democratized marketplace as a fragmentation of her identity, precisely what inhibits the kind of civic work her aristocratic station demands. Her anatomized body parts--"dainty words, sweet Kisses, pretty Smiles, and charming Looks," which are analogous to the haberdasher's store of "Pins, Needles, Laces, Thimbles, and such like stuff"--become her own accessories: an "inestimable Treasure, from whence the principal part of mankind might probably expect such infinite satisfaction."(57) In Cresswell's words, women's refusals to exhibit "those large possessions of Wit and Beauty ... injure the publick."(58) As cunning and politically treacherous as Tory polemicists believed her mercantile counterpart the haberdasher to be, they believed that whores were exponentially more cunning and treacherous. Whores not only manipulated the marketplace by substituting their own bodies for the goods that ordinarily circulated freely and sympathized with republicanism, but their mercantile successes also devastatingly amplified republicanism's social agendas. As Cresswell explains, a whore's job is to hoard wealth and divert the traditional signifiers of aristocratic power from the social economy in which displays of wealth signify exclusive social status. A large stock of knowledge, and the highest point of policy and circumspection is necessary to render a Whore successful in her own art; she must be at least as dexterous in the vending her goods, as the Habberdasher at putting off his small-ware: and if she knew her own wealth, she has in her Shop no less variety than the Habberdasher in his.... she has in her Cabinet, Rubies, Pearls, Emeraulds, and the joy and melody of the World.(59) Aware that Restoration England treated display as a class privilege and a signifier of allegiance to the patriarchal state, Mother Cresswell warns her student that not every "insipid Slut" can put her interest ahead of her pleasure and resist the allure of apparent aristocratic privilege.(60) Upon hearing Dorothea's distaste for aging lovers, whose demands the young ingenue finds troublesome, Cresswell chastises, "For that, Daughter, I must tell you: a Whore is a Whore, but a Whore is not a Woman.... A Whore ought not to think of her own pleasure, but how to gratifie her Bedfellow in his sensitive desires: She must mind her interest not her sport; the Lovers sport, the ruine of his interest and the emptying of his Purse."(61) Most striking about this passage is the way Tory ideology ventriloquizes Whig rhetoric. As a Whig and thus someone with conventicling sympathies or who dissented from the Church of England, Cresswell predictably tutors Dorothea in the "fleeting" benefits of physical pleasure. But as a crypto-Tory mouthpiece, Cresswell articulates a social subtext in which sensual pleasure is both a luxury working women can ill afford and one from which Whig republicanism ideologically bars them. For Tory ideology, it was a cunningly constructed win / win political proposition that outflanked Whig ideology. If mercantile women accepted the equation between labor and enfranchisement, in which textile mercantilism was imbricated, they offered little threat to aristocratic privilege, since, recognizing that the goods they sell were ephemeral, they would eschew public display for themselves and work quietly and industriously behind the scenes. But Tory ideology also benefited even if mercantile women aspired to aristocratic privilege and ostentatious display, since aristocratic exclusivity was incommensurate with Whig republicanism and its democratic sympathies. Like Dorothea, socially ambitious women turned traitors to their class. Either way, England's class-based distribution of power stayed securely in place. Perhaps the most interesting feature of pornographic satires published during the Exclusion Crisis is that they suggest that the class disavowal London's merchants exhibited during the bawdy house riots--their repudiation of their own apprentices--had become fully internalized. Appearing the same year as The Whores Rhetorick was a pornographic satire entitled The London Jilt, or the Politick Whore.(62) Treating bourgeois social ambition as an aristocratic infection and the contagion of idleness, The London Jilt suggests bourgeois culture had moved beyond the protectionist efforts of the early Restoration, which heavily indebted merchant interests to the Crown, and had turned the patriarchal state's deployment of the laboring body to its own ideological advantage. Like Dorothea, the "London jilt" finds herself trapped in a spiral of downward mobility, halted only by her embrace of prostitution. Unlike Dorothea, though, the London jilt suffers from familial ambition and subsequent paternal enervation rather than failing family fortunes and subsequent paternal abandonment. Born in the city, she is the only child of a merchant and his wife, a fact to which she attributes her own decline: "I was brought up in some sort of Libertinism; for to be an only Child, and to be rendered wanton, are two things which cannot be well separated."(63) That the whore understands that her parents' inability to produce siblings who might labor for the family's commonweal signals a tacit repudiation of the patriarchal state as their choice sends her down the path of idleness. But the whore's descent also hinges upon the fact that her father has fallen from being a merchant to an innkeeper. "I was about five years old," the jilt confesses, "when my Father was transformed from a Merchant to a Victualler, and I was sent to School to write and learn French, as also to Dance; and for that purpose, I can assure you, that my Parents strain'd their Purse, but were nevertheless well enough satisfied since it flattered their Ambition."(64) Desperate to regain their prosperity, the parents treat their daughter as a commodity that they can trade to better their social standing and satisfy their ambitions. The London jilt's family narrative dramatizes a social phenomenon about which "Drapers, Mercers, Haberdashers, Grocers, Hosiers, and other Trading House-keepers" had lobbied Parliament in a 1675 broadside.(65) As London burst its medieval limits and engulfed outlying suburban areas, guild companies faced increasing competition from merchants outside the municipal limits who were not obligated to participate in the city's freedom in order to pursue their trade. Collectively, London's merchants complained not only that their competitors operated unencumbered by municipal regulations and obligations, but that they were, "Single, Lusty, and Able of Body"--unencumbered by familial obligations. "The said Hawkers and Pedlars are Computed, and Boast themselves to be neer 18000 Persons ... and do notwithstanding Trade in all places, and go about to all Noblemen's, and Gentlemen's Houses to Vend their Commodities, to the Destruction of the Shop-keepers in the Adjoyning Towns; who are made hereby incapable to discharge their Debts and Obligations to the Merchants and others that Trust them."(66) The jilt's family thus exemplifies not only the cause of merchants' problems but also the effects of those problems. If the growth of suburban mercantilism were to continue, merchants claimed, then "in Vain it will be for Gentlemen, or others to breed up any of their Sons to Trades," and "many Families [would be] Ruined, their Wives and Children Begging in a Deplorable Condition, having had their Bread taken out of their Mouths." Not only do transgressive working-class figures disrupt the proper development and sustenance of family life, they also engage in illicit family reproduction; they "Multiply daily, and have within few Years Trebled their Number." "Such a number of young, lusty, vagrant People, increasing as they do," the broadside fretted, must inevitably become the source of class insurrection, turning "Outlaws" and "bidding defiance to Law and Government." And, indexing the extent to which London's merchants had aligned their interests with those of the patriarchal state, the broadside also disavows merchants' parliamentary alliance during the civil wars and mimics Tory propaganda by attributing this "deplorable" state of current affairs to "our unhappy Domestick War." Rogue merchants have prospered so thoroughly from republicanism's liberal social agenda, the 1675 broadside contends, that they now mimic their social superiors by "tak[ing] Servants, Contract[ing] for Years, some Retaining three or four a piece, which must of a Necessity be as a Canker to Eat out the Life of Trade."(67) The London jilt's family's decision to move to the suburb of Islington clearly made them part of the teeming, undisciplined masses London's merchant guilds feared. But unlike the broadside's rogue suburban merchants, the jilt's family found little profit outside the city walls. Whatever errant understanding caused the merchant to finance his daughter's education by keeping a public house also led him to trust the wrong people. Eventually, the merchant himself emblematizes the consequences of liberating profit from patriarchal authority. "For since we dwelt out of the City," the jilt observes, her father "was become so lean, that nothing was to be seen in all his Body; but Skin and Bone."(68) One Sunday; while his wife and daughter are away at church, the merchant becomes enthralled by acrobats who stop at the inn for refreshment on their journey to London. He begs the acrobats to show him their tricks. The thieves oblige the merchant's request but only to break his legs so they can rob the inn. Plagued by an abusive wife who refuses to forgive her husband his poor judgment, the merchant never recovers, effectively abdicating his "natural" authority over his family. Narrating her family's disintegration, the whore observes, "And, indeed, I had as much Commiseration for the poor Man, as a Child can have for a Father, and though I was still young, I cursed the Unnatural Cruelty of my Mother, who would hardly suffer me to speak to him, and threatened me very severely when she saw that I pittyed him, so much had hatred bastardized all Love and Humanity."(69) In some ways, the satire suggests that the family's obsessive desire for profit precipitates the mother's and daughter's fall into prostitution. But the jilt's family is less interested in profit for profit's sake than in wealth as a sign of social station. Thus when the inn begins to fail after the merchant's death, mother and daughter respond by selling their property in order to create the illusion of station, which will allow them to "receive honourably a Man of Quality and Merit."(70) But this strategy is only a stopgap, as "Profits [inevitably] grew less and less."(71) The house had a finite quantity of "goods," and in the end the mother must go to work and "play with her Buttocks"(72) in order to keep herself and her daughter from fulfilling the 1675 broadside's prediction that the suburban proliferation of rogue merchants would send "Wives and Children Begging ... having had bread taken out of their mouths."(73) It is only a matter of time before Dorothea becomes a whore, wooed only by the "Merchants Servants" and "Cash-Keepers," whom the city merchants had complained about--a far cry from the class of suitors to which her parents had aspired.(74) The mother turns from selling herself to selling her daughter and encourages her daughter's degraded mercantilism by counseling that "those old Rusty blades who did it only once in twenty-four hours, were the best, and gave the most Money."(75) In 1711, John Gwillim continued the polemical argument in favor of textile mercantilism's subordination to patriarchal authority in a satire entitled The London Bawd: With Her Character and Life. Discovering the Various and Subtile Intrigues of Lewd Women, in which the title character spins numerous yarns of her exploits first as a whore and then as a bawd.(76) Consistent with The Whores Rhetorick and The London Jilt, The London Bawd links its protagonist's prostitution to mercantile support of republicanism during the civil wars. An old bawd, the whore explains, "hates forty One as much as an old Cavalier, for at that Age she was forced to leave off Whoring, and turn Bawd."(77) And like the London jilt, this whore falls upon hard times with the Stuart Restoration because her father, who is a "Haberdasher of small Wares," had fatally misaligned himself with Parliament "in opposition to the King, and thinking that Charles Stuart (as they then called Charles the Second) would never be Restored, [he] laid out his Mony in Purchasing Crown Lands."(78) Repeating almost exactly the London jilt's father's errors, the London bawd's father proves especially inept at handling his daughter's "future." "Whilst he lived," she acknowledges, "he gave me all that Education that the most Wealthy Citizens bestow upon their Daughters, he keeping me at Board at Hackney-School. And when grown to Marriagable Years I wanted not for store of Sweet-hearts, and some of them of very good Estates; and yet my Father thought none good enough."(79) Through such pornographic satires as The London Bawd and The London Jilt, we begin to see why Dunton treats cross-dressing tradesmen's wives with such vitriol. The London Bawd's contention that the haberdasher's class ambition precipitated his daughter's fall into prostitution has a dark subtext. As early as the bawdy house riots, there is evidence to suggest that Crown partisans imbued the marketplace generally, and work more specifically, with a political dualism. Work and workers who were orderly, well-regulated, industrious, and, most important, out of sight were a boon to the patriarchal state. But work and workers who violated established institutions of social order--class, guilds, or city walls--whose bodies were persistently in the public eye, flagrantly and, at times, seditiously transgressed patriarchal state authority. Pornographic satires' relegations of republican daughters to the underworld of the laissez-faire marketplace is the price of textile mercantilism's political reconciliation with the patriarchal state. And textile mercantilism's negotiations with the Stuart patriarchal state over merchants' errant alliance with republicanism make the bodies of tradesmen's wives a highly contested site of national identity. These women's inadvertent self-commodifications challenge the marketplace's ability to discipline social and political order and suggests that merchants may not, after all, have been capable of securing mercantilism against republican women's insurgency. In the context of these political renegotiations, the whore becomes what literary scholar Laura Mandell characterizes as the degraded purveyor of capitalist production.(80) One final source worth considering in early modern England's deployment of the prostitute as an emblem of degraded capitalism and check on class mobility is Daniel Defoe's Roxana. Ordinarily read as one of Defoe's more sympathetic forays into the genre of female criminal biography--an apology for women whose poverty forces them into a life of crime--Roxana, like the political pornographic satires on which it draws, works to emphasize the democratic dangers of women to English mercantilism and conservative politics. It is probably no accident that Defoe's narrative takes the ideological shape it does since Defoe and Dunton were childhood friends and, during his early career, Defoe briefly contributed to Dunton's Athenian Mercury.(81) Moreover, given the frequency with which Roxana replicates crucial episodes from the tracts I have examined here, it seems probable that Defoe counted on his readers recognizing Roxana as representative of Dorothea, the London jilt, and the London bawd, and seeing in Roxana's transgressive accumulation of wealth the same political valences attached to earlier pornographies.(82) Roxana's family were French Huguenot emigres whom Louis XIV expelled in 1683. The Huguenots not only exacerbated England's anxiety about the relationship between idleness and civic unrest, they also threatened the clothiers' monopoly by setting up competing textile manufactories. Indeed, Defoe himself later served as an apologist for the clothiers.(83) The Huguenots were mostly highly skilled artisans, and Roxana is quick to point out that her father "was far from applying to the rest of our Nation that were here, for Countenance and Relief," as though she were answering London merchants' 1675 complaint that rogue suburban merchants "are no Real Natives, but most of another Nation; whose great Encouragements are such, that they daily Flock from their own Country into Ours, only to follow this Trade."(84) "Having fled early, while it was easie to secure their Effects," Roxana insists that her parents had "remitted considerable Sums of Money" prior to their emigration.(85) Nevertheless, like so many other young girls led into a life of iniquity, her parents' industry and prudence stops at their daughter's wedding, and Roxana marries a brewer--"this Thing call'd a Husband" and the "Foundation" of her "Ruin."(86) Roxana's husband abandons her to circumstances uncannily similar to those of the London jilt's mother. Defoe's heroine first sells off all her household possessions and, at her maid's behest, learns to restock her home with signs of prosperity, trading sex for "a Morsel of Bread" and "Deliverance" from the "Devil of Poverty and Distress," and finally embarking on a course of stupendous financial acquisition.(87) But the episode that most centrally characterizes Roxana's life of vice, by her own admission, is the episode with the Turkish costume. Similar to the wives of Dunton's tradesmen, Roxana signifies her availability to the king, and the aristocratic order over which he presides, through her costume. Epitomizing Roxana's ill-gotten gains, her Turkish costume symbolizes the absence of patriarchal authority--the "Sacrifice" of England's "Glory, Trade, and Naval Strength," to a "Prince's Impure Pleasures"--of which Charles II's court so frequently stood accused in the late seventeenth century.(88) However, Defoe's indictment of Charles II's government is not, as it might seem, a repudiation of the patriarchal state. Like her Restoration counterparts, Roxana is quintessentially and explicitly a Whig whose voracious capitalist accumulation signifies the illicit wages of patriarchal absence and republican insurgency. On virtually every front, Roxana disavows the virtues of domestic production, since she accumulates most of her wealth on the continent, which geopolitically literalizes her rejection of king and country. Moreover, Roxana parlays her continental acquisitions into even greater wealth under the guidance of Sir Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor of London (1679-1680), whose wife was one of Cresswell's well-known cronies. Interestingly, Clayton was instrumental in several late-seventeenth-century plans to put London's indigents to work for the textile industry.(89) Roxana's Turkish costume, thus functions as the focal point of a political / economic allegory that once again emphasizes the mutually dependent relationship between healthy mercantilism and a healthy patriarchal state. Defoe implies that Whig interests, unchecked by strong patriarchal state authority, not only allow foreign goods unimpeded access to English consumers (represented in the novel by the court), but that those interests introduce to English markets an economic system predicated on enslavement. Crowing about her business acumen, Roxana proclaims that the costume with which she seduces the king was an unusually good buy having cost her "about sixty Pistoles in Italy, but cost much more in the country from whence it came."(90) Clothes are so important to Defoe's political/economic allegory that Roxana's penitence for her life of sin comes only when she puts on the demure costume of a Quaker. In Defoe's eyes, clothes really do make the woman, and the domesticity of the Quaker costume predictably pulls Roxana back into the domestic sphere, where she begins to undergo punishment for her sexual transgressions against the patriarchal order she had so flagrantly disregarded. Initially, of course, Roxana adopts the Quaker costume as a disguise that she hopes will hide her identity from her daughter, the youngest child of Roxana's first marriage to the brewer. Roxana rationalizes the masquerade on the grounds that her daughter's discovery of her infamous mother would only besmirch the girl's good name. Ironically, it is because the Quaker costume forces Roxana to play the virtuous woman that she comes to a grim reckoning with her initial decision to abandon her children and become the jeweler's mistress. For with that decision came Roxana's recognition that she could never reveal her identity to her children. Tellingly, it is the costume itself--a conscious and sober disavowal of aristocratic largesse--that leaves the last clear impression on Roxana's readers, as her body and her identity recede further and further into the narrative's background. Finally; leaving her readers with a nearly inchoate testimony, Roxana acknowledges that she has lost virtually all her fortune, divested herself of her maid, and become repentant, weakly assuring her readers that "my Repentance seem'd to be only the Consequence of my Misery; as my Misery was of my Crime."(91) Did late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England entertain "the fantasy of a universal collaboration in the dressing of the female body"?(92) Certainly. And was that fantasy misogynist? Almost without a doubt. But misogyny, endemic though it sometimes may be, is also a highly strategic social sensibility. And the strategy that directs late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century England's misogynist fantasy of disciplinary haberdashery, is, in the final analysis, highly political. John Dunton's priggish disdain for ostentatious dress and his dour disapproval of illicit sexuality, which he assumes goes hand in glove with such display; ultimately is a repudiation of mercantilism's republican past. Constructed through the confluence of antirepublican propaganda and antipoverty legislation, the Restoration prostitute served as mercantilism's dark underside the--illicit face of democratic, working-class identity. And the mercantile bourgeoisie's ability to keep her in check, either demurely clothed as in Roxana's case or industriously laboring in workhouses, functioned as a convincing argument that England's emergent bourgeoisie deserved access to political power because it, too, could mount the patriarchal defenses of social order that had formerly been the exclusive province of the patriarchal state. NOTES (1) John Dunton, The Nightwalker: or, Evening Rambles in search After Lewd Women, With the conferences Held with Them, Etc. To Be publish'd Monthly, `Till a Discovery be made of all the chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet (1696). Dunton's work was part of the "reformation of manners movement of the late seventeenth century. See also Robert 15. Shoemaker, "Reforming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690-1738," in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750, ed. Lee Davison et al. (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 99-120. (2) Dunton, Nightwalker, October 1696, 10, 11. (3) Ibid., 11. (4) John Gwillim, The London Bawd: With Her Character and Life. Discovering the Various and Subtile Intrigues of Lewd Women, 4th ed. (London, 1711), 7. Stanley Nash speculates that the satire was probably published first during the 1680s or 1690s. Only the fourth edition from 1711 remains. Stanley Nash, Prostitution in Great Britain, 1485-1901: An Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 13. (5) The Character of a Town-Miss (London, 1680), 21. (6) There has been some debate about the accuracy and validity of using "pornography" to describe seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts that address England's complex sexual underworld. As a term, "pornography" did not emerge in English until the 1830s, and because most English sexual satire lacks the scopophilic dimension modern readers take to be a conventional feature of pornography, these texts do not appear to be "pornographic." Nonetheless, because pornography literally means literature about prostitutes, these texts are pornographic. For more on pornography's provenance, see Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800," in Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 9-45. For more on early modern English pornography, see David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England (New York: University Books, 1965); and Nash, Prostitution in Great Britain. See also Laura Mandell, "Bawds and Merchants: Engendering Capitalist Desires," ELH 59 (1992): 107-23. (7) Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 116. (8) Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). (9) Hunt, "Introduction," 25. Pietro Aretino's Postures (1524) are a series of engraved images illustrating various sexual positions and are often attached to his Sonneti Lussuriosi (1527). For more on this work, see Paula Findlan, "Humanism, Politics, and Pornography," in Invention of Pornography, 49-123. (10) Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene, and Bawdy Works Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979); and Susan Wiseman, "`Adam, the Father of All Flesh': Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War," Prose Studies 14, no. 3 (1991): 134-57. (11) From the Stuart Restoration in 1660 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the patriarchal state was a specific conceptual and political entity. Patriarchalism refers to the specific doctrine of monarchical authoritarianism developed predominantly under early Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I. Its conceptualization of power hinges upon both a historical account of patriarchal political power and an anthropological account of patriarchal social structure. For more on Stuart patriarchalism and its permutations during the civil wars and Restoration, see Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann E Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism and Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975); J. E Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Robert Ashton, Reformation and Revolution, 1558-1660 (London: Paladin Books, 1984). (12) Republicanism denotes a body of political thought that looks to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome as well as modern Italian city-states. Generally, seventeenth-century English republicanism opposed "the expansion of the executive, by corruption, by the emasculation of parliamentary independence, and ... by the maintenance of a standing army." Blair Wooden, "English Republicanism," in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 443-75, esp. 444. For more on seventeenth-century republicanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1967). Coll. Henry Marten's Familiar Letters to His Lady of Delight. Also Her kinde Returnes. With His Rivall R. Pettingalls Heroicall Epistles (London, 1662), quotation on 92. (13) London Bawd, 119. The pornographic satire, Select City Queries: Discovering several Cheats, Abuses and Subtilties of the city Bawds, Whores, and Trapanners (London, 1660), for instance, contains an extensive litany of textile merchants accused both of whoring and cavorting with republicans. (14) For an alternative view of the relationship between class and cross-dressing, see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). There are some historical precedents for the convergence of these two discourses as tools of social order. Historian Ruth Mazo Karras, for example, notes that medieval culture often resorted to sumptuary laws as a means to regulate whores' commercial activity. A late-fourteenth-century statute "prohibit[ed] whores from dressing like `good and noble dames and damsels.'" See Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21. And as historian Ian Archer argues, haberdashers' emergence as a commercial force is largely attributable to "the increased spending power of labourers and artisans in the later fourteenth century." The Crown responded to this increase with sumptuary laws similar to those that regulated whores. See Ian Archer, The History of the Haberdashers' Company (Sussex, England: Phillimore & Co., 1991), 5. (15) Defining England's merchant class during this period is a somewhat perilous proposition since in practice merchant activities often involved a wide spectrum of English society, including "landowners, gentlewomen, widows, and clergymen." For more on this, see Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 30-33. (16) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964). (17) Interestingly, historian Margaret Davies's research on seventeenth-century apprenticeship documents an upsurge in the rate of prosecution for violation of the "Seven-Year Term" of the Statute of Artificers (1563) during the period just before the first civil war, suggesting, perhaps, a heightened anxiety about both masters and apprentices adhering to conventions and statutory regulations set out for practicing a trade or craft. See Margaret Gay Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship: A Study in Applied Mercantilism, 1563-1642 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); and Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300-1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976). (18) Archer, History of the Haberdashers' Company, 89. (19) For more on apprentices' involvement with the radical Leveller movement, see H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 32-45, 86-120; and David Wootten, "Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution," in Cambridge History of Political Thought, 412-42. (20) Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 32-45. (21) Hill speculates that the grandees may have enabled Charles I's escape from capture at the end of 1647 in order to create a "crisis" that would make consideration of the agreement impossible. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 54. (22) The Remonstrance of the Apprentices In and about London (London, 1659). (23) Although clearly an important event in the aggregate textile industry's changing sociopolitical construction, the 1675 weaver's riot lacks the republican overtones so evident in the Messenger riots. For more on the weavers' riot, see Richard M. Dunn, "The London Weavers' Riot of 1675," Guildhall Studies in London History 1, no. 1 (1973): 13-23. (24) Tim Harris cites this admittedly exaggerated figure in "The Bawdy House Riots of 1668," Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (1986): 537-56. (25) At the trial's conclusion, the London Gazette reported, "to the just vindication of the City, that neither persons above-named nor any other that were apprehended upon the said Tumult were found to be Apprentices as was given out, but some idle persons, many of them nursed in the late rebellion, too readily embracing any opportunity of making their own advantages to the disturbance of the peace, and injury of others." London Gazette, 2-6 April 1668, n.p. The Complete Record of State Trials and Proceedings for High-Treason, and other crimes and Misdemeanors. From the Reign of King Richard II to the Reign of King George II (London, 1742), 3:588. (26) Complete Record of State Trials and Proceedings for High-Treason, 3:588. (27) Two of the five pornographic pamphlets, The poor-whores petition. To the most splendid, illustrious, serene and eminent lady of pleasure, the countess of Castlemayne (1668) and The Gracious Answer of the most illustrious lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlem--To the Poor-Whores Petition (1668), satirize prostitutes victimized by the riots, suggesting that London's whores were minions of Charles II's Catholic mistress, Barbara Villiers. (28) The Citizens Reply to the Whores Petition and Prentices Answer (1668). (29) Ibid. (30) I use the term "homosocial" here as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick does to mean the hierarchical social bonds between men, which, Sedgwick also contends, are often forged over the "sexually discredited body of a woman." Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 156. (31) For more on the Crown's regulation of apprenticeship as an instrument of social control, see Davies, Enforcement of English Apprenticeship. (32) London Bawd, 4. (33) 12 Car. 2, cap. 37. (34) Select Queries, pt. 1 (London, 1660), 3. (35) John Garfield, The Wandring Whore, pt. 1 (London, 1660), 10. , (36) See, for example, Coll. Henry Marten's Familiar Letters to His Lady of Delight, The Whores Petition to the London Prentices (1668), The Gracious Answer of the most illustrious lady of Pleasure, the Countess of Castlem--To the Poor-Whores Petition, The Loyal Feast (1682), An Answer to the Whiggish Poem on the Loyal Apprentices Feast (1682), The Politick Whore (1682), The London Jilt, or the Politick Whore: Shewing the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure Make Use of for the Intreaguing and Decoying of Men, Interwoven with Several Pleasant Stories of the Misses Ingenious Performances (London, 1683), The Whores Rhetorick (1683; facsimile reprint, ed. James R. Irvine and G. Jack Gravlee, New York: Scholars' facsimiles and Reprints, 1979), and London Bawd. (37) See Charles Wilson, England's Apprenticeship, 1603-1763 (New York: Longmans, 1984). (38) England and Scotland maintained separate parliaments at this point, but the two realms were united under the Stuart Crown. (39) Impartial Protestant Mercury, 13 September 1681, n.p. (40) 12 Car. 2, cap. 32. (41) 15 Car. 2, cap. 15. (42) Benefit of clergy was a legal fiction extended initially to clergymen and then to nearly anyone convicted of a noncapital felony, whereby, "if a convict could prove that he was a clerk, he would be handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities to be dealt with as they saw fit.... In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the fiction was cleared of ecclesiastical impediments which had become meaningless, and `benefit of clergy' was extended to illiterate peers and women. A short term of imprisonment was substituted for delivery of the `clerk' to the bishop." J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1971), 281-82. The Crown's rendering of the theft of raw textile materials nonclergiable and thus a capital offense indexes the state's heightened ideological and economic investment in the textile interests during this period. (43) 22 Car. 2, cap. 5. (44) Patrick O'Brien, Trevor Griffiths, and Philip Hunt, "Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English Cotton Textile Industry, 1660-1774," Economic History Review 44, no. 3 (1991): 395-423, quotation on 398. See also Tim Keirn, "Parliament, Legislation, and the Regulation of English Textile Industries, 1689-1714," in Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 1-24. (45) For more on this shift in legislative procedure, see O'Brien, Griffiths, and Hunt, "Political Components of the Industrial Revolution"; and J. P. Cooper, "Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in Seventeenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5, no. 20 (1970): 73-99. (46) Joshua Gee, The Trade and Navigation of Great-Britain Considered (London, 1738), 54-55, 56. (47) Ibid., 63. (48) Ibid., 56. (49) Ibid. (50) Roger L'Estrange, A Word concerning Libels and Libellers (London, 1681), 4-5. (51) Whores Rhetorick. David Foxon notes that John Wickens, who printed The Whores Rhetorick, was convicted at the 1683 Guildhall sessions, which, as Tim Harris has documented, were heavily dominated by Whigs during this period. Combined with the satire's subject and its references to contemporary politics, not to mention Creswell's notorious Whig partisanship, Wickens's conviction suggests that his satire was Tory propaganda. See Foxon, Libertine Literature in England; and Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). (52) Although sheltered from the world, Dorothea recognizes Creswell. After the bawd admits that she "had for many years kept in Moor-Fields [a brothel], to the joy, comfort, and support of the whole amorous Republick," Dorothea exclaims, "Ah Madam! ... how cruel have you been in concealing thus long your name." Whores Rhetorick, 26. (53) Ibid., 1-2. (54) Ibid., 26. (55) Dunton, Nightwalker, September 1696, n.p. (56) Whores Rhetorick, 14. (57) Ibid. (58) Ibid. (59) Ibid., 38. (60) Ibid. (61) Ibid., 144. (62) London Jilt, 2. (63) Ibid. (64) Ibid. (65) Reasons Humbly Offered to the Consideration of the High Court of Parliament By The Drapers, Mercers, Haberdashers, Grocers, Hosiers, and other Trading Housekeepers of this Nation, of the great Decay of their Trades (London, 1675). (66) Ibid. (67) Ibid. (68) London Jilt, 13. (69) Ibid. (70) Ibid., 20. (71) Ibid. (72) Ibid. (73) Reasons Humbly Offered. (74) London Jilt, 24. (75) Ibid., 24-25. (76) London Bawd. (77) London Bawd, 4. (78) Ibid., 119-20. (79) Ibid., 119. (80) Mandell, "Bawds and Merchants." (81) Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: A Life (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 178-80. (82) For a different perspective on the intersection of costume and mercantilism in Roxana, see Ann Louise Kibbey, "Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana," PMLA 110 (1995): 1023-34. (83) See Brown, Ends of Empire. (84) Daniel Defoe, Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress or a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess de Winteselsheim in Germany Being the Person known by the name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II, ed. Jane Jack (1724; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5. Reasons Humbly Offered. (85) Defoe, Roxana, 5. (86) Ibid., 7. (87) Ibid., 38. (88) Dunton, Nightwalker, September 1696. (89) Stephen Macfarlane, "Social Policy and the Poor in the Later Seventeenth Century," in Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 252-77. (90) Defoe, Roxana, 174. (91) Ibid., 33 (92) Brown, Ends of Empire, 116.3 |
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