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Census Lookups General Lookups => Census Lookup and Resource Requests => Census and Resource Discussion => Completed Census Requests => Topic started by: Adamb on Thursday 20 September 12 15:35 BST (UK)
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I have found out a bit about the grim life of the watercress sellers in Victorian London. A member of my family was one circa 1914.
But, has anyone ever heard that watercress seller might be a euphemism for prostitute? My wife is sure she's come across that somewhere in her reading, but I'm not sure!
Adam
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I have never come across Watercress Seller as a euphemism for Prostitute.
According to Charles Booth, in almost all cases prostitution was not seen as a permanent way of life. To some it was a temporary or occasional employment, as Booth described it for East End tailoresses or dressmakers 'who return to their trade in busy times'. Though disease and mortality would overtake the unfortunate, it was a less hazardous profession than many of its alternatives.
Stan
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Maybe just a case of multi-tasking ;). I've looked up Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, but it is not there. Maybe you should be censoring a certain person's reading material :o
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Actress, laundrywoman, lady of no occupation are all commonly used euphemisms for prostitute. Modern terms include "Lady of the night" and one I particularly like "Pavement princess".
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Ok thanks everyone, I'll leave it at that! I do know that several of my ancestors must have lived off their wits eg when husband or partner died and before the next one came along. I have two bigamist husbands and certainly two common-law marriages in my ancestry, nothing surprises me any more. I'm just amazed at how the women managed to cope - they have my full admiration.
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and certainly two common-law marriages in my ancestry
Just to point out that in England and Wales there is no such thing as "common law marriage" (in spite of what you sometimes see in the media), whereby unmarried persons who live together and behave as if they were married are treated as man and wife. It has not been possible to enter into an informal marriage in this country before and since the passage of Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753.
There is a difference between using the term 'common law wife' and a 'common law marriage.' A 'common law wife' may be a wife in fact but in law, common or otherwise, she has no such status. So a child of an unmarried, co-habiting couple is illegitimate.
Stan
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Whilst there is no such thing as a common law marriage; when I worked as a personal officer over 50 years ago the staff records of people in such unions were endorsed CLU acronym for Common Law Union.
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As an additional point to those above, there wasn't even such a thing as common law marriage before the 1753 Act - I'd highly recommend "Marriage Law for Genealogists" by Professor Rebecca Probert, who's the world's leading authority on the history of marriage laws and practices. She's also written several academic articles on the law prior to 1753, and it's clearly one of her big bugbears that the idea that CLM existed before March 1754 has become the prevailing misunderstanding in the past few years. In actual fact, the only way of marrying before the 1753 Act was before an Anglican clergyman, and her research shows that only a vanishingly small number of couples lived together as husband and wife without going through a formal Anglican ceremony - her book's fascinating reading - highly recommended.
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I don't think that saying " It has not been possible to enter into an informal marriage in this country since the passage of Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753" means that there were such things as 'common law marriages' before then, it is that the Act was an Act for the better preventing of clandestine Marriages, and laid down in law the legal requirements for marriage.
Stan
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Fair point - I must have read your previous post too quickly and thought it had said "It has not been possible to enter into a common law marriage in this country since the passage of Lord Hardwicke's Act in 1753" instead of "informal marriage", as you wrote. My mistake. I'd go on from there, though, to say that there was similarly no legal possibility or de facto practice of informal marriage, as normally loosely defined these days (for example, for 'informal' read 'bare exchange of consent') before the 1753 Act.
To back that up, I'd note that a "clandestine" marriage as understood before the Act was a very specific thing, ie a marriage that took place before an Anglican clergyman but without complying with all the requirements of the canon law (during the canonical hours, with banns, in the parish church of one of the parties etc). The Act laid down in statute law the requirements, and gave them teeth, but every single element required under the Act had already existed in canon law for centuries. Clandestine marriage before the Act was still perfectly valid in law, but could attract the censure of the church courts; after the Act, the idea of "clandestinity" came to be more associated with secrecy or evasive elopement. Clandestine marriage was never informal, but instead perfectly valid but outside the church's strict requirements. Most clandestine marriages were only clandestine in that they took place in the "wrong" parish, and it was in fact the popularity of the Fleet (where every marriage was by definition clandestine) which was the direct stimulus behind the Clandestine Marriages Act.
Informal marriage is, IMHO, a different kettle of fish: The phrase "informal marriage" is itself a later concoction - it didn't occur in the C18th - and the practices nowadays generally associated with the phrase (eg "broomsticks", "handfasting", "common-law" arrangements) didn't exist.
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There is no doubt that marriage laws are complex, you can download the 1873 book “The marriage Law of England” which has about 480 pages to cover the subject at that time. http://archive.org/details/marriagelawengl00hammgoog
Stan
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and her research shows that only a vanishingly small number of couples lived together as husband and wife without going through a formal Anglican ceremony - her book's fascinating reading - highly recommended.
Yet a project I have been involved in "Dorset Bastards" shows that in the period where a fairly complete set of parish registers survives usually from c1700-1837, the percentage of illegitimate births in Dorset (recorded as base born ) rises consistently from around 5% to around 15% by the end of the period. I don't call either of these percentages "vanishingly small"
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Those figures strike me as a little high compared to other national data on illegitimate births for 1700-1837 (which would, roughly and from memory, start at around 2% and rise to between 5% and 10%). A more important point I'd make is that I did say "a vanishingly small number of couples lived together as husband and wife without going through a formal Anglican ceremony", not that there were a vanishingly small number of illegitimate births, which I accept wouldn't be true. There's a stark difference throughout that period (and in fact all the way through to the late C20th) between illegitimate births per se and illegitimate births to a woman who was living in an ongoing non-marital relationship with the father, ie what we'd call 'cohabiting' today.
The reason I've been looking through posts on various genealogical forums concerning marriage laws and practices is that I'm the publisher of Professor Rebecca Probert's latest book, Marriage Law for Genealogists, which she wrote because of the ubiquity of mistakes as to the law and practices in previous centuries (especially before 1754) in existing guides for family historians. Rebecca has, as it happens, done a number of large, detailed cohort studies on illegitimacy and the prevalence of cohabitation for two other books she's written (Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Legal Treatment of Cohabitation, 1600-2010: From Fornicators to Family (CUP, 1012)). She's found, consistently, that such women tended to bear a single illegitimate child and then remain single thereafter. I don't have a copy of her relevant articles or these two titles to hand, but my recollection is of a study of Northamptonshire illegitimacies for the same kind of timeframe, in which the percentage of women bearing an illegitimate child to the same father (as an indication of an ongoing, sexual, non-marital relationship) was something in the order of 0.1-0.5% of illegitimate (not total) births. That's what I'd mean by "vanishingly small".
Of course, there's always the argument that some couples had illegitimate children because they weren't validly married, even though they were living in a stable, sexual relationship, for example when one was already married to somebody else, but I think these are of a different nature to couples who set up home unmarried although able to marry if they wished. I didn't make that point in the previous post, admittedly, but Rebecca's research nevertheless indicates that these couples were for the most part anxious to be seen to be married, even committing bigamy rather than be known to be "cohabiting" (not a contemporary term in this usage).
You clearly know a lot about this area, Stan, and the Dorset Bastards study sounds very interesting. It might be that Rebecca has already come across it, but I myself haven't, I don't think, read the name anywhere in her research. Do you have any link I could pass on to Rebecca, so she can take a look at the findings? I know she'd be very interested.
Liam
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Actually, Stan, I'll revise that previous claim up slightly, having pored over Rebecca's Marriage Law & Practice in the Long C18th (pp114-5 to be exact) - the cohort was of all illegitimate children in all Northants baptism registers between 1730 and 1751 (including all references to bastard, base, spurious, natural, reputed, misbegotten etc etc), a total of 847 births. Of these, in 221 cases both parents' names were recorded, and of these just 6 pairings (2.7% of the 'both parents named' sub-cohort and 0.7% of the illegitimacy cohort) went on to bring a subsequent illegitimate child to be baptised. This is just one of the various studies Rebecca has done to try to gain an idea of the incidence of ongoing, non-marital sexual relationships across the period.
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Actually, Stan,
The post was by Redroger, not me.
Stan
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I'm really not on the ball right now, it appears - I'll admit I'm all but a complete novice when it comes to using web forums, and I hadn't even spotted that there are names on the left hand side, if you can believe it - I was simply going on a name I'd spotted at the foot of a previous post. Sorry!
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Yet a project I have been involved in "Dorset Bastards" shows that in the period where a fairly complete set of parish registers survives usually from c1700-1837, the percentage of illegitimate births in Dorset (recorded as base born ) rises consistently from around 5% to around 15% by the end of the period. I don't call either of these percentages "vanishingly small"
Redroger - making the same point I mistakenly addressed to Stan yesterday, do you have any link or info on the Dorset Bastards project I could pass on to Rebecca, so she can take a look at the findings? I know she'd be very interested.
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I'm really not on the ball right now, it appears - I'll admit I'm all but a complete novice when it comes to using web forums, and I hadn't even spotted that there are names on the left hand side, if you can believe it - I was simply going on a name I'd spotted at the foot of a previous post. Sorry!
It does complicate thing when posters do not put a name at the end
Stan
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(Polite cough) - um, I'm the one who started the thread re water-cress sellers!
I think what has been said is very interesting and wonder if it wouldn't be a very good idea to copy these posts under a new heading, eg Marriage Laws or the like, so as to bring these important matters to a wider audience.
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I heartily agree that it'd be nice to have a forum for questions regarding the laws (and practices) relating to marriage, but then I'm the publisher of the definitive guide to the marriage laws and practices of England and Wales from 1600 onwards, aimed squarely at the kind of questions genealogists come across, so I'm utterly biased! ;)
Adamb - it's not at all uncommon to find examples of bigamy before the early 1970s, when divorce was harder, rarer, and more socially unacceptable than today, but one point I'd note is that such people were nevertheless prepared to marry illegally rather than openly cohabit (in the current sense of the word) - bigamy has today become a rare crime, as nobody turns a hair at a couple living together unmarried. I assume that what you mean by "common law marriages" in your ancestry are examples of couples living together in a stable and enduring relationship out of wedlock? Do you know for sure that this was the case, or is this an assumption based upon not having found a marriage? Have you perhaps found that one was already married to a third party (and was presumably unwilling to commit bigamy)?
As to watercress sellers and prostitution - as a suggestion, you might like to try searching online full text historic databases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, or The Times Online for examples of the use of the phrase. I know Professor Probert hasn't come across this phrase in all her research. An interesting observation here might be that Victorian and early C20th middle class writers and journalists were very quick to portray the working classes as living depraved and immoral lives: Henry Mayhew, for example, is always quoted these days as having discovered that more than 90% of London's Victorian street costermongers lived together unmarried. In fact, he was thoroughly condemned almost straight away by a public meeting of London street-sellers, who were outraged at what they called "a downright falsehood", and who pointed out that Mayhew had paid his (very disreputable, and in fact drunken) informants to tell him what he wanted to hear. They challenged him to appear at a meeting to substantiate his claims, but he refused to attend. Yes, prostitution was rife, but being a prostitute by necessity at times in one's life didn't equate to not being married, which was the norm throughout the period.
Liam
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Adamb - an extra observation on watercress sellers! I've had a look at C18th Collections Online and the British Library's British Newspapers 1600-1900 full text database, and I can't find any indication of the term being used derogatorily. There's only one instance of it in the C18th, and that's a song called The Watercress Girl in a book titled The British Songster (1800). It's very quaint, pretty, and "rural idyll". As to newspapers, there are 80+ uses of the phrase, but a quick look through them doesn't bring up anything prostitute-y. They do frequently appear, though, in mid-to-late Victorian police reports linked to deaths through poverty, alcoholism, etc, and in cases where they've been charged with petty theft, disorderly behaviour etc, so it's reasonable to assume that by that time it was a lowly and impoverished job. Hope that casts some light on it!
Liam
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Thanks, Liam that's a help. I do know my gt-aunt was in Holloway in 1911 for a spell and hope to find out why in October (maybe a suffragette - who knows?) when I get to England for a few days - there are surviving records in the LMA.
regards
Adam
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I'd concur it's not likely to be a general term for a prostitue. My 4x Great Grandmother Ann Gray is listed as one on the 1841 census. She was 65 years old at the time living with her married daughter and son in law. Admittedly they were poor but I doubt she was practising that trade on the side at that age. ;) With all professions though, they could always be practising as a sideline when times got tough.
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I can't possibly let anyone think that their ancestor did not make a good living from selling watercress. This herb is packed with iron and other goodies and even during WWII when food was scarce watercress ensured children got a supply of iron, etc. There's a long growing season and as any child knows you can grow simple mustard & cress seeds on a damp cloth all year round, and I know water cress can be grown outside over winter... unlike most of what's in my garden
This website shows pictures of men working in the massive fields of watercress. Also shown is an outline of another watercress seller...
http://watercress.co.uk/about/historical-facts/
<<One watercress seller who made good was Eliza James, who as a child of five hawked wild bunches of watercress around factories in Birmingham, but who later earned the nickname of “The Watercress Queen” because of her near monopoly on the London watercress restaurant and hotel trade. She was reputed to be the biggest owner of watercress farms anywhere in the world, creating vast watercress beds at Mitcham and Beddington in Surrey and at Warnford, Overton and Hurstbourne Priors in Hampshire. But despite her wealth, she still turned up every morning to work her stall at Covent Garden Market which she had been running for over 50 years, arriving every day on a watercress cart. Reporting on her death in 1927, the Daily Mirror described her life as “one of the most wonderful romances of business London has ever known”.
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I understand that to grow watercress needs pure water; hence it is a guide to the purity of water supply.