Madame Restell

CHAPTER ONE

SHE WAS NOT FRENCH.

And she was not even called Madame Restell—until much later.

The heroine of our tale entered this world in 1811 as Ann Trow. The “lucky star” under which one of her future clients claimed she was born hung over a small English town called Painswick. Those who would later allege she was sent by devilish agents could hardly have picked a more perfect birthplace.

Today, Painswick, with its Cotswold stone cottages, is known primarily as being “the epitome of an English town.” It is one possessed of an idyllic beauty, standing on a hill overlooking one of the Five Valleys of Gloucestershire, a land of rivers and streams. Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII once hunted in its woods; ironically, Boleyn’s eventual executioner, William Kingston, also hailed from the region.¹ In 1643, during the First English Civil War, King Charles I and Royalist forces stayed in Painswick for a time. According to a walking tour guide, “tradition has it that [King Charles I] went up to the Beacon and, seeing the beautiful valley to the east, said, ‘This must be Paradise.’ Since then that valley, and the hamlet on its western side to the north of Painswick, have been called Paradise.”²

Yet there was also another side to the splendor of Painswick. During Ann Trow’s childhood, the townspeople possessed an unusual fondness for pagan customs, celebrating a yearly festival to the Greek satyr god Pan. Until around 1830, citizens of Painswick staged an annual procession in honor of this pagan god, who was most typically associated with sexuality.

The tradition appears to have originated with Benjamin Hyett, a member of the local gentry. In the mid-eighteenth century, Hyett erected a classically styled woodland pavilion, called Pan’s Lodge, where he and his friends could celebrate “nocturnal orgies,” according to the historian Timothy Mowl. Disinclined to let nobles have all the fun, it seems, locals soon got in on the action. Gentlemen’s Magazine, in 1787, described the town’s festival as one that “would have disgraced most heathen nations,” as it was filled with “drunkenness and every species of clamor, riot and disorder.”³

So, Ann was born into an uncommon place with particular—and particularly libertine—customs. But she was far from the only woman to grow up with a similarly blasé outlook toward sex during the period of her youth. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society admired virginity, actual attitudes toward everyday premarital sexual activity at the time were more relaxed—both in Europe and even in supposedly puritanical America—than they’re often portrayed as being in modern media.

As the historian Jack Larkin stated, “Into the 1820s, almost all Americans would have subscribed to the commonplace notion that sex, within proper social confines, was enjoyable and healthy and that prolonged sexual abstinence could be injurious to health. They also would have assumed that women had powerful sexual drives.”⁴ Premarital sex between couples was common. So common, in fact, that one pastor, in South Carolina in 1847, claimed that most brides—“except for two or three”—were pregnant when he performed their weddings.⁵ In some northeastern American states, bundling—in which two sweethearts would snuggle, supposedly chastely, in bed, with the consent of their parents—was a common custom during courtship through the 1700s.⁶ The “chaste” part of the practice, however, was notoriously misleading—which may help explain why, in the 1790s, one-third of rural New England brides were already pregnant by the time they walked down the aisle.⁷ Women were seen as enjoying the practice of bundling as much as, if not more than, men. A poem from 1785 captures the spirit of the tradition:

The concept is hardly that different from modern attitudes toward courtship. A 2002 study found that by the age of forty-four, 99 percent of Americans had sex. Ninety-five percent had premarital sex, making premarital sex nearly universal.⁸

As the lewd poem implies, many considered sexual impulses in women to be natural, not shameful. Indeed, popular magazines advocated punishment for men who had premarital sex with women and then left them, but sympathy for the women, who were perceived as unfortunate victims in that situation.⁹ It may seem incredibly obvious to say “you should sympathize with a woman who had sex with a man and got dumped after”—until you realize that there are still messages today likening women who choose to have premarital sex to worthless, chewed-up gum.

Ann had the strange fortune to live during a period of great change regarding sexual attitudes. In modern times, we’re sometimes guilty of assuming that one sexual ideology dominated a previous century—thinking everyone from the nineteenth century was prudish, for instance. Or else we theorize that all of history is one long, uninterrupted upward trajectory from utmost prudery to utter hedonism. In truth, dominant attitudes regarding sex shift decade to decade. Consider the laissez-faire approach to sex during the early aughts with those considered acceptable a decade and a half later, in a #MeToo era. The attempted rapist character on Gossip Girl in 2007 who became the show’s romantic hero in later episodes would not have been given that story line fifteen years later—indeed, in Gossip Girl 2.0, characters now ask, “Do I have your consent?” before sex.

Over the course of her life, Ann watched public sentiment slide from being moderately permissive toward female sexuality to being more constrained, culminating in a time when doctors were convinced that “good women” did not have a sex drive at all. The change must have felt a bit bewildering, especially to someone who grew up in a place where residents partook in “every species of clamor, riot and disorder.”

Sexual permissiveness aside, Ann’s upbringing was simple. Her father was a laborer who worked at the local woolen mill, as did her mother. Her schooling consisted of basics: she might have learned how to read, most likely from the Bible, so as to recite the catechism, though religion was not a large part of her upbringing. Judging from records concerning Ann Trows, who was born in Painswick during this period, Ann wasn’t baptized until the age of 16, perhaps in preparation for her marriage.¹⁰ While (male) country doctors sometimes came from humble backgrounds, certainly she and her family would have had no such aspirations for her. They never expected that one day she would go on to buy all her family members houses, in spite of the fact that from an early age it was clear that Ann possessed “an acute intellect and a determined will.”¹¹

Like many young girls from lower-class families, Ann was sent into domestic service at the age of fifteen. Servitude at the time was a brutal business, no matter how charming BBC shows persist in making it seem. Dismiss any Downton Abbey notions you might have about this period of Ann’s life. Young Miss Trow was not serving tea to nobility.

Instead, she worked for a middle-class butcher’s family. Given her age, and the fact that she was unskilled, and came from a poor family, it’s likely that she was a maid of all work. As such, she’d be required to do any and all chores around the house. Her day would begin before dawn. She might awake in an attic—which would be freezing during the winter—and creep downstairs at around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. to make sure all the fires were lit before the family came down for breakfast. Then she would spend the day scrubbing floors, carrying water into the house from a well, emptying chamber pots, dusting the rooms, changing the beds, polishing the brass, scrubbing the laundry, cleaning the rugs, and serving the family’s meals. Her work would continue until after nightfall—perhaps around 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., at which point she’d collapse, exhausted, only to begin again the next day.

Domestic drudgery of the lower orders was work that most of us would find physically and emotionally exhausting. However, Ann was naturally someone who enjoyed being busy. There were to be few periods of her life where she appeared to relax, and she always seemed a bit bewildered by those who enjoyed a life of idleness. She was also tireless.

Ann would never forget this time in her life. Nearly a lifetime later, her servants would live in nicer conditions than those of her neighbors, and she’d go out of her way to help them. And, just as she’d never forget the grim physical work that accompanied being a maid, she’d remember, too, the sexual peril inherent in being a teenage girl living in a near stranger’s house.

Despite most households’ insistence that maids not have gentlemen callers, her work as a servant would hardly have insulated Ann from sexuality, both her own and that of her peers. Many ladies took great care to keep their female staff from meeting with men from outside the house. But they often forgot about the men inside the house, especially those within their own families.

If well off, these men could assault household maids with little or no repercussions, legally or socially. And they would. This was sufficiently common in the eighteenth century that the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift advised the household maid “to get as much out of her master as she possibly can and never allow him the smallest liberty, not the squeezing of your hand, unless he puts a guinea into it.… [N]ever allow him the last favor for under a hundred guineas.” He urged particular caution around the family’s eldest son, as, from him, the maid would “get nothing from him but a big belly or the clap, and probably both together.”¹²

Swift meant for readers to take his comments humorously, as any maid would have known that there was not much room for negotiation. If a maid did have sex with a male member of the family who desired her, she risked becoming pregnant and losing her job. People may have been happy to marry women of their own class whom they’d already impregnated, but if they impregnated a maid, they weren’t going to keep paying her to dump out their chamber pots. If she refused sexual favors, however, she was likely doomed anyway: She could be fired immediately. Most chose the former option, compliance. A memoir written by an anonymous wealthy man, most likely Henry Spencer Ashbee, who grew up during the mid-1800s, My Secret Life, stated, “As to servants and women of the humbler class… they all took cock on the quiet and were proud of having a gentleman to cover them. Such was the opinion of men in my class of life and of my age. My experience with my mother’s servants corroborated it.”¹³ The author further discusses impregnating some servants and, perhaps fortunately for them, procuring abortions.

Ann may or may not have experienced these assaults herself, but even so, she was likely well aware of their prevalence. If none presented in her household, she would certainly have heard stories about other maids who had been seduced or outright raped by their masters. Young girls hoped to follow the example set in Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded—the popular novel of the period in which a young maid thwarts her master’s near constant attempts to rape her (at one point he leaps out of her closet; at another, he kidnaps her) only for him to marry her. Ann may well have even read about these experiences in the popular advice guide A Present for a Servant-Maid. Published in 1744 and still referenced throughout Ann’s own era, the manual was divided somewhat evenly between good recipes and warnings about the terrible men who would try to sleep with the help. That list included their masters, male servants, sons of the household, and guests. As for what to do, the manual suggested it was probably best to keep away from men as much as possible, to remind married men of their wives, and to avoid smiling at single men, as it would “the more inflame him and render him more persevering than ever.”¹⁴ The Servant-Maid guide was, to its credit, candid about the fact that avoiding these inflamed men would be incredibly difficult, and, in some cases, even impossible. It also stressed that if a young woman became pregnant, the man would probably not marry her, a situation that could lead to prostitution. At best, because life was not a romantic novel, it mentioned, he would marry her, and then all his friends would sneer at her for being poorly born.

It is a shame that this book did not contain any effective suggestions for birth control—something Madame Restell would end up attempting to remedy later in life.

In any event, trying to avoid a master’s wandering hands while also dumping out his chamber pot seems stunningly degrading. Whether Ann had to fight off advances is lost to history. But for the rest of her life, she would show the utmost sympathy—and often offer vastly lowered prices for her services—to women who had been impregnated by their employers.

At this time in her life, Ann’s options seemed to be either to marry or remain in service. She had little desire to remain a maid.

So, Ann married.

It was hardly unexpected. At sixteen years old, she was pretty and popular, and known to be “a favorite among the cloth weaving population of Painswick.”¹⁵ One of her suitors was a twenty-two-year-old man named Henry Sommers. As a journeyman tailor, Henry had completed his apprenticeship. He was considered fully educated and qualified to work in his field. With such a useful skill he could expect to have steady employment. At the time, Painswick was well known for its cloth and weaving industry. By marrying him, Ann’s own fortunes would improve, and she could stop hauling water for her employers’ laundry.

But as many women who live in the real world ultimately discover, married life is not always a fairy tale.

Shortly after her nuptials, Ann found out that her new husband was less a Prince Charming and more of a charming alcoholic. She discovered that she was “no better off after marriage than before.”¹⁶ As a result, “to support him, and herself, she had to do the tailoring work that he should have done.”¹⁷ Ever the hard worker, she soon became very proficient, and within a few years she was a talented dressmaker.

By 1830, she was also a mother to a daughter named Caroline. Supporting her family in Painswick was a constant challenge, but “she heard that in America she could get good wages for the trade that her husband’s dissipation and idleness had forced her to learn.”¹⁸

So, in 1831, Ann, Henry, and their toddler set sail to New York. Had she known how fierce the competition would be, she might never have left home.

¹⁸