There But For the Grace of God

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Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century
by Laura J. Rosenthal

Pub. Date: August 2008
Publisher: Broadview Press
Format: Paperback, xxxii, 229pp
Age Range: Adult
Series: None
ISBN-13: 9781551114699
 

Synopsis from Broadview Press

This anthology makes available for the first time a selection of narratives by and about prostitutes in the eighteenth century. These memoirs...offer important insights into female experience and class and gender roles in the period. Portraying the lives of women in both success and hardship, written in voices ranging from repentant to bawdy, the memoirs show the complexity of the lives of the "nightwalkers." For eighteenth-century readers, as Laura Rosenthal writes in her introduction, these memoirs "offered sensual and sentimental journeys, glimpses into high life and low life, and relentless confrontations with the explosive power of money and the vulnerability of those without it." 

Jennifer's Review of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century

Nightwalkers is a collection of prostitute narratives from the 1700s written not by the women themselves, but by those who claimed to possess the facts of their lives. So though we don’t hear their experiences first-hand, we do get a good look at the reasons why these specific women, and others like them, wound up in the oldest profession. The editor, Laura Rosenthal, whose excellent introduction sets the historical  and literary stage for what follows, did a fine job of gathering together a cross-section of reform, sentimental, and libertine narratives, each differing in style, tone, and purpose (though none are the least titillating). As a result, we learn that some prostitutes, like today’s expensive call girls, moved freely and openly in high society, setting themselves up time and again as a wealthy man’s mistress in order to extract as much money and property from him as they could, occasionally leaving him bankrupt, or nearly so, in the process. Others longed to reform, but then as now, character references were needed for most respectable jobs and these women had none. We find, too, that with society’s help, some fortunate prostitutes were able to mend their ways and live a happier life.

Despite the sadness inherent in them, the narratives often contain unexpected and amusing treats that shed light on the culture of the times. For instance, in The Juvenile Adventures of Miss Kitty Fisher, Kitty, whose love-lorn soliloquies are eavesdropped upon by her landlady (who misinterprets them as a sign of insanity), is examined by a doctor: 

He had...enquired of the people of the house concerning her behaviour; when they unanimously informed him, that she had been raving all day 'till just then....[E]ndeavoring to discover from what source her disorder sprung, he touched upon the usual topics that occasioned madness: adversity, disappointments, application to study, poetry, and at last on love.

If you’ve read Richardson, Fielding, or Defoe, then you have an idea of what a prostitute’s life was like in eighteenth century England. But through the narratives in Nightwalkers, the reader comes to understand that not all of society condemned these women, and indeed, only the strictest moralist would find them all worthy of condemnation. Circumstances – There but for the grace of God go I – put many of these women on the streets and kept them there. Of course, there were those like Sally Salisbury, whose biography opens the book, who seemed born to the profession. No one reveled in her work like the beautiful, devious, acid-tongued Sally. “It was always my Ambition,” she was reported as saying, “to be a First-Rate Whore, and I think, I may say, without Vanity, That I am the greatest, and make the most considerable Figure of any in the Three Kingdoms.” 

(Original, though shorter, review first published May 18, 2011, on GoodReads.com.)