Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has so-ciety to abuse me? Have I received any favors at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir?

—From a letter in The Times (February 24th, 1858) *

[* The substance of this famous and massively sarcastic letter, al-legedly written by a successful prostitute, but more probably by some-one like Henry Mayhew, may be read in Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age.]

Milk punch and champagne may not seem a very profound philosophical conclusion to such soul-searching; but they had been perennially prescribed at Cambridge as a solution to all known problems, and though Charles had learned a good deal more about the problems since leaving the university he had not bettered the solution. Fortunately his club, like so many English gentlemen’s clubs, was founded on the very simple and profitable presumption that a man’s student days are his best. It had all the amenities of a rich college without any of its superfluous irritations (such as dons, deans and examinations). It pandered, in short, to the adolescent in man. It also provided excellent milk punch.

It so happened that the first two fellow members Charles set eyes on when he entered the smoking room had also been his fellow students; one was the younger son of a bishop and a famous disgrace to his father. The other was what Charles had until recently expected to be: a baronet. Born with a large lump of Northumberland in his pocket, Sir Thomas Burgh had proved far too firm a rock for history to move. The immemorial pursuits of his ancestors had been hunting, shooting, drinking and whoring; and he still pursued them with a proper sense of tradition. He had in fact been a leader of the fast set into which Charles had drifted during his time at Cambridge. His escapades, of both the Mytton and the Casanova kind, were notorious. There had been several moves to get him ejected from the club; but since he provided its coal from one of his mines, and at a rate that virtually made a present of it, wiser counsels always pre-vailed. Besides, there was something honest about his manner of life. He sinned without shame, but also without hypocrisy. He was generous to a fault; half the younger members of the club had at one time or another been in his debt—and his loans were a gentleman’s loans, indefinitely prolongable and without interest. He was always the first to start a book when there was something to bet on; and in a way he reminded all but the most irredeemably sober members of their less sober days. He was stocky, short, perpetually flushed by wine and weather; and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candor of the satanically fallen. These eyes crinkled when they saw Charles enter.

“Charley! Now what the devil are you doing out of the matrimonial lock up?”

Charles smiled, not without a certain sense of wan foolish-ness. “Good evening, Tom. Nathaniel, how are you?” Eternal cigar in mouth, the thorn in the unlucky bishop’s side raised a languid hand. Charles turned back to the baronet. “On parole, you know. The dear girl’s down in Dorset taking the waters.”

Tom winked. “While you take spirit—and spirits, eh? But I hear she’s the rose of the season. Nat says. He’s green, y’know. Demmed Charley, he says. Best girl and best match— ain’t fair, is it, Nat?” The bishop’s son was notoriously short of money and Charles guessed it was not Ernestina’s looks he was envied. Nine times out of ten he would at this point have moved on to the newspapers or joined some less iniquitous acquaintance. But today he stayed where he was. Would they “discuss” a punch and bubbly? They would. And so he sat with them.

“And how’s the esteemed uncle, Charles?” Sir Tom winked again, but in a way so endemic to his nature that it was impossible to take offense. Charles murmured that he was in the best of health.

“How goes he for hounds? Ask him if he needs a brace of the best Northumberland. Real angels, though I says it wot bred ‘em. Tornado—you recall Tornado? His grandpups.” Tornado had spent a clandestine term in Sir Tom’s rooms one summer at Cambridge.

“I recall him. So do my ankles.”

Sir Tom grinned broadly. “Aye, he took a fancy to you. Always bit what he loved. Dear old Tornado—God rest his soul.” And he downed his tumbler of punch with a sadness that made his two companions laugh. Which was cruel, since the sadness was perfectly genuine.

In such talk did two hours pass—and two more bottles of champagne, and another bowl of punch, and sundry chops and kidneys (the three gentlemen moved on to the dining room) which required a copious washing-down of claret, which in turn needed purging by a decanter or two of port.

Sir Tom and the bishop’s son were professional drinkers and took more than Charles. Outwardly they seemed by the end of the second decanter more drunk than he. But in fact his facade was sobriety, while theirs was drunkenness, exact-ly the reverse of the true comparative state, as became clear when they wandered out of the dining room for what Sir Tom called vaguely “a little drive round town.” Charles was the one who was unsteady on his feet. He was not too far gone not to feel embarrassed; somehow he saw Mr. Freeman’s gray assessing eyes on him, though no one as closely connected with trade as Mr. Freeman would ever have been allowed in that club.

He was helped into his cape and handed his hat, gloves, and cane; and then he found himself in the keen outside air—the promised fog had not materialized, though the mist remained—staring with an intense concentration at the coat of arms on the door of Sir Tom’s town brougham. Winsyatt meanly stabbed him again, but then the coat of arms swayed towards him. His arms were taken, and a moment later he found himself sitting beside Sir Tom and facing the bishop’s son. He was not too drunk to note an exchanged wink between his two friends; but too drunk to ask what it meant. He told himself he did not care. He was glad he was drunk, that everything swam a little, that everything past and to come was profoundly unimportant. He had a great desire to tell them both about Mrs. Bella Tomkins and Winsyatt; but he was not drunk enough for that, either. A gentleman remains a gentleman, even in his cups. He turned to Tom.

“Tom ... Tom, dear old fellow, you’re a damn’ lucky fellow.”

“So are you, my Charley boy. We’re all damn lucky fellows.”

“Where we going?”

“Where damn lucky fellows always go of a jolly night. Eh, Nat, ain’t that so?”

There was a silence then, as Charles tried dimly to make out in which direction they were heading. This time he did not see the second wink exchanged. The key words in Sir Tom’s last sentence slowly registered. He turned solemnly.

“Jolly night?”

“We’re going to old Ma Terpsichore’s, Charles. Worship at the muses’ shrine, don’t y’know?”

Charles stared at the smiling face of the bishop’s son.

“Shrine?”

“So to speak, Charles.”

“Metonymia. Venus for puella,” put in the bishop’s son.

Charles stared at them, then abruptly smiled. “Excellent idea.” But then he resumed his rather solemn stare out of the window. He felt he ought to stop the carriage and say good night to them. He remembered, in a brief flash of proportion, what their reputation was. Then there came out of nowhere Sarah’s face; that face with its closed eyes tended to his, the kiss ... so much fuss about nothing. He saw what all his troubles were caused by: he needed a woman, he needed intercourse. He needed a last debauch, as he sometimes needed a purge. He looked round at Sir Tom and the bishop’s son. The first was sprawled back in his corner, the second had put his legs up across his seat. The top hats of both were cocked at flyly dissolute angles. This time the wink went among all three.

Soon they were in the press of carriages heading for that area of Victorian London we have rather mysteriously—since it was central in more ways than one—dropped from our picture of the age: an area of casinos (meeting places rather than gaming rooms), assembly cafes, cigar “divans” in its more public parts (the Haymarket and Regent Street) and very nearly unrelieved brothel in all the adjoining back streets. They passed the famous Oyster Shop in the Haymar-ket (“Lobsters, Oysters, Pickled and Kippered Salmon”) and the no less celebrated Royal Albert Potato Can, run by the Khan, khan indeed of the baked-potato sellers of London, behind a great scarlet-and-brass stand that dominated and proclaimed the vista. They passed (and the bishop’s son took his lorgnette out of its shagreen case) the crowded daughters of folly, the great whores in their carriages, the lesser ones in their sidewalk droves ... from demure little milky-faced millinery girls to brandy-cheeked viragoes. A torrent of color —of fashion, for here unimaginable things were allowed. Women dressed as Parisian bargees, in bowler and trousers, as sailors, as se?oritas, as Sicilian peasant girls; as if the entire casts of the countless neighboring penny-gaffs had poured out into the street. Far duller the customers—the numerically equal male sex, who, stick in hand and “weed” in mouth, eyed the evening’s talent. And Charles, though he wished he had not drunk so much, and so had to see every-thing twice over, found it delicious, gay, animated, and above all, unFreemanish.

Terpsichore, I suspect, would hardly have bestowed her patronage on the audience of whom our three in some ten minutes formed part; for they were not alone. Some six or seven other young men, and a couple of old ones, one of whom Charles recognized as a pillar of the House of Lords, sat in the large salon, appointed in the best Parisian taste, and reached through a narrow and noisome alley off a street some little way from the top of the Haymarket. At one end of the chandeliered room was a small stage hidden by deep red curtains, on which were embroidered in gold two pairs of satyrs and nymphs. One showed himself eminently in a state to take possession of his shepherdess; and the other had already been received. In black letters on a gilt cartouche above the curtains was written Carmina Priapea XLIV:

Velle quid hanc dicas, quamvis sim ligneus, hastam, oscula dat medio si qua puella mihi?

augure non opus est: “in me,” mihi credite, dixit, “utetur veris viribus hasta rudis.”*

[*It is the god Priapus who speaks: small wooden images of him with erect phallus, both to frighten away thieves and bring fertility, were common features of the Roman orchard. “You’d like to know why the girl kisses this spear of mine, even though I’m made of wood? You don’t need to be clairvoyant to work that one out. ‘Let’s hope,’ she’s thinking, ‘that men will use this spear on me—and brutally.’”]

The copulatory theme was repeated in various folio prints in gilt frames that hung between the curtained windows. Already a loose-haired girl in Camargo petticoats was serving the waiting gentlemen with Roederer’s champagne. In the background a much rouged but more seemingly dressed lady of some fifty years of age cast a quiet eye over her clien............