All rights reserved. Reproduction for sale or profit prohibited. This essay may not be reprinted or redistributed without the permission of the author. When the German traveller Archenholz visited London in the late eighteenth century, he noticed that every evening around dusk all the principal streets would fill with prostitutes dressed in gaudy colours.
He was horrified to see eight- and nine-year-old girls proffering their charms. The better class of courtesans lived in the West End. Archenholz reckoned that 30, ladies of pleasure resided in the single parish of Marylebone, of whom 1, were kept mistresses paid an annuity by their seducers, living in elegant apartments and attended by servants. Welch argued that the Lock Hospital for venereal diseases was merely a temporary stopgap, because after their venereal distempers were cured, common prostitutes simply returned to their trade in the streets.
The gaolers were more interested in selling liquors to their inmates than in reforming them. He did appreciate, however, that women who lived only by prostitution would be reduced to absolute distress if prostitution were totally suppressed. He therefore urged that a charity be established by the legislature to provide long-term relief and useful labour for prostitutes, and that charities be set up to support orphans and abandoned children, especially children between the ages of seven when parental legal responsibility for them ceased and fourteen when the parish became legally responsible for them.
He also proposed stricter regulation of immigration from Ireland, the source of much of the sexual labour force. Bernard Mandeville in his Modest Defense of Public Stews had argued for the state regulation of prostitution, since repression obviously was not working, but most people were shocked by this suggestion.
Prostitution was a serious problem. Some reformers claimed there were 3, full-time prostitutes in London and Westminster, but Welch thought the figure was far greater. By , the magistrate Colquhoun concluded that there were 50, prostitutes in the metropolis. Michael Ryan, in Prostitution in London , believed that by there were 80, prostitutes and 5, brothels. Most of the prostitutes in London were second-generation Irish immigrants, whose fathers had not succeeded in finding an adequate livelihood.
