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First published in Great Britain in 2021

by Canongate Books Ltd,

14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books

Copyright © Shaun Usher, 2021

The right of Shaun Usher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

For permission credits, please see here

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 556 1

eISBN 978 1 78689 557 8

For Play

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

01 AN INSTRUMENT OF JOY

Margaret Mead to Elizabeth Mead

02 WHAT GLOOMY TIDINGS ABOUT THE CRABS

Patrick Leigh Fermor to Enrica Huston

03 YOU THE PIOUS, THE MORAL, THE RESPECTABLE

Another Unfortunate to The Times

04 TO MY EVER-LOVING WIFE

Don to his wife

05 THE ACHE IN MY HEART IS INTOLERABLE

Dorothy Day to Forster Batterham

06 ALL I KNOW IS ASTHMA

Marcel Proust to Jacques Porel

07 SEXATIONALLY YOURS

Mae West to Alfred Kinsey

08 THIS ASTONISHING PILGRIMAGE

John Cheever to his lover

09 DO NOT THINK I REJOICE IN BEING SEXLESS

Dora Carrington to Mark Gertler

10 SEX DOES NOT THRIVE ON MONOTONY

Anaïs Nin to the Collector

11 THE LAST SEXUAL TABOO

J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster

12 OBLIVION OF WORDS

Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera

13 YOU’RE FOOD AND DRINK TO ME

Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin

14 YOUR LOVELY HAMPTON WICK

Cynthia Albritton to Keith Richards

15 THERE ARE NO NICE CUSTOMERS

Tanja Rahm to her former customers

16 MY BODY SHALL BE ALL, ALL YOURS

Radclyffe Hall to Evguenia Souline

17 MAN’S BEST FRIEND? A SHEEP? A HORSE?

Jessica Mitford to the New York Times Book Review

18 MAX STANDBY

Dian Fossey to Robinson McIlvaine

19 A POTENTIALLY LIMITLESS SHARED ECSTASY

Frederick B. Exner, M.D., to the Journal of the American Medical Association

20 EVEN MY BONES SEEM TO CRY FOR YOU

Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz

21 YOUR NAME IS UPON EVERY TONGUE

Pope Pius II to Rodrigo de Borja

22 AT LENGTH THE WAVES GREW MORE TERRIFIC

Rupert Brooke to James Strachey

23 THE POOR-WHORES PETITION

Madam Cresswell and Damaris Page to Lady Castlemaine

24 I WAS A MASTURBATOR’S MASTURBATOR

Dalton Trumbo to Christopher Trumbo

25 I WAS THE WORST BED PARTNER IN FIVE CONTINENTS

Martha Gellhorn to Betsy Drake

26 I NEED TO RELIEVE MY SEXUALITY PHYSICALLY SOMEHOW

Amrita Sher-Gil to Marie Antoinette Gottesmann

27 MARRIED LOVE

Various to Marie Stopes

28 IF ONLY

Percy Grainger to Karen Holten

PERMISSION CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A letter is a time bomb, a message in a bottle,

a spell, a cry for help, a story, an expression of

concern, a ladle of love, a way to connect through

words. This simple and brilliantly democratic art

form remains a potent means of communication

and, regardless of whatever technological revolution

we are in the middle of, the letter lives and, like

literature, it always will.

INTRODUCTION

Before I begin: should you happen to be a child, please close this book and hand it to an adult. If you are an adult, please do not leave this book within reach of a child, no matter how keen a letter writer they might be. Instead, may I suggest introducing them to some of the more age-appropriate titles in this series, beginning with Letters of Note: Dogs and Letters of Note: Cats.

Letters of Note: Sex, should you be in any doubt, is a book about sex. More specifically, it is an exploration of sex, and our relationship to it, through the lens of the humble letter – a form of correspondence which, given its ostensibly private nature, is perfectly suited to discussing such intimate matters.

Both tone and focus of these letters are wide-ranging. We begin with a letter of sisterly advice from anthropologist Margaret Mead to her younger sibling who had recently had her first sexual experience; we end, 150 pages later, with a missive from Australian composer Percy Grainger that is so sexually explicit as to approach the surreal. The journey from first to last is winding. You will read a pained plea from the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement to the man with whom she longed to share her bed but for reasons of religion could not; you will see the request once sent to a member of the Rolling Stones by a sculptor who wished to immortalise his ‘spectacular’ instrument; and you will, I hope, be fascinated by a frank exchange of letters between two novelists in which is discussed the ‘last sexual taboo.’ Topics broached in these unabashed pages include masturbation, prostitution, celibacy, promiscuity, incest, sex toys, pornography, BDSM, bestiality, erectile dysfunction, and pubic lice, and they come through the pens and typewriters of such people as Anaïs Nin, Frida Kahlo, Martha Gellhorn, Mae West, Marcel Proust, Henry Miller, Dian Fossey, and Georgia O’Keeffe. A heady mix indeed.

Since work on this volume began in 2019 I have trawled through thousands of letters, flicked through hundreds of books, and entered millions of alarm-triggering words and phrases into search engines, all in search of the selection you now hold, and I am of the firm opinion that each one deserves its place. I hope you will agree.

Shaun Usher

2020

The Letters

LETTER 01

AN INSTRUMENT OF JOY

Margaret Mead to Elizabeth Mead

11 January 1926

Margaret Mead was widely regarded as the leading anthropologist in the western world for many years, thanks largely to Coming of Age in Samoa, a ground-breaking and controversial book she wrote after a research trip in 1925. In the book, she sought to shine a light on the previously alien lives and relaxed sexual attitudes of adolescent Samoan girls. Although since contested, Mead’s findings were a revelation at the time and in fact have been credited with influencing the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In 1926, a year after setting foot on the Samoan island of Ta‘ū, Mead learnt of a sexual awakening much closer to home: that of her younger sister, Elizabeth. This letter of advice was her response.

THE LETTER

Elizabeth dear, I’ve a good mind to punish you by writing back in pencil. You’re a wretch to write in pencil on pink paper just when you’re writing something very important that you particularly want me to read. Don’t do it again.

I am glad you told me about the moonlight party, dear. It’s the sort of thing that had to happen sometime and it might have been a great deal worse. As it was, it was a nice boy whom you like, and nothing that need worry you. There are two things I’d like to have you remember—or in fact several. The thrills you get from touching the body of another person are just as good and legitimate thrills as those you get at the opera. Only the ones which [you] get at the opera are all mixed up with your ideas of beauty and music and Life—and so they seem to you good and holy things. In the same way the best can only be had from the joys which life offers to our sense of touch (for sex is mostly a matter of the sense of touch) when we associate those joys with love and respect and understanding.

All the real tragedies of sex come from disassociation—either of the old maid who sternly refuses to think about sex at all until finally she can think about nothing else—and goes crazy—or of the man who goes from one wanton’s arms to another seeking only the immediate sensation of the moment and never linking it up with other parts of his life. It is by the way in which sex— and under this I include warm demonstrative friendships with both sexes as well as love affairs proper with men—is linked with all the other parts of our lives, with our appreciation of music and our tenderness for little children, and most of all with our love for someone and the additional nearness to them which expression of love gives us, that sex itself is given meaning.

You must realize that your body has been given you as an instrument of joy—and tho you should choose most rigorously whose touch may make that instrument thrill and sing a thousand beautiful songs—you must never think it wrong of it to sing. For your body was made to sing to another’s touch and the flesh itself is not wise to choose. It is the spirit within the body which must be stern and say—“No, you can not play on this my precious instrument. True it would sing for you. Your fingers are very clever at playing on such instruments—but I do not love you, nor respect you—and I will not have my body singing a tune which my soul cannot sing also.” If you remember this, you will never be filled with disgust of any sort. Any touch may set the delicate chords humming—but it is your right to choose who shall really play a tune— and be very very sure of your choices first. To have given a kiss where only a handshake was justified by the love behind it—that is likely to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

And for the other part—about being boy crazy. Try to think of boys as people, some nice, some indifferent—not as a class. You are[n’t] girl crazy are you? Then why should you be boy crazy? If a boy is [an] interesting person, why, like him. If he isn’t, don’t. Think of him as an individual first and as a boy second. What kind of a person he is is a great deal more important than that he belongs to the other sex—after all so do some hundred million other individuals.

I am very proud of the way you are able to think thru the problems which life brings you— and of the way you meet them. And I consider it a great privilege to have you tell me about them. I’m so glad you are happy dear.

Very lovingly,

Margaret

LETTER 02

WHAT GLOOMY TIDINGS ABOUT THE CRABS

Patrick Leigh Fermor to Enrica Huston

11 August 1961

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a dashing English war hero and journalist who produced some of the most celebrated travel writing of modern times, not least in A Time of Gifts, a compelling account of a year-long trek from Rotterdam to the ancient city of Constantinople. The journey took place in 1934, forty-three years before the book’s eventual publication. Fermor’s charms and propensity to party were well known, resulting in affairs with various women in numerous countries over the years, including, in the 1960s, ballerina Enrica ‘Ricki’ Huston, who happened to be married to Hollywood filmmaker John Huston. It was to her that Fermor wrote in August of 1961, in relation to a mutual infestation they were both itching to get to the bottom of.

THE LETTER

The Mill House

Dumbleton

My darling Ricki,

1,000 thanks for your Paris letter, and apologies for delay. Barbara and Niko came for the weekend, and I had to go to London when they left, with the result that now – Tuesday evening! – just back, I can only get this off express to Paris tomorrow morning. Damn, damn, damn.

Triple damn indeed, and sixfold & 100-fold because alas! I’ve committed myself, only yesterday too, to devoting myself to my mama in the country this weekend, and I’m such a neglectful and intermittent son that I can’t put it off now. [. . .] I am longing to see you and hate the thought of your vanishing out of reach for what seems such an age, all unembraced! Bugger (cubed).

I say, what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me? I’ll tell you why this odd doubt exists: [. . .] just after arriving back in London from Athens, I was suddenly alerted by what felt like the beginnings of troop-movements in the fork, but on scrutiny, expecting an aerial view of general mobilisation, there was nothing to be seen, not even a scout, a spy, or a despatch rider. Puzzled, I watched and waited and soon even the preliminary tramplings died away, so I assumed, as the happy summer days of peace followed each other, that the incident, or the delusive shudder through the chancelleries, was over. While this faint scare was on, knowing that, thanks to lunar tyranny, it couldn’t be from you, I assumed (and please spare my blushes here!) that the handover bid must have occurred by dint of a meeting with an old pal in Paris, which, I’m sorry to announce, ended in brief carnal knowledge, more for auld lang syne than any more pressing reason. On getting your letter, I made a dash for privacy and thrashed through the undergrowth, but found everything almost eerily calm: fragrant and silent glades that might never have known the invader’s tread. The whole thing makes me scratch my head, if I may so put it. But I bet your trouble does come from me, because the crabs of the world seem to fly to me, like the children of Israel to Abraham’s bosom, a sort of ambulant Canaan. I’ve been a real martyr to them. What must have happened is this. A tiny, picked, cunning, and well-camouflaged commando must have landed while I was in Paris and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things, and, when you came within striking distance, knowing the highest when they saw it, they struck (as who wouldn’t?) and then deployed in force, leaving their first beachhead empty. Or so I think! (Security will be tightened up. They may have left an agent with a radio who is playing a waiting game . . .)

I wonder whether I have reconstructed the facts all right. I do hope so; I couldn’t bear it to be anyone but me. But at the same time, if it is me, v. v. many apologies. There’s some wonderful Italian powder you can get in France called MOM — another indication of a matriarchal society — which is worth its weight in gold dust. It is rather sad to think that their revels now are ended, that the happy woods (where I would fain be, wandering in pensive mood) where they held high holiday will soon be a silent grove. Where are all their quips and quiddities? The pattering of tiny feet will be stilled. Bare, ruin’d choirs. Don’t tell anyone about this private fauna. Mom’s the word, gentle reader. [. . .]

No more now, my darling Ricki, as I must leap into my faithful Standard Companion and dash to the post with this, hoping and praying it gets you in time. No need to say how much I’m going to miss you; you know I will. Not only the moon’s a rival now, but the sun and Greece as well, and I know what potent allies they are. But no moping! We’ll make some glowing plan when you get back, and see what magic the mysterious north can offer. Anyway, bless you a billion times, my dearest darling Ricki, and lots of love hugs and kisses

from Paddy

LETTER 03

YOU THE PIOUS, THE MORAL, THE RESPECTABLE

Another Unfortunate to The Times

February 1858

On 25 February 1858, Charles Dickens wrote to the editor of The Times and enquired as to the true identity of a sex worker who had recently written to the paper under the pseudonym ‘Another Unfortunate’. Dickens was writing in his capacity as co-founder of Urania Cottage, a home for ‘fallen women’ who had ‘turned to a life of immorality’, and his hope, by writing, was to contact and save another. Alas, it was not to be. The next day, having belatedly read Another Unfortunate’s letter in full – reprinted here – and now keenly aware that this particular lady most certainly did not wish to be rescued, Dickens wrote to the editor again and withdrew his request. In reality, Another Unfortunate had in fact been responding to an earlier letter in The Times from ‘One More Unfortunate’ supposedly by an ashamed sex worker who believed that women like her ‘are beings whom men should shun and women should condemn’.

THE LETTER

Sir – another ‘Unfortunate’, but of a class entirely different from the one who has already instructed the public in your columns, presumes to address you.

I am a stranger to all the fine sentiments which still linger in the bosom of your correspondent. I have none of those youthful recollections which, contrasting her early days with her present life, aggravate the misery of the latter. My parents did not give me any education; they did not instil into my mind virtuous precepts nor set me a good example. All my experiences in early life were gleaned among associates who knew nothing of the laws of God but by dim tradition and faint report, and whose chiefest triumphs of wisdom consisted in picking their way through the paths of destitution in which they were cast by cunning evasion or in open defiance of the laws of man.

I do not think of my parents (long in their graves) with any such compunctions as your correspondent describes. They gave me in their lifetime, according to their means and knowledge, and as they had probably received from their parents, shelter and protection, mixed with curses and caresses. I received all as a matter of course, and, knowing nothing better, was content in that kind of contentedness which springs from insensibility; I returned their affection in like kind as they gave it to me. As long as they lived, I looked up to them as my parents. I assisted them in their poverty, and made them comfortable. They looked on me and I on them with pride, for I was proud to be able to minister to their wants; and as for shame, although they knew perfectly well the means by which I obtained money, I do assure you, Sir, that by them, as by myself, my success was regarded as the reward of a proper ambition, and was a source of real pleasure and gratification.

Let me tell you something of my parents. My father’s most profitable occupation was brick-making. When not employed at this, he did anything he could get to do. My mother worked with him in the brickfield, and so did I and a progeny of brothers and sisters; for somehow or other, although my parents occupied a very unimportant space in the world, it pleased God to make them fruitful. We all slept in the same room. There were few privacies, few family secrets in our house.

Father and mother both loved drink. In the household expenses, had accounts been kept, gin or beer would have been the heaviest items. We, the children, were indulged occasionally with a drop, but my honoured parents reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of getting drunk, ‘and they were the same as their parents had been’. I give you a chapter of the history of common life which may be stereotyped as the history of generation upon generation.

We knew not anything of religion. Sometimes when a neighbour died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the church. If a grand funeral chanced to fall in our way we went to see that, too—the fine black horses and nodding plumes—as we went to see the soldiers when we could for a lark. No parson ever came near us. The place where we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen. ‘The Publicans and Sinners’ of our circumscribed, but thickly populated locality had no ‘friend’ among them.

Our neighbourhood furnished many subjects to the treadmill, the hulks, and the colonies, and some to the gallows. We lived with the fear of those things, and not with the fear of God before our eyes.

I was a very pretty child, and had a sweet voice; of course I used to sing. Most London boys and girls of the lower classes sing. ‘My face is my fortune, kind sir, she said’, was the ditty on which I bestowed most pains, and my father and mother would wink knowingly as I sang it. The latter would also tell me how pretty she was when young, and how she sang, and what a fool she had been, and how well she might have done had she been wise.

Frequently we had quite a stir in our colony. Some young lady who had quitted the paternal restraints, or perhaps, had started off, none knew whither or how, to seek her fortune, would reappear among us with a profusion of ribands, fine clothes, and lots of cash. Visiting the neighbours, treating indiscriminately, was the order of the day on such occasions, without any more definite information of the means by which the dazzling transformation had been effected than could be conveyed by knowing winks and the words ‘luck’ and ‘friends’. Then she would disappear and leave us in our dirt, penury, and obscurity. You cannot conceive, Sir, how our ambition was stirred by these visitations.

Now commences an important era in my life. I was a fine, robust, healthy girl, 13 years of age. I had larked with the boys of my own age. I had huddled with them, boys and girls together, all night long in our common haunts. I had seen much and heard abundantly of the mysteries of the sexes. To me such things had been matters of common sight and common talk. For some time I had coquetted on the verge of a strong curiosity, and a natural desire, and without a particle of affection, scarce a partiality, I lost—what? not my virtue, for I never had any. That which is commonly, but untruly called virtue, I gave away.

You reverend Mr Philanthropist—what call you virtue? Is it not the principle, the essence, which keeps watch and ward over the conduct, the substance, the materiality? No such principle ever kept watch and ward over me, and I repeat that I never lost that which I never had – my virtue.

According to my own ideas at the time I only extended my rightful enjoyments. Opportunity was not long wanting to put my newly acquired knowledge to profitable use. In the commencement of my fifteenth year one of our be-ribanded visitors took me off, and introduced me to the great world, and thus commenced my career as what you better classes call a prostitute. I cannot say that I felt any other shame than the bashfulness of a noviciate introduced to strange society. Remarkable for good looks, and no less so for good temper, I gained money, dressed gaily, and soon agreeably astonished my parents and old neighbours by making a descent upon them.

Passing over the vicissitudes of my course, alternating between reckless gaiety and extreme destitution, I improved myself greatly; and at the age of 15 was living partly under the protection of one who thought he discovered that I had talent, and some good qualities as well as beauty, who treated me more kindly and considerately than I had ever before been treated, and thus drew from me something like a feeling of regard, but not sufficiently strong to lift me to that sense of my position which the so-called virtuous and respectable members of society seem to entertain. Under the protection of this gentleman, and encouraged by him, I commenced the work of my education; that portion of education which is comprised in some knowledge of my own language and the ordinary accomplishments of my sex; – moral science, as I believe it is called, has always been an enigma to me, and is so to this day. I suppose it is because I am one of those who, as Rousseau says, are ‘born to be prostitutes’. Common honesty I believe in rigidly. I have always paid my debts, and, though I say it, I have always been charitable to my fellow creatures. I have not neglected my duty to my family. I supported my parents while they lived, and buried them decently when they died. I paid a celebrated lawyer heavily for defending unsuccessfully my eldest brother, who had the folly to be caught in the commission of a robbery. I forgave him the offence against the law in the theft, and the offence against discretion in being caught. This cost me some effort, for I always abhorred stealing. I apprenticed my younger brother to a good trade, and helped him into a little business. Drink frustrated my efforts in his behalf. Through the influence of a very influential gentleman, a very particular friend of mine, he is now a well-conducted member of the police. My sisters, whose early life was in all respects the counterpart of my own, I brought out and started in the world. The elder of the two is kept by a nobleman, the next by an officer in the army; the third has not yet come to years of discretion, and is ‘having her fling’ before she settles down.

Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have I received any favours 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? Why does my unnatural parent repudiate me, and what has society ever done for me, that I should do anything for it, and what have I ever done against society that it should drive me into a corner and crush me to the earth? I have neither stolen (at least since I was a child), nor murdered, nor defrauded. I earn my money and pay my way, and try to do good with it, according to my ideas of good. I do not get drunk, nor fight, nor create uproar in the streets or out of them. I do not use bad language. I do not offend the public eye by open indecencies. I go to the Opera, I go to Almack’s, I go to the theatres, I go to quiet, well-conducted casinos, I go to all the places of public amusement, behaving myself with as much propriety as society can exact. I pay business visits to my tradespeople, the most fashionable of the West-end. My milliners, my silkmercers, my bootmakers, know, all of them, who I am and how I live, and they solicit my patronage as earnestly and cringingly as if I were Madam, the Lady of the right rev, patron of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They find my money as good and my pay better (for we are robbed on every hand) than that of Madam, my Lady; and, if all the circumstances and conditions of our lives had been reversed, would Madam, my Lady, have done better or been better than I?

I speak of others as well as for myself, for the very great majority, nearly all the real undisguised prostitutes in London, spring from my class, and are made by and under pretty much such conditions of life as I have narrated, and particularly by untutored and unrestrained intercourse of the sexes in early life. We come from the dregs of society, as our so-called betters term it. What business has society to have dregs—such dregs as we? You railers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourselves and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves? [. . .]

What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is—the shame you mean? I conduct myself prudently, and defy you and your policemen too. Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality? Will you make us responsible for what we never knew? Teach us what is right and tutor us in what is good before you punish us for doing wrong. We who are the real prostitutes of the true natural growth of society, and no impostors, will not be judged by ‘One more unfortunate’, nor measured by any standard of her setting up. She is a mere chance intruder in our ranks, and has no business there. She does understand what shame means and knows all about it, at least so it seems, and if she has a particle left, let her accept ‘Amicus’s’ kind offer as soon as possible.

Like ‘One more unfortunate’ there are other intruders among us—a few, very few, ‘victims of seduction’. But [seduction] is not the root of the evil—scarcely a fibre of the root. A rigorous law should be passed and rigorously carried out to punish seduction, but it will not perceptibly thin the ranks of prostitution. Seduction is the common story of numbers of well brought up, who never were seduced, and who are voluntary and inexcusable profligates. Vanity and idleness send us a large body of recruits. Servant girls, who wish to ape their mistress’ finery, and whose wages won’t permit them to do so honestly—these set up seduction as their excuse. Married women, who have no respect for their husbands, and are not content with their lawful earnings, these are the worst among us, and it is a pity they cannot be picked out and punished. They have no principle of any kind and are a disgrace to us. If I were a married woman I would be true to my husband. I speak for my class, the regular standing army of the force.

Gentlemen of philanthropic societies and members of the Society for the Suppression of Vice may build reformatories and open houses of refuge and Magdalen asylums, and ‘Amicus’ may save occasionally a ‘fallen sister’ who can prevail on herself to be saved; but we who never were sisters—who never had any relationship, part, interest, or communion with the large family of this world’s virtues, moralities, and proprieties— we, who are not fallen, but were always down—who never had any virtue to lose—we who are the natural growth of things, and are constantly ripening for the harvest—who, interspersed in our little, but swarming colonies throughout the kingdom at large, hold the source of supply and keep it fruitful—what do they propose to do with us? Cannot society devise some plan to reach us?

‘One more unfortunate’ proposes a ‘skimming’ progress. But what of the great bubbling cauldron? Remove from the streets a score or two of ‘foreign women’, and ‘double as many English’, and you diminish the competition of those that remain; the quiet, clever, cunning cajolers described by ‘One more unfortunate’. You hide a prurient pimple of the ‘great sin’ with a patch of that plaster known as the ‘observance of propriety’, and nothing more. You ‘miss’ the evil, but it is existent still. After all it is something to save the eye from offence, so remove them; and not only a score or two, but something like two hundred foreign women, whose open and disgusting indecencies and practices have contributed more than anything else to bring on our heads the present storm of indignation. It is rare that English women, even prostitutes, give cause of gross public offence. Cannot they be packed off to their own countries with their base, filthy and filthy-living men, whom they maintain, and clothe, and feed, to superintend their fortunes, and who are a still greater disgrace to London than these women are?

Hurling big figures at us, it is said that there are 80,000 of us in London alone—which is a monstrous falsehood—and of those 80,000, poor hardworking sewing girls, sewing women, are numbered in by thousands, and called indiscriminately prostitutes; writing, preaching, speechifying, that they have lost their virtue too.

It is a cruel calumny to call them in mass prostitutes; and, as for their virtue, they lose it as one loses his watch who is robbed by the highway thief. Their virtue is the watch, and society is the thief. These poor women toiling on starvation wages, while penury, misery, and famine clutch them by the throat and say, ‘Render up your body or die’.

Admire this magnificent shop in this fashionable street; its front, fittings, and decorations cost no less than a thousand pounds. The respectable master of the establishment keeps his carriage and lives in his country-house. He has daughters too; his patronesses are fine ladies, the choicest impersonations of society. Do they think, as they admire the taste and elegance of that tradesman’s show, of the poor creatures who wrought it, and what they were paid for it? Do they reflect on the weary toiling fingers, on the eyes dim with watching, on the bowels yearning with hunger, on the bended frames, on the broken constitutions, on poor human nature driven to its coldest corner and reduced to its narrowest means in the production of these luxuries and adornments? This is an old story! Would it not be truer and more charitable to call these poor souls ‘victims’?—some gentler, some more humane name than prostitute—to soften by some Christian expression if you cannot better the un-Christian system, the opprobrium of a fate to which society has driven them by the direst straits? What business has society to point its finger in scorn, to raise its voice in reprobation of them? Are they not its children, born of the cold indifference, of its callous selfishness, of its cruel pride?

Sir, I have trespassed on your patience beyond limit, and yet much remains to be said [. . . The difficulty of dealing with the evil is not so great as society considers it. Setting aside ‘the sin’, we are not so bad as we are thought to be. The difficulty is for society to set itself, with the necessary earnestness, self-humiliation, and self-denial, to the work. To deprive us of proper and harmless amusements, to subject us in mass to the pressure of force—of force wielded, for the most part, by ignorant, and often by brutal men—is only to add the cruelty of active persecution to the cruelty of passive indifference which made us as we are.

I remain, your humble servant,

Another Unfortunate.

LETTER 04

TO MY EVER-LOVING WIFE

Don to his wife

1 April 1968

On 1 April 1968, a British gentleman named Don fed a sheet of London Borough of Hounslow stationery into a typewriter and wrote a letter to his wife.

THE LETTER

LONDON BOROUGH OF HOUNSLOW

1st April, 1968

To my ever-loving wife,

During the past year I have attempted to seduce you 365 times. I succeeded 36 times.

This averages once every 10 days and the following is the list of reasons why I did not succeed:

We will wake your mother: 7 times

It is too hot: 15 times

It is too cold: 3 times

Too tired: 19 times

Too late: 16 times

Too early: 9 times

Pretending to sleep: 35 times

Window open, neighbours will hear: 3 times

Backache: 16 times

Toothache: 2 times

Headache: 6 times

Not in the mood: 21 times

Will make the cat jealous: 18 times

Watched late show: 12 times

Mud-pack: 3 times

Grease on face: 4 times

Too drunk: 17 times

Company in the next room: 7 times

Mind my hair: 28 times

Is that all you think about? 83 times

Do you think we can improve on our record this coming year?

Your ever-loving husband,

Don

‘DO YOU THINK WE

CAN IMPROVE ON

OUR RECORD THIS

COMING YEAR?’

– Don

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