Landladies under attack
Georgian gossip-mongers preyed on women who let out rooms
Eighteenth-century lodgers were drawn from all parts of the social spectrum – from milliners to celebrated composers to future founding fathers of the United States. But what about the people who put them up?
Many Georgian landlords and landladies came from the middle class of professionals: shopkeepers and skilled artisans in “clean” occupations such as the manufacture of clothing.
Among married couples it was often the wife who managed the lodgers. It was work similar to wifely housekeeping responsibilities: caring for a family, cleaning the house, and buying, preparing and serving food.
Yet not all landladies were married, and not all came from the “middling” sort. Many were single or widowed, and undertook these tasks not from love and Christian duty, but for money. And that often came at a price.
Inviting strangers into the home – and turning that home into a business – was dangerous for Georgian women’s reputations, and opened them up to all manner of ridicule and vilification.
If the stranger-lodgers were female, her home could be misinterpreted as a brothel, with her the “madame” and her lodgers sex workers. If they were male, the relationship was open to sexual innuendo.
Novels, plays and prints exploited these landlady stereotypes. In Frances Burney’s play The Witlings, landlady Mrs Voluble is a nosy gossip, rifling through her lodger’s room the minute he goes out. In Samuel Richardson’s popular novel Clarissa, the heroine is lured to West End lodgings that prove to be a brothel run by sinister bawd Mrs Sinclair.
These cultural attitudes affected how lodgers, especially men, perceived real-life landladies. They were angry if they failed to provide caring services gratis. (Samuel Curwen complained when his landlady
Mrs Atwood, of -nightsbridge, went out for the day when he was suffering the after-effects of an enema for his constipation.) They also regarded landladies, their daughters and maidservants as sexually available. One landlord, a Mr Malton of Chelsea, caught his lodger, William Hickey, creeping downstairs after lights out to join their 16-year-old daughter in her bed.
When relationships soured, higher-status lodgers, like Boswell and Curwen, were snobbishly abusive. Society’s harshest judgment came in the reaction to the 1761 murder of Anne -ing by her lodger, the Swiss miniaturist Théodore Gardelle. -ing was very much the victim in this episode. Yet she received little sympathy from the popular press, which portrayed her as “showy”, and exhibited a gleeful preoccupation with her “gentlemen callers”.