In Liza of Lambeth, Maugham draws on his own experiences as a trainee doctor who would frequently be called to attend on people in the poorer areas of London.  Liza is an eighteen year old factory worker who enjoys dancing, drinking, wearing new clothes and generally living life to the full.  She lives with her aging mother, walks out with Tom and spends time with her friend Sally.  All this changes when a new family move in to the street and the father, the much older Jim Blakestone, starts paying attention to Liza.  Even though Jim is married, Liza finds herself unable to resist him and so begins her downfall.

Like Up at the Villa which I read earlier last year, this book is not at all the sort of book that it seems to be from the first chapter, which is so full of stereotypical cockney merriment and hijinks that I half expected Dick van Dyke to pop up and start performing a song and dance routine.  However, it does not take long for Maugham to reveal the hard reality of the daily lives of the inhabitants of Vere Street, in which all men beat their wives, women fight each other, and death is an ever-present possibility.  None of the characters ever seem particularly unhappy with their lot in life, facing their relative poverty with equanimity and good cheer, prosaically discussing the practicalities of having insured a person as they lie dying or excusing their husbands’ violence as just being down to drink.  Of course, this makes it all the more heart-breaking and shocking to read as a modern reader or even a Victorian reader of a higher class with different expectations of what life should be like.

There were two things that I found irritating in this book (although do remember that I was predisposed to be irritated anyway).  The first is Maugham’s attempt to reproduce a cockney accent in his writing.  Although it is usually possible to work out what characters were saying, unlike in some books where attempts at written accents make a character’s speech virtually unintelligible (Lorna Doone, I’m looking at you), it is rather grating.  I know Maugham wants to stop readers from imagining the inhabitants of Vere Street speaking in perfect RP, but this is already implied through vocabulary choice and the accent reproduction was a step too far for me.  The other thing was Liza and Jim’s relationship, which Maugham makes no attempt to explain.  The attraction for older, married Jim is obvious, but why does Liza fall in love with him?  She knows he is married with a daughter only a few years younger than her, she knows he beats his wife, she knows he gets drunk and yet still she goes with him.  When Liza is first introduced, she is such a feisty and opinionated character that I expected her to slap Jim and screech at him when she first feels him surreptitiously stroking her leg as he sits beside her in the cart, but she keeps quiet at the time and later lets him follow her home and kiss her.  Perhaps her downfall is supposed to seem all the more tragic because her love is inexplicable and illogical, but I personally found it too unbelievable.

I would have probably enjoyed this book more had I not read the introduction first, not because Maugham gives away anything of the story but because the writing in it out-classes that of the actual story completely.  The introduction is far more polished, professional and engaging and I found it more interesting than the story itself.  Liza of Lambeth was Maugham’s first novel, written when he was only twenty-three, and the introduction in the Vintage edition of the book was written for a retrospective collection of his works when he was a much older man with a much better developed writing style, so the discrepancy is entirely understandable.  Nevertheless, the comparison that it invites is not favourable and so this is another introduction which would be better moved to the end of the book, I think.

Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham.  Published by Vintage, 2000, pp. 139.  Originally published in 1897.

Rubenhold’s edition starts out with an informative and interesting introduction which puts the List into its historical context.  Harris’s List was not written by a man named Harris at all, but by an Irish poet named Samuel Derrick who had fallen on hard times and needed to find a way to keep himself out of debtor’s prison.  Jack Harris was a notorious London pimp who allowed Derrick the use of his influential name and his extensive list of contacts in return for a one time fee, and so he only became bitter while Derrick became increasingly wealthy.

The entries on each girl provide a surprising amount of detail, and they are often miniature character studies rather than just bawdy adverts promising pleasures.  Obviously there is physical description and a summary of which particular tastes a girl caters to along with her prices (as a rule, the more specialised the tastes, the higher the price) but there are also details such as how she came into ‘the public life‘ as the List euphemistically terms it.  In some cases, the writer expresses sympathy for a girl who has been led astray by a man and is forced to turn to this particular line of work, as in the case of Miss Char-ton:

This is an old observation, but certainly a true one, that some of the finest women in England are those, who go under the denomination of ladies of easy virtue.  Miss C- is a particular instance of the assertion; she came of reputable parents, bred delicately, and her education far superior to the vulgar; yet the address of a designing villain, too soon found means to ruin her; forsaken by friends, pursued by shame and necessity; she had no other alternative, than to turn -, let the reader guess what.  – She was long a favourite among the great, but some misconduct of hers, not to be accounted for, reduced to the servile and detestable state of turning common.  She is a fine figure, tall and genteel, has a fair round face, with a faint tinge of that bloom she once possessed, is rather melancholy, ’till inspired with a glass, and then is very entertaining company.  (pp. 56-57)

In others, girls appear to bring about their own falls through their lusty natures and to thoroughly enjoy doing so, like Miss Jo-es:

This lady was born in the country, but the circumstances of her parents, when she was sufficiently grown up, obliged them to send her into London to get a livelihood, she was not long before she got a place in St. James’s Market, where, whither, by being accustomed to see the poor lambs bleed, or rather a desire of becoming a sacrifice to the goddess of love, is left for the reader to judge, but she was shortly found stabbed to the heart in the most tender and susceptible part of her body, in short she was unable to withstand the powerful impulse of nature any longer, so was ravished with her own consent, at the age of sixteen; her mistress on the discovery, thought proper to send her going, for fear her good man should take it in his head to kill the lamb over again.  She began now to show the bent of her inclinations, she listed under the banners of Cupid, and marched at the head, being of a courageous disposition, and always ready to obey standing orders, she had great success, and often made the enemy to yield, by which means she gained no inconsiderable share of spoil, but her charitable disposition, (being always ready to relieve the naked and needy) soon reduced her. (pp. 69-70)

As you can see, this book contains euphemisms a-plenty.  At times it felt like reading one of Shakespeare’s dirtier plays, the amount of veiled references to sex, body parts, prostitutes and plenty of less orthodox sex acts there were.  As a social and cultural historian this must be a fascinating book to examine.

However, it might not come as a shock to learn that I am not a jolly Georgian gentleman out looking for a good time, and so consequently a lot of these descriptions started to blur into one after a while.  They were interesting, and the book itself is fascinating because of what it is, but there were just too many of them without anything to break them up for it to be a riveting read.  In the final section of the book which looks at excerpts from outside 1793 the girls are grouped together by type (red heads, foreign beauties, buxom etc.) and I think I might have enjoyed it more had the whole book been arranged like this with some sort of commentary from the author accompanying each section.  I know Rubenhold has written two other books on the subject: The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List and The Harlot’s Handbook, both of which sound as though they are more along those lines, using the List as a means of illustrating a point rather than as the raison d’etre of the book.  I’ll definitely be on the lookout for these as this has proven to be an unexpectedly fascinating topic.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain by Hallie Rubenhold.  Published by Tempus, 2005, pp. 158.  First edition.

As the title suggests, the book is a fictionalised diary of fifteen months in the life of an ordinary man .  Mr Charles Pooter is a middle class man, living in a typical London suburb, who works at a bank.  As he goes about his daily life, his aspirations are constantly frustrated by his troubles with his workmates, his layabout son, the tradespeople and the blasted scraper outside his door.

The aspect of this book that I enjoyed best was definitely Mr Pooter himself.  In spite of his pompous manner, his ineffectual nature, his jokes that fall flat and his highly inflated opinion of himself, I found him somehow endearing.  I rarely sympathised with him, he often frustrated me, but I liked him nonetheless.  His ill-advised notions (perhaps most delightfully deciding to paint everything with red enamel paint, leading to a rather bloody-looking bath after it dissolves in the hot water) often had me giggling.  His constantly frustrated narration is rather entertaining:

By-the-by, I will never choose another cloth pattern at night.  I ordered a new suit of dittos for the garden at Edwards’, and chose the pattern by gaslight, and they seemed to be a quiet pepper-and-salt mixture with white stripes down. They came home this morning, and, to my horror, I found it was quite a flash-looking suit.  There was a lot of green with bright yellow-coloured stripes.

I tried on the coat, and was annoyed to find Carrie giggling.  She said: “What mixture did you say you asked for?”

I said: “A quiet pepper-and-salt.”

Carrie said: “Well, it looks more like mustard, if you want to know the truth.”

How interesting that the Victorians evidently said “pepper and salt” instead of “salt and pepper” as I always hear it nowadays.  The things you learn from books.

I also appreciated the fact that not every entry was intended to be funny, which made it feel more like a real diary, with someone just recording the mundane things that had happened that day.  Often these entries provided build up to an amusing anecdote, but it nonetheless adds a flavour of realism to an otherwise comic novel.

Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith, illustrated by Weedon Grossmith.  Published by Pan, 1947, pp. 171.  Originally published in 1892