The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List Read Online Free
Author: Hallie Rubenhold
paternal gesture, Harris senior reached for his pen and committed his instructions to paper. In his ‘Wholesome Advice to His Son for His Conduct in Life’, he summarised those thoughts he had expressed to his child as they sat together in his cell. Harris senior reminded his boy that as he had no fortune, a conventional education would be of no use to him. At any rate, it was his experience that there was ‘nothing so great an obstacle to getting money as learning’. ‘No, no my son’, he continued, ‘I have taken care to prepare you for quite another employment’:
Would you get money, my son – study men’s passions; ply them. Is a man ambitious of fame – go through thick and thin, to make him the greatest patriot that ever existed; but be sure of your reward before you give the finishing stroke to his reputation. Does he love wenching – pimping is a thriving calling, it must be orthodox, or some who do would not possess it. Does he want a seat in the House – vote for him, bribe for him, swear for him; there is no harm in all this. A scrupulous man, indeed may object to an oath because it is false, but it may be true; read it not, and then you can not tell which it is, and they administer it so fast that you can not understand it, even if you would. If your patron loves Play, learn dexterity of Hand and cheat as much as you can; take care, do not be detected, if you are, swear and bluster, challenge, fight and kill, and then your honour is retrieved. This is done every day with success; there is nothing washes off the slur of infamy, but the man’s blood you have offended! Let no scruple of your conscience preponderate with you; to thrive in this world, a man must not have a grain of that commodity.
Although shocked at first by his father’s recommendations, Jack Harris eventually came to understand the logic in it. It was a message touched with poignancy, one that had been placed in his hand upon his father’s death.
In death, Harris senior had left his family nothing but the prospect of starvation. He had also laid the seeds of vice in his eldest son. Armed with his father’s advice, which he ‘looked upon as my only personal estate’, Jack plunged himself headlong into a career of criminality. In order to gain the confidence of society, his first act was to appear convincing. With the appropriate attire and gait, Harris assumed the respectable persona of a gentleman, ‘without any other pretensions to that rank, but impudence and ignorance; which indeed make so great of the modern man’s accomplishments’. Unfortunately, he admitted, it required some trial and error before he alighted upon his true calling. In the first instance, he looked into becoming a political bully, one who lived by the extraction of bribes. For this purpose, he states that he ‘took a house in Westminster in hopes of making my fortune by elections; but no general one soon ensuing, I was obliged to lay aside, with my house, all my hopes upon that score’. Harris then tried his luck as a cardsharp, teaching himself how to ‘cheat at play’, but sighed that, ‘having no head for calculations and no knowledge of figures, it was of little avail to me.’ It was sometime shortly thereafter that he realised where his true talents lay. With a flattering, obsequious bent to his personality, his destined path unfurled before him. ‘Nature’, he announced quite frankly, ‘designed me for a pimp’.
This was Harris’s sad tale. Those who read it when it featured as part of
The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray
would have been quite taken in by the narrator’s earnestness. It was a history that suited his identity well; it added flesh to the bones of his legend. But as Jack Harris generally preferred to lead his life unobtrusively, lingering behind the dim yellow light of the tavern candles rather than in the full blaze of public view, these few snippets were all that most of his clients ever learned of him. Only a select
Would you get money, my son – study men’s passions; ply them. Is a man ambitious of fame – go through thick and thin, to make him the greatest patriot that ever existed; but be sure of your reward before you give the finishing stroke to his reputation. Does he love wenching – pimping is a thriving calling, it must be orthodox, or some who do would not possess it. Does he want a seat in the House – vote for him, bribe for him, swear for him; there is no harm in all this. A scrupulous man, indeed may object to an oath because it is false, but it may be true; read it not, and then you can not tell which it is, and they administer it so fast that you can not understand it, even if you would. If your patron loves Play, learn dexterity of Hand and cheat as much as you can; take care, do not be detected, if you are, swear and bluster, challenge, fight and kill, and then your honour is retrieved. This is done every day with success; there is nothing washes off the slur of infamy, but the man’s blood you have offended! Let no scruple of your conscience preponderate with you; to thrive in this world, a man must not have a grain of that commodity.
Although shocked at first by his father’s recommendations, Jack Harris eventually came to understand the logic in it. It was a message touched with poignancy, one that had been placed in his hand upon his father’s death.
In death, Harris senior had left his family nothing but the prospect of starvation. He had also laid the seeds of vice in his eldest son. Armed with his father’s advice, which he ‘looked upon as my only personal estate’, Jack plunged himself headlong into a career of criminality. In order to gain the confidence of society, his first act was to appear convincing. With the appropriate attire and gait, Harris assumed the respectable persona of a gentleman, ‘without any other pretensions to that rank, but impudence and ignorance; which indeed make so great of the modern man’s accomplishments’. Unfortunately, he admitted, it required some trial and error before he alighted upon his true calling. In the first instance, he looked into becoming a political bully, one who lived by the extraction of bribes. For this purpose, he states that he ‘took a house in Westminster in hopes of making my fortune by elections; but no general one soon ensuing, I was obliged to lay aside, with my house, all my hopes upon that score’. Harris then tried his luck as a cardsharp, teaching himself how to ‘cheat at play’, but sighed that, ‘having no head for calculations and no knowledge of figures, it was of little avail to me.’ It was sometime shortly thereafter that he realised where his true talents lay. With a flattering, obsequious bent to his personality, his destined path unfurled before him. ‘Nature’, he announced quite frankly, ‘designed me for a pimp’.
This was Harris’s sad tale. Those who read it when it featured as part of
The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray
would have been quite taken in by the narrator’s earnestness. It was a history that suited his identity well; it added flesh to the bones of his legend. But as Jack Harris generally preferred to lead his life unobtrusively, lingering behind the dim yellow light of the tavern candles rather than in the full blaze of public view, these few snippets were all that most of his clients ever learned of him. Only a select
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