Harlot Economics: What's the House Cut?

[nodorothyparker]

All of our specific discussion of harlot economics can go here.  

Lucy negotiated 500 pounds a year from Lord Fallon this season after she was offered 400 last year.  Charlotte rejected the Marquess's offer for 600 pounds a year after spending one night with him for 100 guineas.  So what are the economics of this?  This is starting to feel like a dirty word problem.

[OtterMommy]

I found a currency converter to help!

This show is set in 1763, so using that link:

Lucy's 500 pounds a year would be worth $101,620.58

Charlotte's 600 pounds a year would be worth $121,944.70

I had to do more googling for the guineas because, even with my degree in British History, I have no clue what those are (they are 21 shillings.  Now, what is 21 shillings...)

Okay, so 1 guinea = 21 shillings and there are 20 shillings in a pound (yeesh, with math like this, it is no wonder they lost the colonies!).  100 guineas would be 2100 shillings, which would be 105 pounds.  Is that right?  If so, that means the Marquess spent $21,340.32 for one night with Charlotte.

[Riplet68]

Charlotte is in a position where she can reject most offers.  Quigley lets her keep everything she owns, plus pays her room, board and clothes.

Edited July 30, 2018 by Riplet68
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[OtterMommy]

4 minutes ago, Riplet68 said:

Charlotte is in a position where she can reject most offers.  Quigley lets her keep everything she owns, plus pays her room, board and clothes.

Charlotte is in a very unique situation, not only for the reasons that you mentioned but also because if she loses her place with Quigley, she can always return to Margaret.  However, as we saw, she can't reject ALL offers--while she was able to up her nightly rate for the Marquess, she wasn't able to ultimately reject him.  But then, Charlotte has chosen to become a pawn in a game of chess that everyone knows they are playing and I'm sure she recognizes that her "freedom" comes at a great risk.

But, thinking about those numbers before, I realize it really does need some context.  For this, it is probably best to take Charlotte out of the equation.  So, not considering her case, the numbers aren't as actually high as they look.  The overhead is incredibly high in this business. First off, the madam takes the bulk of the money (and it sounds like Lucy is giving all her money to her mother).  That would make it sound like the madams are making out like bandits, but that isn't the case.

We know that Margaret is renting her house and it is a step up from where she was before when she was getting Charlotte's money from her previous "situation."  It sounds like Quigley owns her own house, but I'm guessing she either owes money on it OR paid on it for quite some time.  Both homes require upkeep--Margaret needs new windows and Quigley needs her carpet cleaned, for example.  Plus, you know, I'm sure the laundry bill is enormous--even in a time when hygiene isn't what it is today.  Quigley also has servants in her employ and, I'm sure there is also some sort of security force (Margaret's would be North).

There is also the costs of entertaining.  Both madams throw parties (although Quigley's seem to happen on a nightly basis), and there is no small expense to that.  And they have to dress their girls and those dresses are not inexpensive.  They also have to feed their girls and anyone else who is living in the house.  This is also way before the age of insurance so if anything happens to the girls--they get a cold to they get knifed--the money to care for them has to come out of pocket.  There probably also needs to be some cash on hand for unexpected things, like getting arrested for solicitation and then being accused of murder.  

All this and I bet that isn't even the tip of the iceberg of expenses!

[nodorothyparker]

This is where it becomes highly relevant that when Quigley was arrested, she didn't have the 500 pounds cash necessary to get herself out of jail despite all her finery and the trappings of Golden Square.  Neither did anyone else who might have at least been willing to pay it should they have had it.  Mrs. May didn't have it, for example, and she seems to be living comfortably enough.  I think we were supposed to think last season that Charlotte was living pretty luxuriously on Howard's dime but after his murder when Marney wanted to pool resources and flee to the Colonies, she didn't have any cash money or much of anything but the dress on her back either.

I remember reading once when discussing the economics of Jane Austen novels that direct conversions pre-Industrial Revolution to now can be misleading as servants and manual labor came relatively cheap while material goods were substantially more expensive because everything was handmade and labor intensive.  Lots of people as they tried to climb the economic ladder were what would be considered cash poor for all those reasons.

[snowwhyte]

So we know how much the higher quality courtesan are getting the question now is how much is someone like Fanny or Kitty making? Nancy offers a speciality service, does she charge more?

[OtterMommy]

2 hours ago, snowwhyte said:

So we know how much the higher quality courtesan are getting the question now is how much is someone like Fanny or Kitty making? Nancy offers a speciality service, does she charge more?

We've seen the men pay in coin for them (and a few coins at that), so not much.  Nancy is a free agent and she has her own residence (I doubt she owns it, but she's not sleeping in an alley somewhere).  My guess is she charges slightly more, but her client pool is limited.

[nodorothyparker]

There was an argument an episode or two back over whether Emily's cut from Harriet was one or two guineas per cull.  It looked like she had more than two coins in her hand but not a lot more.  When Cherry joins the house, she says she would expect to earn 10 shillings per customer in a house like Emily's, but they never mention 10 shillings out of how much total. 

Another number from last season's finale that I just came across that pertains to this conversation:  Emily demands Quigley give her a "deed to one of your houses" and 100 pounds for her silence on Quigley trying to sacrifice her to the Spartans' murder club.  So while it's great that they're apparently not paying rent, beyond any pocket money she and Charles have that's all she's starting out with in trying to set up her own establishment.  For some reason, I remembered it as more.  No wonder that by the beginning of this season she tells Charles that "Mama's money's gone" and that's why she's back to servicing the clientele herself and feeling the pressure of needing to get other women working for her and giving her a cut.

[nodorothyparker]

Episode 5 gives us another clue to London economics and how many of these women probably ended up as harlots in the first place.  Quigley and Charlotte are surveying women looking for work as part of Quigley's virgin hunt and when Charlotte points out that they're looking for "honest jobs," presumably as house maids or performing other manual labor women would be allowed to do, Quigley responds "Who wants to be a drudge for 6 pounds a year when they could live in splendor in Golden Square?"  

This website suggests that aforementioned 6 pounds a fairly accurate number for a house servant.  Now compare that to amounts we've heard on the show, from half a pound to a pound or more per average throw even after the bawd takes her cut.

[snowwhyte]

Thinking about the terrible options available to women at that time does put a more positive light on how far we've come with women's rights. There's still work to be done obviously but I am very glad to have options beyond housewife, servant or prostitute.

I do wonder which I would choose. I am too reserved to be a harlot, too independent to be a housewife and too lazy to be a servant. Maybe servant would be the best option because at least then you don't have to pop out a bunch of kids without pain relief.

[OtterMommy]

1 hour ago, nodorothyparker said:

This website suggests that aforementioned 6 pounds a fairly accurate number for a house servant.  Now compare that to amounts we've heard on the show, from half a pound to a pound or more per average throw even after the bawd takes her cut.

 

I think we also need to figure into account that the fact that a housemaid had nearly all of her expenses paid (and it was common--as it was in the case in the show--that the money would be sent home to support her family).  True, the bawds are paying most of the upkeep for their girls--if a prostitute is "lucky" enough to find a place in a house--but it isn't exactly a job that you can leave.  Once you are a prostitute, you are pretty much stuck in that world.  You might be able to open your own house at some point, or you might be fortunate enough to be kept and then move from benefactor to benefactor.  But, once you enter that life, there really is no going back.  While there definitely were movements to reform prostitutes, usually once a woman was a prostitute, she would never be a part of mainstream society.

A maid, on the other hand, can always return home or marry or whatnot.  She also was not putting herself in danger of venereal disease or violence (unless she had a less than desirable position).

I came across this article which I think covers a lot of what we are talking about here.

[aradia22]

Quote

So we know how much the higher quality courtesan are getting the question now is how much is someone like Fanny or Kitty making? Nancy offers a speciality service, does she charge more?

Betsey first charged 5 shillings and then 8 when John needed to buy her forgiveness as well for refusing to walk with her during the raid to help keep her safe. The girls on the street usually name similar figures.

Harriet got 4 guineas when she was Dido but in a later episode, Quigley told one of the men that it was 3 guineas for each girl. I suppose we can just assume all the girls in Margaret's or Lydia's employ bring in similar numbers because it wouldn't make sense to charge all that differently for girls in the same house. Who knows how much of their money they get to keep. Season 1 made it seem like Quigley's girls were always paying their debt and didn't keep anything. I'm going to guess that the unique nature of Nancy's service means that it would be particularly bad if it were discovered so she gets paid a little more than the average harlot for her discretion. However, she does operate out of Covent Garden so I don't think she could charge as much as the other two. But who knows?

[nodorothyparker]

After this first episode of season 3, I'm stuck on the fact that Golden Square was sold for 600 pounds.  We know from the discussions above that comes out to around $122,000 in today's money, which to be fair is a lot of cash money for these women all used to dealing in much smaller sums.  But it feels a little low given all we've seen and heard about the "splendor of Golden Square."  I'm having a tough time finding out what average house prices in London would have been at the time for comparison.  Great houses seem to have been sold or built for much more, although I suppose its infamy as a brothel would probably drop the price a fair bit.

Emily settled with her new keeper for 25 pounds a week, which if she manages to make that work longterm puts her ahead of what Lucy and Charlotte were earlier offered as courtesans.  Even his initial offer of a weekly 10 pounds comes out to about $1,800 a week, considerably more than many working people were making at the time.  That's a lot of money to be throwing around for a guy having sex in a common tavern.  

[aradia22]

Quote

But it feels a little low given all we've seen and heard about the "splendor of Golden Square."

A quick search on Google Maps makes me think that maybe there were just huge jumps in the pricing based on the neighborhood. Usually in period novels, Mayfair is the neighborhood of choice for a wealthy. But it's not that far from Golden Square. Which is not that far from Greek Street. All three are roughly equidistant. So maybe we can just assume that each neighborhood means the modern equivalent of jumping into a different tax bracket?

[heckkitty]

I suspect the price for Golden Square was low because Charles ran it into the ground.  

[chaifan]

Charles ran the business into the ground, not necessarily the property.  I was also surprised that it sold for 600 pounds ($122,000 US in today's money).  This seems to me to be more of a $1millon property, at least.  Yes, it was sold at today's equivalent of a foreclosure auction, and it was a brothel, but even taking that into account, 600 pounds seems very low.  Likewise, Lydia's bail of 500 pounds seemed inordinately high.

Someone posted some conversions above, and using the currency converter from that link (but rounding a bit to make math easier) here is a breakdown of shillings & guineas:

1 pound = $200 in 2019

20 shillings to a pound, so 1 shilling = $1

21 shillings to a guinea, so 1 guinea = $21

Using these (rough) figures and figures from some of the posts above, Quigley's girls made 3-4 guineas per customer, or $60-$80.  Cherry wanted 10 shillings, $10, per customer at Emily's.  Betsy and the "girls on the street" charge 5 shillings, or $5. 

Here's a link on cost of living in the mid-1700's.  A few items I thought were interesting:

Dinner in a Steakhouse - 1 shilling

Daily pay for a journeyman tailor - 2 shilling

Weekly wage for unskilled labor - 9 shilling

Monthly wage for a seaman - 1 3/4 pound

"Cost of a night out, including supper, a bath and a fashionable courtesan" - 6 pounds

http://footguards.tripod.com/08HISTORY/08_costofliving.htm

[chaifan]

From Season 3, Episode 3:

Harriet makes 5 guineas (about $100) if she takes a customer.  (As house bawd she normally doesn't take customers, so this is a special service.)  This fee helps cover house expenses and her son's school.

Fredo makes 5 guineas for a "regular" customer. 

Edited August 4, 2019 by chaifan

[chaifan]

From Season 3, Episode 4:

Lydia pimps out Kate to the Prince for 50 guineas, so around $1,000.  But Mrs. May takes it all.  That seemed a bit extreme to me - Mrs. May is housing them, etc., but in no way would she be able to justify the full 50 guineas as her take.