It’s the Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure
Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw
Theatr Clwyd, 1995
Prostitution had been the world’s oldest profession long before Shelley coined the term. Throughout the 19th century, as industrialisation forced more and more people into the cities, the number of women drawn into the trade mounted irregularly but inexorably. Although exact figures were hard to compute, official estimates put the number of prostitutes in London in 1820 at six and a half thousand. By the 1880s this figure has risen to at least 80,000, at a time when the population od the capital as a whole numbered some 2,362,000.
Everyone knew it went on and most men who could afford to do so, indulged themselves as a matter of course. The business made society stars of certain grandes horizontals like Lilly Langtry and Catherine (‘Skittles’) Walters. Printed guides were circulated listing addresses where tableaux vivants and poses plaatiques could be views, and notices in public places like parks and railway stations, no less than in the pages of the popular press, advertised available services in terms that still sound familiar today: “massage rooms”, “baths”, “foreign language schools”. Further down the social scale, working class men picked up streetwalkers or ‘motts’, who would either be full-time professionals or part-time skivvies trying to eke out the minuscule wages they earned from factory work, waitressing, or a hundred other menial trades It was these latter who roused the greatest indignation among the social reformers, and these towards whom they directed their greatest efforts.
Not that they had an easy task. Even earnest reformers like the Christian Socialist minister Stewart Headlam were aware of the inadequacy of preaching “virtue is its own reward” to poverty-stricken young girls struggling to remain decent on a pittance while all around them those who strayed, strode or were snatched off the straight and narrow could at least look forward to a decent bit of clothing and the promise of regular meals. Even those who sought help were frequently unwilling or unable to liken their present debauched circumstances to the simple fact of economic need. General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had it from the girls themselves that only two in a hundred went on the streets as a direct result of poverty; the vast majority claimed they were only there due to the effects of drink, early seduction, or simply choice as an ‘easy’ way out of the gutter. However, the girls might well have been telling him what they suspected he wanted to hear in order to elicit the maximum amount of aid from his Rescue Homes. Havelock Ellis at the start of this century concluded, even more short-sightedly, that “love of pleasure”, “vanity and laziness”, “greed for sweets” and even “love of company” were the major contributing factors to a life lived as the chattel of uncaring men.
Shaw had no doubts. He cited simple economic necessity as the fundamental and overriding reason for any girl to go on the streets. In the famous Preface he wrote to the first published edition of Mrs Warrn’s Profession in 1898, he declared “Prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.” And he went on to make the point that there are various kinds of prostitution: “No normal woman would be a professional prostitute if she could better herself by being respectable, nor marry for money if she could afford to marry for love.” (my italics)
Benjamin Scott was I the forefront of the campaign to get the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed in an attempt to curb the insidious influence of the trade, particularly as it related to children. (As the law stood, it amounted to little more than a charter for paedophiles and rapists. Any girl of thirteen was considered legally competent to give her consent to sexual acts, while no girl under eight could testify in court as she would be deemed incapable of understanding the nature of the oath.) The Amendment was particularly needful in view of the fact that the younger and fresher the girl, the more attractive a proposition she would be, considering the roll the business inevitably took on girls’ physical appearance and, eventually, character. For their part, brothel-keepers frequently found it to their advantage to play the part of substitute mother to youngster who, paradoxically, might find themselves being treated solicitously for the first time in their lives. The fact that they had to make themselves available for sex with strangers in return for such ‘privileges’ was seen by many to be a small price to pay.
For some, too, it was the only chance they would ever get to travel. There was a well-documented white slave traffic between Britain and the continent, and brothel chains were organised on an international scale. Procurers would tempt girls from their homes with the promise of, say, a career on the stage, then ship them abroad for “training and experience”.
But even for those not directly involved in the business there were profits to be made. William Thomas Stead wrote a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette ostensibly to expose the ease with which minors could be removes and corrupted. Posing as a client in one instance, he was able to “purchase” a child of thirteen for £5. The articles caused a sensation and made Stead famous – which had been the idea all along. Such tabloid-style journalism was as popular then as it is now – moral indignation masking prurient interest – and even though Stead was later accused of over-enthusiasm in the way he pursued his researches (eventually serving two months in jail for abducting a child to Paris without her father’s consent), his exposes did at least contribute to a change in the law. IN 1885, Parliament raised the age of consent to sixteen, at the same time making procurement a criminal offence.
But making the practice illegal was one thing, enforcing the ban was quite another. Collusion and hypocrisy were the twin fertilisers that kept the trade flourishing. On the domestic front the age-old double standard of one moral law for men and another for women was so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that few had the courage – or the time or the means or the energy – to contest it. Yet the business ultimately could not have kept going so profitably without the continuing support of the authorities. Both police and highly-placed officials in public life turned a blind eye, or became heavily involved themselves, protected by their social position. Shaw in his play was to make certain such figures of rectitude did not escape criticism. Both church and state in unholy alliance in an unholy trade are firmly implicated, each seen to be as bad as the other. The Preface again: “I desired to expose the fact that prostitution is not only carried on without organisation by individual enterprise in the lodgings of solitary women, each her own mistress as well as every customer’s mistress, but organised and exploited as a big international commerce for the profit of capitalists like any other commerce, and very lucrative to great city estates, including Church estates, through the rents of the houses in which it is practised.” Prostitution, in other words, is capitalism made flesh, the logical outcome of a political system which by its nature ensures increasing wealth for the few and ever-deepening misery for the many. Not at all a happy equation to set before an audience that preferred to keep the two obsessions – sex and money – strictly separate.
The value of the play lies in its continuing relevance due to the clear-eyed unsentimental approach Shaw adopted to treat his theme When prostitution wasn’t being gleefully damned by the press, it was being presented in an even more unhealthy (because unrealistic) light by sentimental novelists and playwrights full of euphemisms about “young girls going to the bad”. While the full extent of just how bad that bad could be was glossed over or fudged, then the status quo would remain unaltered and unalterable. Shaw set about shaming the whole of his audience, and therefore the whole of society. While the public, the politicians and the church were reluctant to act due to their various vested interests, the problem had to be attacked at its sociological root. Attitudes would never change, Shaw asserted, unless there was a wholesale shift in the economic viability of all members of the population.
Sums of Money Mentioned
The equivalent value of £1 in 1881 is approximately £48.67 in today’s* money. (Bank of England)
Vivie Warren received £50 from her mother for coming third in the Cambridge Mathematics exams (called the tripos). Today that would be £2,433.50. Vivie feels £200 would be more suitable - £9,734.
£50 is the very sum that the Reverend Samuel Gardner offered Mrs Warren twenty years earlier to buy his love letters back. In 1874 this was roughly equivalent to our £1,738.
Mrs Warren’s sister Jane earned nine shillings a week I the white lead factory where she worked as a young girl. The equivalent sum today is £17.50.
Mrs Warren’s other sister managed on her husband’s wage of eighteen shillings a week as a government labourer. Today that would be approximately £34.66.
Mrs Warren herself earned four shillings a week with board as a barmaid at Waterloo station when she was very young - £8 a week today. She expected 1/6 a day (about £3.50) as a cleaner in her later life.
Sir George Crofts has put £40,000 into Mrs Warren’s empire over the years, ie, £1,946,800.
Frank expects £400 per annum, ie, £19,000, if he inherits all his father’s money.
NOTE: In the days before decimalisation, a shilling (equivalent to 5p) was made up of 12d, or twelve old pence. There were twenty shillings to the pound. A guinea was 21 shillings, or £1.5p.
*1995. At the time of uploading to this website, August 2023, that equivalent is more like £99.62, ie, more than double.
MRS WARREN’S HISTORY
In 1898, when Shaw published his first three works for the theatre under the collective title Plays Unpleasant, many were of the opinion that Mrs Warren’s Profession was by far the most unpleasant of the lot.
His first effort at becoming the British Ibsen, Widowers’ Houses, had been received well enough when it was performed at JT Grein’s Independent Theatre in 1892, but his second, The Philanderer, had failed to find a producer. Shaw’s friend the journalist William Archer declared himself appalled by the play, Grein refused it, and no West End theatre was prepared to countenance a work which dealt so openly with a sexual theme – especially not one where the dalliance was neither insinuated nor punished. It was typical of Shaw that, totally undaunted, he should next choose to address the subject of prostitution.
The idea was suggested to him by the actress Janet Achurch. She and her husband Charles Charrington had put on the first London production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1889, and were in the forefront of the attempt to bring a more realistic view of contemporary society onto the stage. She had recently read Maupassant’s story Yvette and thought there might be a ply in it. Indeed, it was a conventional-enough shocker for the time, about a madame of the old school who corrupts her own daughter against her will. Shaw thought the story overly romanticised, but declared he would “work out the truth of that mother some day”. In the meantime he suggested write her own version to provide herself with a decent part. (The result, Mrs Daintry’s Daughter, was a much more standard and sentimental treatment of the theme than Shaw’s was to be.)
The other main influence in the writing of the play was Beatrice Webb, Shaw’s fellow Fabian, who was keen for him to “put on the stage a real modern lady of the governing class”, who might also represent the emerging role of women as capable members of society in their own right, rath than mere dependents of men. The result was Vivie Warren, a radically updated version of Maupassant’s emotional and doomed heroine.
He began writing on 27th June 1893 and had finished the first act by the end of August, claiming to have “skilfully blended the plot of The Second Mrs Tanqueray with that of The Cenci”. In other words, he was playing the sex and money cards for all they were worth with the suggestion of incest thrown in. On 4th September he informed Janet: “The play progresses bravely… I have made the daughter the heroine, and the mother a most deplorable old rip (saving your presence).” It was finished by 2 November and while he had always intended the part of Vivie to go to Janet, he already knew casting the “deplorable old rip” was going to be a problem.
Among the early candidates was Mrs Theodore Wright, the actress who had been the first English Mrs Alving in Grein’s production of Ghosts. That play had received some of the most vitriolic notices in the history of British theatre: “naked loathsomeness… a dirty act done publicly… gross, almost putrid indecorum…” But if Shaw assumed Mrs Wright would be willing to expose herself to more of the same, he was wrong. After he had read her his play, the actress “rose up; declared that not even in her own room could she speak the part to herself, much less in public to a younger woman”, and sent Shaw packing. One can see her point. At a time when many actresses were thought to be three parts prostitute themselves, Ibsen’s Mrs Alving, the mother of a syphilitic son, was a far more sympathetic figure to play than Shaw’s vulgar harlot.
Shaw next approached Elizabeth Robins, a forceful and intelligent actress and early feminist who had long been campaigning to have women accorded their due rights in the male-dominated theatre of the time. But the tone he adopted, a jocular mixture of flattery (“Holy Elizabeth, pray for me”), desperation (“I am at my wits’ end about this unlucky play of mine”) and arrogance (“the right woman ought to have the courage for it”) misfired completely. “If at any time you should want to write me on business,” she replied frostily, “I must ask you to use the usual forms of address…” Thawing later, however, she did recommend a couple of “intellectual” actresses for the part, Frances Ivor and Olga Nethersole, whom Shaw flatly refused to consider. He remained convinced that “There is a reputation to be got out of the part,” but his hopes of securing Mrs Patrick Campbell’s services were at best wishful thinking and at worst a case of having missed the boat. She had just enjoyed her first big success as Pinero’s Paula Tanqueray and her name was already made. As for the other actress most commonly associated with Shaw, the famous correspondence with Ellen Terry has only recently begun, and Shaw was still a relatively new playwright at this time. It is unlikely either of these ladies would have accepted the part of Mrs Warren, even if Shaw had been in a position to offer it to them.
Besides, the question of who was to play his tainted heroine was rendered academic for the time being by the fact that the Lord Chamberlain had no intention of granting the play a licence. The main objection was not so much the subject matter itself, explosive enough though that was; the sticking point was Shaw’s treatment of it. The fallen woman had long been a stock character of \Victorian literature – Maupassant’s Mme Obardi apart, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan had appeared around the same time as Paula Tanqueray’s youthful indiscretion was being exposed on the West End stage, barely a year before Mrs Warren came into being. But females were only allowed to be depraved so long as they were seen to atone in the last act or the final chapter, preferably under the firm moral guidance of some benevolent male protector. Shaw was not one to have any truck with such rosy-spectacled mawkishness: he had made his Mrs Warren a survivor who had beaten the system rather than become a victim of it.
This early run-in with the self-appointed guardian of the public’s morals was to plunge Shaw into a lifelong struggle to secure for the stage the same freedom as other art forms enjoyed. He recorded his disgust at the “impudence” of the censor to whom a playwright had to pay two guineas simply for the privilege of having his play read, with no automatic guarantee of its subsequent performance. Surely it should have been the other way around, Shaw fulminated, he should be paying me for the enjoyment my work gives him!
Once published, the play had to wait another four years before it was performed, and even then, lacking any official sanction, it had to be put on in a private club. Where the audience had to be made up of invited guests rather than paying customers. The Stage Society eventually mounted its production on 5 and 6 January 1902 at the New Lyric Club – two performances only, as nobody involved could afford to put it on for any longer than that. Mrs Warren and her daughter were played by Fanny Brough and Madge McIntosh respectively, while the part of Vivie’s would-be lover Frank was taken by Harley Granville-Barker.
The first public performance took place in New York in 1905, but even then it was touch and go. The entire cast was arrested during rehearsals and only released after the judge had read the play. It wasn’t until 1925 thirty years after it was first written, that Mrs Warren’s Profession first went before the British public on a professional stage – “too late”, commented Shaw, although he was more aware than anyone that the problem of prostitution was not only still as virulent as ever, but society had not even begun to address the causes of it which he had been attacking.
The play’s history since then has been no less bumpy. Even as late as 1955, for example, a version destined for the Salle Luxembourg in Paris – ironically enough, Maupassant’s home town – was banned by the Comédie Française. In 1959 a German film version was made, adapted from a screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald, Terence Rattigan’s sometime writing and producing partner. But it wasn’t shown in either the UK or the USA, probably because it did not translate well, in either sense of the word. Mrs Warren on that occasion was Lilli Palmer, while in Ronald Eyre’s 1971 Old Vic stage production the part was taken by Coral Browne with Sarah Badel as Vivie. The programme notes on this occasion were supplied by Germaine Greer, who a few years before had made her own observations on the status of women in society in her equally controversial book The Female Eunuch.
Mrs Warren herself is now in her one hundred and second year, and there is little sign that she is any less relevant to us now than she ever was. Although on its first appearance her story was to introduce Shaw to the kind of widespread controversy he would come to welcome and relish, he was not so idealistic as to suppose that a mere play could alter social behaviour long-term. On the other hand, he was among the first to recognise it as one of his best and most trenchant works. Looking back a few years after he had written it, and by this time with several successes behind him, Shaw wrote to Wellen Terry, “It’s much my best play; but makes my blood run cold. I can hardly believe the most appalling bits of it. Ah, when I wrote that, I had some nerve…”
PS
I was in a production of this once. It was in Trinity College Gardens, Oxford, in the summer of 1976, the last seriously hot one before they all were.
In those days, of course, one only ever read the scenes one was in oneself, so I’m a bit hazy about what went on in the pages where the two women were on stage together, talking amongst themselves. It was therefore educational rereading these articles and finding out that the play probably had a few serious points to make. I wish I’d paid more attention now… but I was too busy pining hopelessly for the gorgeous makeup assistant who every night spent ten minutes with my hands in her lap, gently stroking on old-man make-up and warts. I think it was Michael Billington who, in a piece on Alan Bennett’s play Habeas Corpus, described the frustrated cleric as an “unfired canon”. That was me, that year, in that lovely place, beneath that heavenly weather.