nay, eight pounds per annum, and upwards; insomuch that an ordinary
tradesman cannot well keep one; but his wife, who might be useful
in his shop or business, must do the drudgery of household affairs;
and all this because our servant-wenches are so puffed up with
pride nowadays, that they never think they go fine enough: it is a
hard matter to know the mistress from the maid by their dress; nay,
very often the maid shall be much the finer of the two. Our
woollen manufacture suffers much by this, for nothing but silks and
satins will go down with our kitchen-wenches; to support which
intolerable pride, they have insensibly raised their wages to such
a height as was never known in any age or nation but this.
Let us trace this from the beginning, and suppose a person has a
servant-maid sent him out of the country, at fifty shillings, or
three pounds a year. The girl has scarce been a week, nay, a day
in her service, but a committee of servant-wenches are appointed to
examine her, who advise her to raise her wages, or give warning; to
encourage her to which, the herb-woman, or chandler-woman, or some
other old intelligencer, provides her a place of four or five
pounds a year; this sets madam cock-a-hoop, and she thinks of
nothing now but vails and high wages, and so gives warning from
place to place, till she has got her wages up to the tip-top.
Her neat’s leathern shoes are now transformed into laced ones with
high heels; her yarn stockings are turned into fine woollen ones,
with silk clocks; and her high wooden pattens are kicked away for
leathern clogs; she must have a hoop too, as well as her mistress;
and her poor scanty linsey-woolsey petticoat is changed into a good
silk one, for four or five yards wide at the least. Not to carry
the description farther, in short, plain country Joan is now turned
into a fine London madam, can drink tea, take snuff, and carry
herself as high as the best.
If she be tolerably handsome, and has any share of cunning, the
apprentice or her master’s son is enticed away and ruined by her.
Thus many good families are impoverished and disgraced by these
pert sluts, who, taking the advantage of a young man’s simplicity
and unruly desires, draw many heedless youths, nay, some of good
estates, into their snares; and of this we have but too many
instances.
Some more artful shall conceal their condition, and palm themselves
off on young fellows for gentlewomen and great fortunes. How many
families have been ruined by these ladies? when the father or
master of the family, preferring the flirting airs of a young
prinked up strumpet, to the artless sincerity of a plain, grave,
and good wife, has given his desires aloose, and destroyed soul,
body, family, and estate. But they are very favourable if they
wheedle nobody into matrimony, but only make a present of a small
live creature, no bigger than a bastard, to some of the family, no
matter who gets it; when a child is born it must be kept.
Our sessions’ papers of late are crowded with instances of servant-
maids robbing their places, this can be only attributed to their
devilish pride; for their whole inquiry nowadays is, how little
they shall do, how much they shall have.
But all this while they make so little reserve, that if they fall
sick the parish must keep them, if they are out of place, they must
prostitute their bodies, or starve; so that from clopping and
changing, they generally proceed to whoring and thieving, and this
is the reason why our streets swarm with strumpets.
Thus many of them rove from place to place, from bawdy-house to
service, and from service to bawdy-house again, ever unsettled and
never easy, nothing being more common than to find these creatures
one week in a good family, and the next in a brothel. This
amphibious life makes them fit for neither, for if the bawd uses
them ill, away they trip to service, and if the mistress gives them
a wry word, whip they are at a bawdy-house again, so that in effect