A three-pronged approach to the complex causes for girls' movement into the sex trade, proposing educational solutions to help them avoid seduction
[Seduction Novel] [Sex Work] Corry, John
The Gardener's Daughter of Worcester, or The Miseries of Seduction. A Moral Tale.
London: Sold by Champante & Whitrow, [1800]. First Edition. Rebound to style in full calf with gilt to spine and boards. Measuring 180 x 105mm and collating complete including hand-colored frontis: [2], 36. Binding firm, with front board slightly bowed. Bookplate of J.O. Edwards to front pastedown; bookbinder's ticket of Blair Jeary to rear pastedown. Gentle scuffing to center of title page with loss of several letters but all words remaining legible; some light marginal foxing, else unmarked. A scarce seduction narrative sitting at the cusp between the golden era of the demi-monde and the backlash of the Regency, The Gardener's Daughter is reported at 4 US libraries according to ESTC (via Print Probability) and its most recent appearance at auction was in 1973. The present is the only example in trade.
A three-part text combining a novella, an essay, and an elegy on sex work, The Gardener's Daughter of Worcester is anything but a straightforward seduction novel. Rather than simply warning young women against the dangers of sexuality and blaming them when they engage with it, the text considers the complex reasons for girls' movement into the sex trade. And it makes practical suggestions for how, as a society, the English might open better avenues for those who might have few other choices.
The opening novella is The Gardener's Daughter, and it follows Lucy Staunton from her humble but happy home and marriage prospects in the countryside into London high society and finally to sex work and suicide. While the narrator does place some blame on Lucy for her situation -- over time she becomes too aware of her beauty and vainly flaunts it -- more than anything the text explores the problematic forces surrounding Lucy. She is raised "in a little paradise" of her parent's garden where her beauty caused them to nickname her "the rose of Worcester." She was educated first at home "to read and sew" before "being educated at a boarding school" in the hopes she would become more accomplished and find a better husband. Despite these plot points seeming positive, the text points out their failures. Lucy is praised for beauty and urged toward education not for self-improvement but for financial exchange value. In the end, she excels in her education and this leads her to reject the proposal of a loving farmer in favor of a well-paying governess job in a London household. Here again, Lucy's education fails her. For while her mother issues a last-minute warning against "false friends among your own sex and the allurements of man," she has not been trained to understand what this means. And so, when the wealthy Captain Flash promises her marriage and wealth, she believes she is on the threshold of accomplishing everything her beauty and schooling trained her to do; instead, she is seduced and abandoned, unable to return either to her job or her family. Again, the novella suggests that this is not a failing or sin of Lucy's. Blame falls instead on male treachery and a system that protects it; and she trusts and is betrayed or violated by more men who offer her "assistance," these are the forces that lead her into brothel work.
In case the message of The Gardener's Daughter is lost on readers, Corry follows up his fiction with an essay The Young Woman's Friend of a Plan for the Education of Female Children (pages 21-29). Here Corry advocates for a formalized system of education and protection for young women, but especially those who poverty or domestic service would leave vulnerable to male abuses. He also asserts the need to accept and aid those women who do fall to sex work rather than socially ostracizing them. "Let the virtuous of both sexes cordially contribute to the instruction and support of destitute female children and young girls who are in danger or being corrupted." While some of his proposal is progressive, it should be noted that novel reading and the theatre are among the wicked influences he believes girls should avoid.
In a return to sentiment, The Prostitute An Elegy, closes the text (pages 33-36) by decrying the losses of beauty and virtue to the sex trade and calling for a new system to protect feminine virtue. Notably, across the text, though male treachery and oppressive educational systems are blamed for violence against girls, all solutions ultimately fall to the women themselves rather than to the men at fault.
ESTC T144317. (183)