Rings on Every Finger, Fire in Every Word

London 1878. It was in one of the private boxes at Evans’ Supper Rooms, 10 Covent Garden, that the woman known as Miss Val Reece (later Lady Valerie Meux) would hold court.

Valerie was one of London’s best-known of the ‘feminine rulers of the golden youth’, a ‘fair-haired, black-eyed nymph’, surrounded by a circle of inane-looking admirers. She ruled with her ‘saucy ways and hard swearing’. She always wore many rings on her fingers, her prized possessions, the last items she would ever think of taking to ‘uncle’, slang for a pawnbroker.

But who was she? What was she?

She would often describe herself as an actress. Others said she was a chorus girl at best, others a barmaid, and more whispered she was worse. Courtesan, prostitute, a pretty little horsebreaker. She had a reputation. She was known, a familiar figure in the London demi-monde, the ‘half-world’ where elite and wealthy pleasure-seeking men met the women who entertained them.

Heavy drinking, gambling, sexual promiscuity, the hedonistic pleasures of the theatre and ballet and horse races, away from wives, away from family, away responsibility, away from boredom.

Evans, the Argyll, the Aquarium, the Casino de Venise (otherwise known as the Holborn Casino), The Gaiety Theatre, the Alhambra, Surrey Gardens, were the stages where the demi-monde played out in public. Nothing moral, nothing virtuous, flourishing hunting grounds of immorality.

Source: New York Herald, 5 December 1878. Image: AI generated.