Love and Dirt: the marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick by Diane Atkinson

Equal rights? Not bloody likely

Victorian English gentlemen were notorious collectors. In the interests of scientific investigation and sociological progress, they amassed butterflies, antiquities and colonial territories on a breathtaking scale. Arthur Munby – minor poet, man of letters, Church Commissioner and barrister – collected working women. For over 50 years he sought out shop-girls, milliners, fruit and flower sellers, prostitutes, rag-pickers, flither-lasses, pitbrow and gypsy girls, acquiring their photographs and making detailed notes about their physical appearance and working lives. His studies enabled him to speak authoritatively on issues like factory reform.

If the world sniggered knowingly, it was probably justified. For this respectable God-fearing bachelor had an astonishing secret that only came to light after his death.

No one would have been particularly surprised that Munby enjoyed sexual dalliance with Hannah Cullwick, an attractive scullery maid he encountered on one of his early specimen hunts in Oxford Street in 1854. Nor would they be too taken aback to discover that she frequently stripped for him and rubbed her body with boot blacking and chimney soot to satisfy his penchant for female grime and sweat. What would have shocked his family and contemporaries, however, was that 19 years after their first encounter, he married her.

Munby first spoke to Hannah on her 21st birthday. She was enjoying her second visit to London, having been brought from her native Shropshire by her employers for the season. On her first visit, the year before, Hannah had seen Charles Kean in Sardanapalus, Byron's tragedy about the King of Assyria who falls madly in love with one of his many slaves, Myrrah.

The play so fired her romantic imagination that when Munby approached her, she immediately identified him as a Master to whom she could become lovingly enslaved. His interest in female drudgery perfectly matched her desire to abase herself. She practised her letter-writing in order to send her lover the kind of detailed descriptions he revelled in, telling him that "the blacker I get with work, the more ardent I feel towards you", and incidentally ensuring that her side of the unusual relationship is amply recorded.

At times, even Munby was alarmed by the alacrity with which she responded to his desires. She moved to London to be near him and arranged to be out on the doorstep of her new place of work, scrubbing on her hands and knees whenever he might chance to walk past. She wore a chain round her neck to which only he had a key and a grubby leather strap on her wrist as a symbol of his ownership that, together with her wildly dishevelled appearance, often perturbed her employers.

After their marriage in 1873, the couple lived together in a curious household where Hannah skivvied for lodgers who had so little idea that Munby was married to the disgustingly dirty maid they made sexual advances to her under his nose. Any hopes he had of transforming her into a lady, Eliza Doolittle-style, were soon dashed. He tried to stop her – literally – licking his boots, but had to relent and allowed her to do so as a treat on special occasions such as their wedding anniversary. Although they enjoyed occasional trips abroad or to the country, where neither of them were known, she was not at ease and felt too old to alter her ways.

Sadly, the strain of the unusual arrangement took its toll on Hannah. After four years of living together, she developed a drink problem and by mutual agreement returned to Shropshire to live with relatives, who were only too glad to take Munby's money. For the next 30 years he visited her often, but they died lonely and apart in 1909 and 1910, affectionate to the end. Although this curious Cinderella story has no fairy-tale ending, in Love and Dirt Diane Atkinson attentively rescues the unlikely couple's story from oblivion.

Charlotte Cory's 'Imperial Quadrille' will appear this spring from HarperCollins