What Was the Original ‘Oldest Profession’?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Here’s a question to begin this week’s blog post. What was the original ‘oldest profession’?

a) prostitution
b) farming
c) law
d) soldiering
e) tailoring
f) humbugging

I’ll come to the correct answer in due course, but it most definitely is not a).

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was, though. Even the Oxford English Dictionary seems to support you: under its entry for ‘oldest profession’, it simply states, ‘euphemistic. Prostitution.’ Its earliest citation is from 1922 and names acting as the oldest profession alongside prostitution, but in fact the tradition of referring to the latter as ‘the oldest profession’ appears to be all Rudyard Kipling’s fault.

In 1889, Kipling published ‘On the City Wall’, a short story about an Indian prostitute, Lalun, who is described as ‘a member of the most ancient profession in the world’:

Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve, as every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East, where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.

Five years later, the Pall Mall Gazette used the expression, while suggesting that Kipling had indeed been the originator (or at the very least the populariser) of it.

And so prostitution became the oldest profession and, in the popular imagination, it has remained so.

It took a while to catch on. And part of the problem was that before Kipling, there was a long tradition of claiming your particular line of work was the oldest profession out there. This used to be something to shout about, too. But as the new, Kipling-created meaning began to oust the old, there were a few teething problems as the old guard struggled to keep up with the new.

This led to some embarrassing moments where people unaware of Kipling’s new coining of an old phrase made some unintentionally hilarious remarks, such as when Lord Wolseley, during a speech to the Royal Military Academy in 1895, observed that ‘a certain proportion of the cadets were now leaving to enter the oldest profession in the world’.

And in the same year, the Cambridge Review reported the fact that many Cambridge colleges had been slow to admit agricultural students, ‘but Clare, Caius, King’s, and Trinity Hall have now opened their gates to those who are anxious to understand the principles of this the oldest profession.’

How liberal of them.

The thing is, there are many other professions which have been described as the ‘oldest’ or ‘most ancient’, some of them several centuries before Kipling identified sex work as the oldest of the lot, and farming appears to have been a favourite until Kipling came along.

In 1887, just two years before his story appeared, the National Stockman and Farmer opined: ‘Farming is the oldest profession or occupation that the world has ever known.’ So the Cambridge Review in 1894 wasn’t wrong, just a little slow to catch on to new developments.

Humbugging was one of the many ‘jobs’ which were identified as the most ancient trade of all, long before Kipling elevated ladies of the night to this august position. Sadly, this didn’t mean the making of minty boiled sweets but scamming or conning people. When Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, dismisses Christmas as ‘humbug!’ he was essentially saying it was all a con and a load of nonsense. The Irish poet Henry Brooke (1701-83) wrote a poem, ‘On Humbugging’, which stated that humbugging was the ‘most ancient’ of all trades:

Of all trades and arts in repute or possession,
Humbugging is held the most ancient profession.

A century earlier, in ‘The Song in Praise of the Merchant-Taylors’ (first recorded in 1680), tailors are named as members of the oldest trade of the lot:

Of all the professions that ever were nam’d,
The taylor’s, though slighted, is much to be fam’d.

This song goes on and on for many stanzas, and was sung as part of the Lord-Mayor’s Show, whenever the London lord-mayor happened to belong to the tailors’ guild. It formed part of the last pageant, which bore the delightful name of ‘The Palace of Pleasure’. Which almost sounds like the name for an upmarket (or upmarket manqué) house of questionable repute, thus taking us back to Kipling’s ‘oldest profession’.

But even tailors weren’t the first to claim they were the ‘oldest profession’. In Margaret Cavendish’s play The Sociable Companions (1668), soldiers declare that their ‘profession, which is to rob, fight and kill, is the most ancient profession that is’.

So making war, not love (or rumpy-pumpy at least), was the oldest ‘oldest profession’ of them all.