Cora Pearl - Early Life

Early Life

The date and place of her birth are uncertain. Her date of birth has been given as February 23, 1842, however the actual year may have been 1835. Her birth name too is uncertain. Source material indicates her given name to be Eliza Emma Crouch. The place of birth cannot be verified. It is known that the Crouch family resided on the south coast of England in the port city of Plymouth.

Her father was the cellist and composer Frederick Nicholls Crouch. The family endured constant financial uncertainty, and was plagued by debt. The strain of life caused her father to desert the home in 1847. Escaping his creditors, Crouch was able to make his way to America in 1849. With six young daughters to care for, her mother Lydia brought a man into the household, who was to be considered a “stepfather” by her children. The arrangement proved untenable for young Pearl and induced her mother to send her to a convent boarding school in Boulogne, France. She remained there for eight years returning to England in 1854/1855 to live with her maternal grandmother in London. Life with her pious, kindly grandmother, Mrs. Watts, was a regulated one. Other than attending church services every Sunday, Pearl's activities were restricted to the home she and the elderly woman shared. The two took walks together through the London West End neighborhood in which they resided located in proximity to Covent Garden.

It was a life she found confining and her restless nature and innate curiosity rebelled. She defied her grandmother’s cautions regarding the dangers a young woman faced out in the streets unchaperoned. On her own one day, she accepted the advances of an older man who approached her on the street, allowing him to take her to a drinking den where he wooed her with cakes and plied her with alcohol and ultimately took her virginity. Upon awakening, she found the man had left her a five-pound note — more money than she had ever seen. She was approximately twenty years old at the time and later said the encounter left her with "an instinctive horror of men." While this may have been her first experience of this type, she was not entirely innocent of sexual matters. During her years at the all female French convent school she attended, she had engaged in numerous same-sex relationships. After her abrupt initiation into heterosexual sex, she did not return to her grandmother's home, nor go back to her mother, but rented a room for herself in Covent Garden.