Debauched world of the 18th-century harlots
A new ITV drama will pull back the curtain on Georgian London’s rampant sex trade but the reality is even more shocking
SEX AND THE CITY: Daniel Sapani as William North, Samantha Morton as brothel keeper Margaret Wells and Lesley Manville as Lydia Quigley went on to explain that in almost every street women could be seen exposing themselves at the windows and doorways “like beasts in a market for public sale” and with language, dress and gesture too offensive to be mentioned.
According to Dan Cruickshank, German diarist FW Schutz studied the way they conducted themselves. “He wrote: ‘Many are not content with soliciting but try to force their affections on one. It is difficult to get rid of these, as sometimes four, five or more, in competition, attach themselves to one.’”
One contemporary author described how at midnight the younger women would leave the streets to be replaced by “old beggar women of 60 and more who come out of their hiding places in order to serve drunken men”. Public fornication was common.
But despite all this, for women in Georgian England prostitution was one of the only ways of gaining healthy economic independence. An average prostitute could earn more than £400 a year, compared with the £5 a year they might earn as a housemaid. Inevitably young girls from the much poorer countryside streamed into London.
According to Cruickshank, in the late 18th-century prostitution vied in financial importance with brewing, construction and the London docks. “It was the service industry par excellence and generated an estimated gross turnover of £20million per annum,” he explains. To compare, in 1792 the London docks handled imports and exports worth £27million.
Cruickshank says London prostitutes were divided into different classes. Bottom of the pile were the streetwalkers who charged “a pint of wine and a shilling” for an alleyway assignation. Harlots worked from rooms or a bawdy house and charged by the hour or by the act. The high-class whores worked in fashionable brothels known as “nunneries” and were skilled in social graces.
And there was, as in the series, an actual directory of prostitutes. Harris’s List Of Covent Garden Ladies was a bestseller. It sold 250,000 copies in a city with a population of just one million and was split into sections including The Full Figured, The Unusual, Ladies of Experience and The Poxed.
Typical is the entry in 1788 describing Miss Lister of 6 Union Street, Oxford Road: “Painted by the masterly hand of nature with the neighbouring hills below full ripe for manual pressure, firm and elastic.”
MISS BROWN of 14 Old Compton Street, Soho, was described as having “pouting orbs” compared to “two poached eggs in fine preservation”. And Mrs Forbes, of Yeoman’s Row in Knightsbridge, had a reputation for being “as lascivious as a goat”.
English society even encouraged men to pay for sex. “Men of a certain class would have a wife to have children with and a mistress to play with,” says Brown Findlay.
“If a woman was married her body was considered the man’s property, along with her actual property. That was not the world of the harlots – their property was theirs. Their body was their own. And they decided what happened to it. I love that.” Harlots begins on ITV Encore at 10pm on March 27.