Policing & The Law
Law enforcement, prosecution, and the legal status of sex work in Georgian London
Law enforcement, prosecution, and the legal status of sex work in Georgian London
Eighteenth-century London had no professional police force. Instead, the city was served by a disparate force consisting of parish constables, night watchmen, magistrates, and informers, a system that was completely inadequate to serve a city of almost a million people. This fragmented approach to law enforcement played a large role in the flourishing landscape of sex work and the open publication of listings like Harris's List.
The chief local law enforcement officers were the parish constables. These were unpaid citizens who served an annual term of duty. For the most part, they were tradesmen or householders who viewed the service as a nuissance rather than a privilege. Those who were able to afford it, hired deputies to serve in their stead. These deputies were often poorly motivated and ill-equipped to maintain order in busy urban parishes.
The nightly watch, groups of men who patrolled the streets at night, supplemented the constables. These were typically elderly men who were willing to work for low pay, and were a frequent subject of satire. Henry Fielding described the night watch as "poor old decrepit People" who were "of very little Service to the Public." Each parish operated independently of the others, with no coordination between the night watches. This provided opportunities for criminals to take advantage.
The most important development in the policing of Georgian London came from the Fielding brothers. In 1749, the writer and magistrate Henry Fielding founded a small force of professional thief-takers who were paid for their services and were based at his magistrates' court on Bow Street. His blind half-brother, John Fielding, expanded this force after Henry died in 1754 and founded what became known as the Bow Street Runners, the precursor to the Metropolitan Police founded in 1829.
One of the main activities of John Fielding was his work against disorderly houses and sex work. He organised raids on brothels and bagnios, as well as publishing notices in the Public Advertiser advising those running disorderly houses to close down their businesses. However, Fielding was restricted in his activities because at any given time, he only had at his disposal a handful of runners to police the entire city. His main concern was not the regulation of sexual commerce but the prevention of crime such as robbery, burglary, and murder.
Sex work itself was not a crime under English common law. There was no statute that directly prohibited the sale of sexual services. The law prohibited associated activities: keeping a disorderly house or a brothel/bawdy house, soliciting a nuissance, and vagrancy. The most important statute was the Disorderly Houses Act of 1751 (25 Geo. II, c. 36), which authorised parish constables to institute prosecutions of the owners of disorderly houses, defined as brothels, gaming houses, or other houses of disorderly conduct.
Another avenue for prosecution was provided by the Vagrancy Acts. Women who were idle and disorderly or unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves were liable to be committed to a house of correction. This meant that women on the streets at night were liable to prosecution, but those who worked from fixed addresses, as those in Harris's List, were less likely to face legal consequences.
The prosecution of crime in Georgian London was a largely private affair. There was no public prosecutor, and victims of crime had to bring their own cases before a magistrate, incurring the costs of prosecution themselves. This resulted in a powerful disincentive to take legal action, particularly when the crime in question was the maintenance of a brothel rather than a more direct crime against person or property.
The Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which operated in the early eighteenth century and were revived periodically thereafter, sought to address this problem by attempting to organise systematic prosecutions. Their agents would gather evidence against brothel keepers and pay for prosecutions, but their activities were highly controversial and often the subject of public hostility. By the 1760s, when Harris's List first appeared, these Societies had largely fallen into dormancy, only to be revived in a different form by the Proclamation Society of the 1780s.
Where prosecutions did occur, the punishments varied greatly. Those running disorderly houses faced a fine, time in the pillory, or imprisonment. The women, on the other hand, were often dealt with more leniently, being summoned before a magistrate, who might sentence them to a short time in a house of correction or simply let them off with a warning. The inconsistent treatment of those involved in the sex trade placed it in a gray area, in that it was subject to legal sanction, yet at the same time, it was tolerated as long as it did not attract public complaint.
The publication of Harris's List itself existed in a gray area of the law. While obscene libel was a common law offence, what constituted obscenity was not clearly defined or consistently applied. In 1727, the publisher of Venus in the Cloister, Edmund Curll, was prosecuted for his publication, and it was held to be a misdemeanorable offence. However, many booksellers openly sold erotic and sexually explicit materials from their shops in the Covent Garden area, and Harris's List was available from mainstream booksellers for decades.
The relative immunity of Harris's List can be explained by a variety of factors, including the fact that it was not fiction, the difficulty of attributing the work to any particular party, and the fact that the authorities had other, more pressing concerns. It was not until the 1780s and 1790s, as the campaigns for moral reform gained momentum, that the atmosphere in the publications industry became less favorable, which might have contributed to the eventual demise of Harris's List in 1795.