Population
London's explosive growth and the diverse communities of the Georgian metropolis
London's explosive growth and the diverse communities of the Georgian metropolis
London in the second half of the eighteenth century was the largest city in Europe and one of the largest in the world. The population of London expanded from an estimated 600,000 in the 1690s to around 900,000 by the 1740s, and reached one million by the first national census of 1801. This phenomenal expansion touched every aspect of life in the metropolis, including its social relationships, and provided the context in which Harris's List found its audience.
This expansion was not uniform across the city. The ancient city of London within the walls actually suffered a decline in its population as the city developed commercially. The most rapid expansion took place in the western suburbs (Westminster, Marylebone, and the parishes of Middlesex). New streets and squares were developed in these areas to house the gentry and the growing middle sort. To the east, parishes like Stepney, Whitechapel, and Spitalfields took in successive waves of the poor and immigrants.
Parish data confirms the magnitude of these changes. The parish of St. Marylebone, which was mostly rural in the early eighteenth century, increased its population from about 6,000 in the 1690s to over 63,000 by 1801. St. Pancras similarly increased its population from about 1,500 to over 31,000 in the same time period. By contrast, the inner-city parishes of St. Mary le Bow and St. Mildred Poultry had populations measured in hundreds rather than thousands.
The growth of London, therefore, was fueled by an influx of immigrants. The birth rate in London was always lower than the death rate during the eighteenth century. This was an inevitable demographic fact, and it meant that London was consuming people faster than it was producing them. The population, however, continued to grow due to the steady inflow of newcomers: young men and women from the English countryside, from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and from continental Europe.
They included young, unmarried men and women seeking employment. They came to London as apprentices, servants, labourers, and craftsmen. For the women, the trip to London was always an adventure, and it was always a gamble. The best that could happen to them was to find work as domestic servants in good families, and the worst was to find themselves in an alien city with no one to turn to. The women described in Harris's List include some who came from the provinces, i.e., Somerset, Yorkshire, and Ireland, suggesting that migration and its attendant vulnerabilities played a significant role in their stories.
The eighteenth century was more diverse than is perhaps understood. London was inhabited by significant communities from all over the globe, which reflects the expansion of British commerce and colonies.
The Black population of London has been estimated to range from 10,000 to 20,000 by the late eighteenth century. Black Londoners included domestic servants, sailors, musicians, street vendors, and other occupations. Some of them had been transported to England as slaves and later acquired their freedom, while others had been born free in London or had arrived there as free migrants. The legal position of slavery in England was not entirely clear until the Mansfield judgment of 1772 (Somerset v Stewart), which ruled that enslaved people should not be forcibly removed from England, although slavery itself was not abolished. Harris's List occasionally mentions women of colour, although always from a white male point of view.
London also had a large Jewish population, mainly located in the eastern parishes near Aldgate and Whitechapel. The Sephardic community, established since the Resettlement of 1656, was supplemented by Ashkenazi immigrants from central and eastern Europe during the course of the century. The Huguenots from France, settled in Spitalfields and Soho since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, contributed their skills as silk weavers and created a unique cultural identity for these areas.
The population density was highly varied throughout the metropolis. The most densely settled areas were those of the old City of London and the immediately adjacent districts. In the parish of St Paul Covent Garden, the focus of Harris's List's geography, the population was packed tightly into a small area surrounded by the market, the theatres, and the streets. This was in contrast to the large open spaces of the new developments of Mayfair and Marylebone.
In poorer parishes, overcrowding was severe. Families lived in a single room in subdivided houses, and courts and alleys were filled with makeshift housing. The lack of sanitation, water supply, and disease prevalence contributed to the high mortality rates that plagued London, particularly for infants, with some parishes reporting that fewer than half of all children born lived past the age of five.
The rich, on the other hand, enjoyed large town houses in the newly created squares (Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Hanover Square) with piped water from the New River Company and streets with private watchmen. This social geography was not just the backdrop to Harris's List, but an integral part of it, as the publication itself placed the sex trade on the streets of London, connecting each woman with an address and thus making the social hierarchy of the city legible and navigable.
The demographic trends of eighteenth-century London are impossible to separate from the world of Harris's List. The steady flow of young immigrants, the disparities of wealth and living conditions, the diversity of the population, and the anonymity of a city of nearly one million people all contributed to the world in which the sex trade operated. The women of Harris's List were products of this world, many of them recent arrivals, and they navigated it with opportunities and dangers in roughly equal measure.