Print Culture & Publishing
The Georgian book trade and the publishing world that made Harris's List possible
The Georgian book trade and the publishing world that made Harris's List possible
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies was a creation of one of the most thriving and innovative publishing environments in European history. Eighteenth-century London was the heart of the English-language book trade, with hundreds of printers, booksellers, and publishers catering to a rapidly expanding readership eager for news, entertainment, and information. To grasp the print culture of the time is to grasp how a publication such as Harris's List was able to come out every year for over three decades.
The eighteenth century was marked by a growth of print culture that was unprecedented in Britain. The expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that pre-publication censorship was a thing of the past. This opened the doors for a flood of new publications. By the mid-eighteenth century, London boasted a handful of daily newspapers, dozens of periodicals, and a thriving pamphlet trade. The Stationers Company, which had once exercised a monopoly over printing, retained influence but couldn't possibly control the proliferation of printing houses.
The booksellers were the major figures in the industry. Unlike the contemporary practice of separate publishers and retailers, eighteenth-century booksellers generally did both: they provided the financial backing for book production and retailed the finished works from their shops. Leading booksellers such as Andrew Millar, Robert Dodsley, and Thomas Longman had shops around St Paul's Churchyard and the Strand, and commissioned works from authors, arranged printing, and distributed them via provincial booksellers and hawkers. The industry was highly competitive, with booksellers always looking for new works that would capture the public's imagination.
The area around Covent Garden and the Strand was especially important to the type of publishing that Harris's List represented. While the more respectable aspect of the business was concentrated in Paternoster Row and St. Paul's Churchyard, the streets in the area of Covent Garden were home to booksellers who dealt in more lighthearted matter, such as plays, songbooks, and satiric prints, as well as more risqué material of the same sort.
This was not an underground business. Erotic and sexually explicit publications were openly sold and publicly displayed, and they were often advertised in the press. The distinction between "respectable" and "disreputable" publishing was blurred. A bookseller might sell sermons and scandalous publications, and a printer might print both the Bible and risqué ballads. The publisher of the official editions of Harris's List, H. Ranger, was part of this permissive commercial environment and sold the list from offices in the Covent Garden area alongside other titles.
Harris's List was part of a larger tradition of publications that made little distinction between information, entertainment, and titillation. The eighteenth century was the time of the development of a 'mass market for scandal and sexual content,' which included a wide range of genres.
The "whore dialogue" was a literary form that was well established by the eighteenth century, with origins in Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France. Works like The Whore's Rhetorick (1683) and A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid (c. 1659–1740) were examples of works that presented a dialogue on sexual matters that was intended to entertain as much as inform. Harris's List was a departure from this tradition in form, although it was clearly connected to it in content: a directory rather than a dialogue of real women at real addresses.
Other comparable publications were the Nocturnal Revels (1779), a two-volume account of London's pleasure houses, as well as the "tete-a-tete" columns found in periodicals like the Town and Country Magazine, which featured pictures of fashionable couples, many of whom were in illicit relationships, along with narrative commentaries. The New Atalantis (1709) by Delarivier Manley was the first publication to establish the genre of the Scandal Chronical, which would go on to influence the genre throughout the eighteenth century.
The origins of Harris's List are bound up with two figures: Jack Harris and Samuel Derrick. Jack Harris was a waiter at the Shakespeare's Head tavern in Covent Garden who doubled as a pimp, maintaining a list of women available for hire. Samuel Derrick was an Irish-born writer and poet who had arrived in the 1750s to a London that offered little opportunity for a struggling writer to make a living. Derrick is credited as the original compiler of Harris's List, who took Harris's practical directory of women for hire and elevated it to the realm of the literary with the addition of description, classical allusions, and witty commentaries.
Derrick died in 1769, having been Master of Ceremonies at Bath since 1763. Following his departure from London, other writers took over the compilation of Harris's List, though their identities remain largely unknown. The style and form of the book remained consistent throughout the many years it was published, which might indicate that the editorial style was possibly maintained by the publisher.
Harris's List appeared annually, timed for the Christmas and New Year market, a period when the population of London increased with the influx of people from the provinces attending the winter social season. It was a shrewd marketing tactic, as the new arrivals in London would be unaware of the geography and social layout of the city.
It was disseminated through the bookstores of booksellers, hawkers, and possibly through the taverns and coffee houses, where the target readership might congregate. The exact number of copies of each edition is unknown, although the longevity of the publication, extending to more than thirty annual editions, speaks to its financial success. Hallie Rubenhold has calculated that the total sales of the publication, across its lifespan, may have been as many as 250,000, a figure which makes it one of the most popular publications of the Georgian era.
The target readership of the publication appears to have been male and comprised of the middling and upper echelons of London society, including gentlemen, officers, lawyers, merchants, and the kind of men who frequented the coffee houses and theatres of Covent Garden. However, the publication appears to have had a broader dissemination than this suggests. Its literary qualities, including the wit, poetry and classical allusions, and the moralising, suggest that it was read for entertainment as much as for practical purposes, and the presence of copies of the publication in libraries across Europe suggests that it attracted a readership well beyond London.