The world of Harris's List co-existed in tension with a dominant and resilient tradition of moral reform. Throughout the eighteenth century, religious bodies, charitable organisations, and individuals sought to eliminate what they saw as the vice and immorality of urban life. They helped to create the social world in which Harris's List was published, though they consistently failed to eliminate either the sex trade or the publications that described it.

The Societies for the Reformation of Manners

The most concerted attempt to suppress vice in early eighteenth-century London came with the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Formed in the 1690s, during the reign of William III, these were groups of dedicated Anglicans and Dissenters who set out to prosecute moral offences. Their strategy was quite simple: they would gather evidence of an offence, and then bring cases before sympathetic magistrates.

At the height of their powers in the early 1700s, the Societies claimed that they had achieved tens of thousands of prosecutions. Their annual reports, published publicly, included the names of those who had been convicted, which had the effect of a public shaming. Women who had been arrested for soliciting on the streets were a large part of the Societies' efforts, and the poor, rather than the rich who maintained the sex industry, were the targets.

By the 1730s, the Societies had declined, largely due to legal challenges, public hostility, and the fact that the members had never been able to agree with one another. Bernard de Mandeville, with his philosophical treatise The Fable of the Bees, published in 1714, expanded in 1723, had suggested that individual vices were the source of public virtues, and that attempts to enforce virtue were both futile and harmful. By the time Harris's List first appeared in 1760, the original Societies had been defunct for nearly two decades.

The Magdalen Hospital

A new approach to the question of sex work was first suggested in 1758 with the establishment of the Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes. This was originally located in Prescot Street, Whitechapel, and later moved to Southwark. Here, women who wanted to leave the sex industry were given a program of moral and practical reform. They were given religious instruction, learned domestic skills, and eventually found positions as servants or returned to their families.

The Magdalen Hospital reflected the "sensibility" of the mid-century, the idea that compassion and kindness were moral virtues that ought to be expressed towards the unfortunate. Its founders, who included the merchant Robert Dingley, claimed that the Magdalen Hospital was distinct from the approach of the Reformation Societies, which had been punitive. They believed that women who worked in the sex industry were victims of circumstances, not wicked in themselves, and that kindness and instruction were the only appropriate ways of dealing with them.

The Hospital sparked considerable public interest, and the chapel service was a fashionable occasion, attended by many well-to-do onlookers, who came to witness the penitent women singing hymns, a practice that seemed somewhat voyeuristic in nature. The Hospital admitted a small number of women annually, and there were stringent conditions for admission, including a need to demonstrate penitence and submit to the Hospital's rules and regulations. Many of the applicants were refused admission, and the Hospital did not make a significant impact on the scale of the sex trade.

Philanthropy and Reform

The Magdalen Hospital was a part of a larger trend of philanthropic institutions in mid-eighteenth-century London. Jonas Hanway, a merchant and a philanthropist, was a tireless advocate for the welfare of abandoned children and the reform of the parish workhouse system. His efforts led to the Marine Society, set up in 1756, to place destitute boys in the navy, and he was a strong supporter of the Foundling Hospital.

John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street, combined law enforcement with a kind of social reform. He instituted a plan to place young street women in domestic service, and he collaborated with charitable organisations to develop alternatives to the sex trade. Fielding knew that simply prosecuting the offenders was not enough; he understood the economic conditions driving the women into prostitution and set out to address them in a practical way.

The Proclamation Society, founded in 1787 by William Wilberforce, was a revival of moral reform efforts in the late eighteenth century. Unlike the Reformation Societies, the Proclamation Society focussed on influence and persuasion rather than mass prosecutions. It lobbied to enforce existing laws prohibiting vice and to establish a moral tone among the upper classes. Its activities overlapped with the final years of the publication of Harris's List, and the increasingly hostile moral climate may have contributed to the demise of the publication.

Libertine Culture and Its Critics

This tradition of moral reform was opposed by the culture of libertinism, a set of attitudes and behaviours which emphasised sexual liberation, pleasure, and the rejection of traditional morality. Libertinism had its origins in the Restoration court of Charles II and continued throughout the eighteenth century as an aristocratic and gentlemanly way of life. The rake, the man-about-town, the connoisseur of pleasure - all these were cultural types which Harris's List reinforced and contributed to.

Libertinism manifested itself in clubs (such as the Hell-Fire Club, which flourished from the 1720s to the 1760s), literature (from the Earl of Rochester's poetry to John Cleland's Fanny Hill), and in the everyday social lives of Londoners in taverns, theatres, and pleasure gardens. It coexisted uneasily with the moral reform movement: many of the same men who supported charitable institutions visited the establishments listed in Harris's List.

Harris's List in the Moral Landscape

Harris's List negotiated this moral terrain with surprising ease. The publication occasionally took a moralising tone, cautioning readers against the dangers of dissipation or expressing sympathy for women who had entered the trade by misfortune. These passages might have been genuine, but might equally have been a device—a way of giving moral sanction to a publication that was ultimately intended to facilitate sexual commerce.

The longevity of Harris's List over three decades, despite the best efforts of moral reformers, speaks to the limits of reform in Georgian London. The sex trade was too deeply embedded in the economic and social fabric of the city to be eradicated by prosecution, philanthropy, or moral suasion. Harris's List existed because there was a market for it, a market which was created by the same social conditions that reformers were trying to combat. The fact that Harris's List disappeared in the 1790s, at first because of the prosecution of its last publishers, might speak less to the success of the reformers than to the changing nature of publication and taste, as the revolutionary fervour of the 1790s transformed the cultural landscape in a way that made the traditional format of Harris's List seem old-fashioned.