Sex & the City
Entertainment, pleasure, and the sex trade in Georgian London
Entertainment, pleasure, and the sex trade in Georgian London
Eighteenth-century London was a city of spectacle, sociability, and sensual indulgence. Its theatres, pleasure gardens, coffee houses, and taverns created an interconnected world of entertainment. In this world, people from different social ranks mingled, flirted, and conducted business of all kinds, including sexual commerce. Harris's List was both a product of this culture and a guide for navigating it.
London was a city with an unparalleled variety of public entertainment. The two patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, presented plays, operas, and pantomimes, and people from all ranks and classes attended them. The galleries were cheap enough for servants and apprentices; the boxes were reserved for the fashionable and the rich. The theatre was as much a social event as it was a form of art, and people went to the theatre to see and be seen, to gossip, to arrange assignations, and to navigate the complex social world that the city presented.
The pleasure gardens were another feature of the landscape of Georgian London. Vauxhall Gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, was opened in 1661. It was at the height of its popularity in the mid-eighteenth century. For the price of a shilling, patrons could promenade under the lamps, listen to music, eat supper in the decorated pavillions, and socialise with other pleasure-seekers. Ranelagh Gardens, which opened in Chelsea in 1742, offered a more exclusive experience centred around the famous rotunda. Both gardens were renowned for the social freedoms they offered. It was considered acceptable for strangers to meet here.
Taverns and coffee houses were the everyday social infrastructure of the city. London boasted hundreds of each, to suit all tastes and social levels. Coffee houses were like clubs, where men met to read the papers, discuss politics, and conduct business. Taverns provided food, drink, and rooms that were often taken for dinners, meetings, or even more salacious activities. Shakespeare’s Head, the tavern in Covent Garden where Jack Harris worked as a waiter and pimp, was just another example of a venue where the boundaries between entertainment, hospitality, and sex were blurred.
The sex trade in Georgian London was concentrated in specific areas, and Harris's List maps this geography with remarkable precision. Covent Garden was the undisputed centre, a neighborhood in which theatres, taverns, bagnios (the latter meaning bath-houses but often places of assignation as well), and lodging houses co-existed. The piazza itself, designed by Inigo Jones as an elegant residential square, by the mid-eighteenth century had become the heart of London's night-time economy.
The streets radiating out from Covent Garden (Drury Lane, the Strand, King Street, and Bow Street) were lined with establishments catering to the sex trade. Further to the west, the streets of Soho and the area around St James's provided a slightly more upmarket setting. To the east, the streets around Fleet Street and the fringes of the City provided a different market. But it was the Covent Garden area, with its unique combination of theatres, taverns, and transient population, that provided the characteristic setting for Harris's List.
The sex trade in eighteenth-century London was an enormous and intricate business, although the exact scope of the sex trade is impossible to determine. Estimates of the number of women participating in the sex trade during the eighteenth century ranged wildly. While some estimates went as high as the sensationalised 50,000, which was often bandied about by moral reformers, modern historians have made estimates of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 women participating in the sex trade in London at any given time during the late eighteenth century.
The sex trade in eighteenth-century London was an industry that reached all levels of society. The first level of the sex trade comprised the so-called kept women or courtesans who were kept by their wealthy patrons in lodgings. These women figured most prominently in the pages of Harris's List, which portrayed them in the most appealing manner possible for the gentlemen of means and taste. The second level of the sex trade comprised the women who worked independently from their own lodgings, receiving visitors by appointment or introduction. Lower still were the women of the bagnios and brothels, who worked under the supervision of a bawd or keeper who took a share of their earnings. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the street walkers, who were the most visible and vulnerable participants in this trade.
Harris's List gives us a glimpse into the upper and middle tiers of this hierarchy. The women described within its pages had addresses of their own, received visitors in their own homes, and charged rates that placed them well above the street walkers. The descriptions within Harris's List emphasise the women's accomplishments in music, conversation, and education, which positioned them as companions rather than simply as objects of physical desire.
Bagnios occupied a unique place within this world. Bagnios began as Turkish baths and provided private rooms with bathing facilities that patrons could rent by the hour or by the night. Some of them functioned simply as bathhouses, while others functioned as an upmarket form of sexual encounter venue. The bagnios of Covent Garden and the Strand (Haddock's, the Turk's Head, and others) were well-known destinations for gentlemen seeking both pleasure and privacy.
The economics of the trade also conformed to the social hierarchy that existed in London. The prices quoted in Harris's List ranged from a few shillings to a few guineas, with the fashionable women commanding the highest fees. However, it must be noted that a guinea, or twenty-one shillings, equaled more than a week's wages for a skilled artisan or a few weeks' wages for a domestic servant. The command over these prices rested upon youth, beauty, accomplishments, and reputation, which were transitory advantages that faded with the passage of time.
Attitudes toward the sex trade changed over the course of Harris's List's publication (1760–1794). In the early years, a rather lax attitude prevailed, particularly within the upper and middle social classes. The sex trade, while deplorable, was seen as an unavoidable aspect of urban life, something that might be regrettable but that it would be futile and unnecessary to expend a great deal of energy upon suppressing. This attitude allowed Harris's List and other publications like it to be openly distributed and booksellers to freely carry them without fear of persecution.
By the 1780s and 1790s, however, the moral atmosphere was undergoing change. The influence of Evangelical Christianity, the establishment of the Proclamation Society (1787), and the cultural transformation associated with the rise of the Romantic movement all conspired to make the sexual commerce and the publications which facilitated it somewhat less acceptable. The revolutionary turmoil in France after 1789 heightened the anxieties concerned with social order, and the British authorities were increasingly willing to crack down on publications which they considered seditious or immoral.
The final edition of Harris's List appeared in 1794 when its last publishers were prosecuted for publishing obscene material. The world of easy pleasure and amusement which had sustained the publication for so long was giving way, in the changed moral and political atmosphere of the 1790s, to a new era of anxiety and censorship, an era which would eventually spawn the moral seriousness of the Victorian age.