Norma Clarke
THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS
The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital
By Dan Cruickshank (Random House Books 688pp £25)
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After the Great Fire in 1666, speculative building became one of London's main economic activities and, according to Dan Cruickshank, what kept the building trade going was the sex industry. The glories of Georgian London were made possible by the vigorous activities of common prostitutes, classy courtesans, bawds, procuresses, pimps, mollies, bullies, bunters, owners of bagnios and brothels, tavern keepers, libertines, and even the landlords of ordinary London houses. The design of the standard London house allowed independent access to many rooms. Did the design emerge in response to the need for more bawdyhouses? Given the estimate of the Universal Daily Register in 1786 that one-sixth of the population of London were 'Rakes or Whores', and Cruickshank's calculation that 'a staggering' one woman in five was in the industry, it starts to seem possible if not probable.
That prostitution was rife in eighteenth-century London is well-known: Boswell's London Journal of 1762-3 gives us vivid glimpses of streetwalkers and Boswell's way with them. Successful courtesans like Fanny Murray wrote their memoirs. Histories and ballads celebrated characters like Sally Salisbury, the toast of the town in 1720, dead by 1724. Moralists fulminated and foreign visitors stared and then, like Johann Archenholtz, wrote down what they saw. London was a city of vice, the Sodom of the age - Pretty Doings in a Protestant Nation as one shocked pamphleteer put it. Much incidental evidence also comes from legal records, not only in the frequent cases where women were the victims of crimes but when they were called in evidence. The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now online. Anybody with a computer can plunge into eighteenth-century life, as vivid as a novel. Cruickshank makes extensive use of these sources, relating individual case studies and linking them to his central argument, that the sheer size of the sex industry made it a key player in the growth of London. Sometimes he can show this literally. Moll King, whose coffeehouse in Covent Garden was notorious as 'a great receptacle for Rakes and Prostitutes', was able to build a row of houses in Hampstead from her profits.
Cruickshank is an architectural historian, and adept at reading the evidence of buildings. Unlike churches and temples, the buildings of the sex industry do not survive to tell their tale. By the Victorian period the bawdyhouses had been domesticated, the bagnios were gone. Only hints remain of their interiors. With a 1752 inventory of Haddock's bagnio, Cruickshank walks us through its 'theatre of sex' (the origin of the book in a TV series is often evident). A few lewd panels found on the upper floor of the Cheshire Cheese suggest that this part of the building might have been leased out as a brothel; and - more interestingly - that rooms were often quickly transformed with the simple addition of soft furnishings, women, and sexually explicit images on the walls. Did Dr Johnson ever venture up there?
By 'women' might be meant children. It was unusual for a girl of eight or nine who was apprenticed to a milliner or mantua maker not to be inducted soon after into prostitution. The same applied to actresses. Servants supplemented their wages this way. There was a category for the moonlighting respectable: they were known as 'demi-reps'. Link boys who held flares to light gentlemen their way home were assumed to be available (Joshua Reynolds's extraordinary portrait of Cupid as a link boy clutching a monstrous phallic torch makes this plain). Hogarth's 1731 series A Harlot's Progress (the original paintings were destroyed in a house fire but the engravings remain) shows innocent Moll up from the country and duped by a bawd into sex work which, at first, gives her luxury and a sense of her own power, but soon consigns her to disease, poverty, prison and death. Some women succeeded. Lavinia Fenton's mother set a price of £200 on her pretty daughter's virginity but it was the stage that transformed Lavinia's life: she was the first Polly Peachum in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and the Duke of Bolton fell in love with her. After some vicissitudes she became Duchess of Bolton. Clever businesswomen like Mrs Goadby, who introduced Parisian-style brothels to London in the 1750s, could make a packet. Elegance and discretion were the keynotes of her well-appointed bawdyhouse. Her style was quickly followed. The satirical referred to them as 'nunneries' presided over by 'abbesses'.
If the buildings are what Dan Cruickshank seeks, it is stories and characters he mostly provides. Familiar eighteenth-century figures like Jonathan Wild, Sir Francis Dashwood, John Wilkes, Henry Fielding and Joshua Reynolds rub along with lesser known individuals like Elizabeth Canning (who was abducted into prostitution), Ann Bell (who was murdered by a punter) and Mrs Cornelys, whose extraordinary masquerades were all the rage in the 1760s. Charitable ventures like the Foundling Hospital and the Magdalen House, which sought to care for illegitimate children and reform 'penitent' prostitutes, were 'significant architectural monuments to the city's sex industry'. Like the bagnios, these buildings have gone. Nobody wanted to save them, testimony perhaps to the moral dilemmas involved: if you gave help, were you not encouraging vice?
Little of the material here is new but it is engagingly and comprehensively assembled. Dan Cruickshank is a humane guide. His observations are sometimes trite, he resorts to the word 'intriguing' too often to mean 'we don't know' (but at least he is prepared to admit it), and some might think he overstates his case, though I don't. His relish for the subject is clear but so too is his understanding of the harsh price often exacted. There was glamour and perhaps wealth at the upper end of the industry, but disease, unwanted pregnancies, violence, and - in the case of homosexuals - falling foul of the law were the likely realities at every level.
Norma Clarke is Professor of English Literature at Kingston University and author of 'Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington (Faber).