Christopher Hart
The Drunken Member
City of Sin: London and Its Vices
By Catharine Arnold (Simon & Schuster 373pp £14.99)

Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!

We like to think we are a liberal-minded lot nowadays, but Catharine Arnold's colourful and richly entertaining gallop through the history of our capital's sex life suggests otherwise. In fact, we seem more strait-laced than at almost any period since the brief aberration of the Commonwealth. Our leaders and MPs are excoriated in the popular press for having mistresses, engaging in unwholesome rendezvous on Clapham Common, or setting fire to hotel curtains, like the unfortunate Labour peer Mike Watson. But this is pretty tame stuff compared to how we used to be.

In Samuel Pepys's day, Sir Charles Sedley MP once put on an impressive display on the balcony of 'Oxford Kate's', a celebrated whorehouse in Bow Street. Pepys describes him appearing naked in broad daylight, perhaps a little tired and emotional, 'acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined', and boasting that he knew of a potion 'as should make all the cunts in town run after him'. Before an audience of a thousand, he then 'took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another and drank the King's health'. Sedley's only punishment was to be banished to the country for a few weeks. Nowadays we are shocked and disgusted when one of our sad, lonely political leaders posts pictures of himself on the internet wearing nothing but his underpants, like my former schoolfellow and head of house, Chris Bryant MP. All rather feeble, really.

Arnold says that Paris is the city of love, but London the city of lust. This sounds a little sweeping, but contains some truth. Obviously Paris has done its fair share of lusting too, and London has had its true lovers, but she astutely notes our very Anglo-Saxon mix of 'ribaldry and reticence'. England is the land not of passionate lovemaking, but of the Donald McGill postcard and the rude limerick. We are not sexually but emotionally prudish.

She describes Londinium enticingly as the 'Las Vegas of the Roman Empire', with wild orgies taking place in its streets day and night. I'd always pictured it as a rather grim little trading post on a wide, muddy river, despite having a magnificent basilica. In this first chapter - my only whinge - her use of sources is a bit cavalier. The truth is, we know very little of daily life in Roman London; to supply the gaps, Arnold turns to Catullus and Juvenal for details of sexual mores. This is unsafe. She gives us Juvenal's description of women so inflamed by worship of the goddess Bona Dea that they would 'rape any passing male or even drag donkeys from their stables'. A lively image, certainly, but not to be taken as an objective description of daily life in Roman times, coming as it does from the sixth satire, the most hilariously unbalanced and misogynistic rant in literature.

We know far more about the Middle Ages, even the names of some of London's whores, such as the delightful Clarice la Claterballock, surely a medieval equivalent of today's porn stars called things like Mitzi Divine. And there is still more about the Tudors and Stuarts, although again it raises the obvious question: is this what people actually did, or what people said they did? Did Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621), distant ancestor of this magazine's Founding Father, really like to watch horses at it before she 'would act the like sport herself with her stallions'? We have no way of knowing, any more than we can be sure about all that stuff Suetonius wrote about the Caesars, or whether Anne Boleyn really slept with her brother.

Voices from the street are inevitably rare, although a porn mag from 1660 called the Wandring Whore does seem to capture the startlingly vivid voice of a working girl. To prevent disease she would urinate into a chamber pot, 'till I made it whurra and roar like the Tyde at London Bridge to endangering the breaking of my very Twatling-strings with straining backwards, for I know no better way or remedy more safe than pissing presently to prevent the French Pox'. Almost everyone was poxed, from Henry VIII to Bishop Gardiner to the Dean of Windsor. Medical wisdom suggested putting stinging nettles 'in the Codpiece about the yerde and the stones', which in reality, one fears, could only have led to what doctors call 'complications'.

The Restoration and Georgian periods stand out as the bawdiest, although the medievals were also impressively untroubled by any notions of modesty. The Victorians, on the other hand, exude a somewhat sickly air, a strict public morality going side by side with plentiful child prostitution, the darker shores of sadomasochism, and of course Jack the Ripper.

We flatter ourselves that we are enlightened now, but it is a very selective enlightenment. Buggery is no longer a capital offence, but then it wasn't in medieval times either. Arnold argues, rightly I think, that the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was far more resigned to man's fallen nature than the Protestants, who wanted to reform us. Both Augustine and Aquinas regarded brothels as a necessary evil. It was the dreaded Thomas Cromwell who first oversaw the Buggery Statute of 1533, though punishment wasn't always imposed. In 1541, Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton, was found guilty of having buggered two of his pupils. He spent some time as a vicar in Essex, by way of penance, and reappeared in 1555 as headmaster of Westminster. Nobody seemed to think this was risky.

Today we are far nicer to buggers and dykes, detest child prostitution, are incredibly strict about monogamy in marriage, and hypocritically harsh about standards in public life. Nowadays, the lusty and colourful Sir Charles Sedley wouldn't stand a chance, and Nicholas Udall would be trembling on Nonces' Row in Pentonville.