1773 Edition. Image @Wikipedia
When I wrote my post about the Master Key to the Rich Ladies Treasury, a number of readers mentioned Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. To my delight Google eBooks offers a link to the 1789 publication. The pocket-sized book, first published in 1757, remained popular for over 30 years with Lotharios looking for a light-o’-love. This annual sold for half a crown, the equivalent of about £15 today or the weekly room rent back in those days. Its author, identified for years as John Harris, was actually the drunken poet, Samuel Derrick, once described by James Boswell as “a little blackguard pimping dog”.*
A Rake's Progress, Hogarth, 1732-33
The introduction to the 1789 publication (see below) provides a shameless rationale for the “votaries of love.” The writer ignored the fact that for most of these ladies life was hard and bitter.
Introduction, p ii of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, 1789
Demand for these lists was so great that 8,000 copies of the first edition were printed. London’s prostitutes were identified by name, location, and their special charms. Here’s a description of Miss Devonshire of Queen Ann Street, who had ‘a fair complexion, cerulean eyes and fine teeth.:
many a man of war hath been her willing prisoner, and paid a proper ransom…she is so brave, that she is ever ready for an engagement, cares not how soon she comes to close quarters, and loves to fight yard arm and yard arm, and be briskly boarded. – Port Cities, London
Although Derrick died in 1769, the list was continued by anonymous authors:
The list was continued for another 15 years by others, but Ms Rubenhold says it became dull soft porn, lacking the wicked sparkle of Derrick’s days – such as the anecdote of Miss C, powdered and perfumed above and below to entertain a prince, who “was so much of an Englishman to despise all fictitious aids in that quarter and, turning up his nose at the … musk, which was quite offensive to him, he rang the bell and sent the servant for a red herring”.- Exposed: Filthy Poet Pimp Who Wrote the Georgian Gentleman’s Guide to Prostitution
The description below of a tall and elegant woman, written 20 years after Derrick’s death, is rather pedestrian and obviously lacks Derrick’s wit.
A description in the 1789 list
For most prostitutes eking out a living in the Georgian era life was a constant struggle against poverty, illness and danger.The Times reported in 1785 that every year 5000 street-walkers died in the city (Prostitution in Maritime London). Prostitutes also died from venereal disease and the effects of poverty once their charms waned. Many aged prematurely. Some girls began their life of sin when they were 10 or 12 , for virgins came at a premium.
The Whore's Last Shift, James Gillray, 1779. From this view of her room and hole in her stocking, we can surmise that her life was far from glamorous. One can imagine that her tower of elaborately styled hair, kept in shape with grease, lard, and powder for days at a time, contained any number of itching lice and vermin when the arrangement was dismantled.
Economics was the driving engine of the thriving whore business in London. One in five women made a living as a prostitute, a remarkable number. The young women and girls who chose prostitution as a living were undereducated and fit only to work in backbreaking, menial jobs. Most prostitutes were independent street-walkers and kept a majority of their wages. A London prostitute stood an excellent chance of earning more than £400 a year. Contrast this income to a housemaid’s earnings of £5 a year, and one can readily see why so many women were drawn to the trade. Forty per cent of prostitutes came from London, while 60% came from the countryside and Ireland. Pimps, bawds, and procuresses (aging former prostitutes) exploited young girls arriving from the country (shades of Fanny Hill). They could make a tidy sum of money, for the deflowering rights of a young virgin went for £150, or £11,000 in today’s sums. (Sin City: One in Five Women in 1700’s London Were Prostitutes.)
Rowlandson, Launching a Frigate. Image @Port Cities.org
[Prostitutes] tended to gather in areas with looser police control; when the police became stricter in the City of London in the eighteenth century, the prostitutes gravitated toward the west and east ends of the city; when police control loosened in the early nineteenth century, they returned to the City. Prostitutes also tended to congregate in areas with cheap lodging houses and lots of men. St. Giles and St. James, home to many cheap boardinghouses, were popular with prostitutes in Westminster; the Docks, where many sailors disembarked, was popular on the east side of the city. – (Tony Henderson. Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830. London and New York: Longman, 1999. x + 226 pp. $29.20 (paper), ISBN 978-0-582-26421-2; $106.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-582-26395-6. Reviewed by Kristen Robinson (Department of History, University of Kentucky)
Note the saying above the door lintel.
The last Harris’s List was published in 1795, just as the perception of prostitution began to change. In the 18th century, “most prostitutes were seen as harlots who sought sex for pleasure. In the eighteenth century, however, prostitution was redefined as a condition stemming from economic need.” (Tony Henderson). As the 19th century progressed, the arrival of street lighting and methods of modern policing reformed London as a city of vice.
The dawn of the Victorian age and new attitudes to morality meant that prostitution gradually went underground. Streetwalking was made an imprisonable offence in the 1820s. – Sin City: One in Five Women in 1700’s London Were Prostitutes
More on the topic:
- *Exposed Filthy Georgian Pimp Who Wrote the Georgian Gentleman’s Guide to Prostitution
- As Lewd as Goats and Monkeys
- Prostitution in 17th-18th century English Ports
- The Green Canister: Mrs. Phillip’s Covent Garden Sex Shop
- Not So Nice Work: Prostitution in the 18th Century
- Prostitution in Maritime London
Jane Austen's World 
Great post, Vic! Sad that 20% of the female population in London had to prostitute themselves to survive.
I have this book. It is a hilarious read, but it’s so true what you say, Vic. You can’t help but think of all these women and the really difficult lives behind these ads for their services. It reminds one, sometimes, of an auctioneer describing cattle.
Wonderful post — thank you! For a vivid illustration of this topic and the inevitably downward trajectory of women in this trade, the British tv series “A Harlot’s Progress” (2006) is excellent.
Excellent and elaborate essay. I enjoyed reading it. It is so vivid and interesting.
Harris’s introduction is very interesting.It is a manifesto that challenges the general rules of society. The family then and now has marriage vows between the husband and wife and was and is an institute that is a unit of society encapsulated in law. Certain duties and obligations, sexually,economically and emotionally, tied by love, but not necessarily, control the family.Within society as a whole we have laws that govern the way we behave. Harris’s manifesto talks about being honest about our urges and going with them, doing what we please which goes against the strictures of society. He is suggesting a sort of sexual anarchy should prevail. In this way it is a political manifesto challenging societies perceived rules.
However it is never one or the other. The situation has always been that beneath the layers of social rules and practices there always has been within all of us the temptation to do what we please. This is not such a bad thing. Creativity in art, music, literature, politics, science, engineering and so on has always been about breaking the rules and often discarding them. Humanity could never have progressed without breaking the rules in every aspect of life.We still have the family unit but the family of the 18th century is not the same as now. Women can work and have the same careers as men and that is just one change. We actively strive for what we want and think it is a good thing and we break or loosen the rules in the process.It takes courage to break rules. Martyrs are born of this.
We need rules and social structures in society but we also need to keep adapting the rules we want to keep.
There is always room for improvement!!!
It has struck me that the descriptions of the prostitutes are rather strange, Some of the descriptions are so detailed they are gynaecologically exact.
These detailed descriptions often coincide with a sort of vagueness about the girls origins and sexual accomplishments.Sometimes the opposite.They relate every detail. he also likes mentioning rumours and suppositions. Sometimes there is a detailed history of them covering a number of years and how they have physically developed. Harris either made all this stuff up or had intimate knowledge of them but sometimes you are left feeling, how well did he know them? Could he have possibly known all of them?
Thank you for this Blog post!
I am trying to find Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, but there are only five issues of it available at the British Library! Does anybody know where copies of the collection are to be found? As five of them have been digitalized, should not all of them been so by somebody interested in this subject at some point?
Anybody with tips on how to get Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, I would be very thankful, as I hope to use them in academic research.
Best
Lotta Moberg
Geroge Mason Univerity, VA, USA.
If you’d like to learn more about the Harris’s Lists, please read my book – The Covent Garden Ladies (by Hallie Rubenhold, Tempus 2005) and the small edited version of the 1792 List, with additions from other years, which I compiled, titled ‘The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies; Sex in the City in Georgian England’, or ‘The Harlots Handbook’ – same book, different name. The Covent Garden Ladies details the book’s creation and the characters involved in it. It also profiles a number of the women on the Lists, into whose lives I conducted some research. The documentary I made about it for the BBC, The Harlots Handbook, can also be viewed on line…somewhere!
Here is the link to the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FzzeC36E0
I’ve been watching to see if anyone would mention Philadelphia Hancock, George Austen’s sister, in this context. Here is a copy-and-paste of a few paragraphs that I’ve written elsewhere:
Philadelphia’s mother Rebecca (Hampson) died on February 6th, 1733, soon after the birth of her sister Leonora. Her father William married again, to Susan Kelk, but he too died on 7 December 1737. Philadelphia was then 7, George 6, and Leonora 4. Susan Kelk was not at all interested in her step-children, and the three were taken in by their Uncle, Stephen Austen (a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard, London), and his wife Elizabeth. Stephen and Elizabeth were prepared to keep little Leonora, and George went to live with his aunt, Betty (Austen) and her husband George Hooper, at Tonbridge in Kent.
It appears that Philadelphia was sent to live with family on her maternal Hampson side – possibly her mother’s sister Catherine, who was married to John Cope Freeman. Nevertheless, the Hampson family don’t appear to have taken much interest in Philadelphia, nor in the other Austen children. The Hampsons were a family of note: Rebecca’s brother George was the 5th baronet; another sister, Jane, was a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Princess-Dowager of Wales, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. (Jane had been present at the birth of George III in 1738; and was in the Princess’s service from the time of her marriage to Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, in 1763, until 1767.)
Philadelphia was apprenticed to Hester Cole of Covent Garden, on the day of her 15th birthday, as a milliner. Many young women in London were milliners, but a “milliner of Covent Garden” was also a euphemism for a prostitute. There is room for speculation on what was in the Hampson’s minds – possibly Catherine saw her as a threat to the marriage prospects of her own daughters. Even assuming that she was trained as a milliner, we must wonder how they could have abandoned one of their own into Covent Garden. If they were unwilling to keep her in the family, one would think that she could have been a perfectly acceptable companion to a lady, or a governess.
(A comment for this blog: Of course, then Jane Austen wouldn’t have had her ‘outlandish’ cousin, nor Henry his first wife, Eliza de Feuillide.)
Ron Dunning
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