Recalling a visit to London in 1763-64, the Italian adventurer and libertine
Casanova described in his autobiography how he was offered the services of a
leading courtesan, Kitty Fisher, for 10 guineas. Despite her glamour and
reputation, he declined the offer. She could speak only English, he said,
and he liked to have all his senses, including that of hearing, gratified.
Casanova also recalled that on the day he turned her down, a certain Sir
Richard Atkins sent Kitty a £100 banknote in return for an assignation. This
time, it was Kitty’s turn to refuse. Outraged by Sir Richard’s
bargain-basement offer, she ate the banknote on a slice of bread and butter.
Quite why Kitty should have refused Sir Richard for £100 when she was happy to
accept Casanova for a tenth of that sum is less than clear — as so often
with Casanova, there is something here that smacks a little too much of
self-flattery. But the anecdote does give some sense of the extraordinary
earning power of harlots in Georgian London. At a time when a labourer might
earn £24 a year and a journeyman tradesman little more than £50, a
high-class prostitute might command more than £50 a night. She could live in
luxury, too. According to one of Casanova’s friends, Kitty lived “in the
greatest possible splendour, spends £12,000 a year, and she is the first of
her class to employ liveried servants”.
Not all prostitutes, of course, had this earning power. James Boswell recalls
in his London Journal paying a shilling to “toy” with a girl in a
court off the Strand, and several times was charged no more than sixpence.
But when one bears in mind the sheer number of harlots in Georgian London —
as many as one in five of the capital’s women, according to some
contemporary estimates — it’s clear that each year vast sums of money
changed hands. In 1792, the docks, the economic hub of London, handled
imports and exports worth about £27 million. Prostitution at that time may
have been worth as much as £20 million a year. Money generated by the sex
industry flowed through the city, financing elegant, though often hastily
built, properties. It would not be going too far to say that much of
Georgian London, particularly areas such as Covent Garden, Soho and
Marylebone, was literally built on the wages of sin.
Tantalising traces remain. True, the long-time commercial and industrial
nature of Covent Garden — moving from entertainment uses in the 18th century
to wholesale fruit, vegetable and flower markets, as well as publishing —
means that hardly any Georgian domestic buildings there retain their
original ground floors or ornate doorcases. Most were removed long ago to
accommodate shopfronts, tavern frontages or warehouse doors. But the late
17th, 18th and early 19th-century houses of Soho, an area of discreet
brothels that also kept a significant residential population, still retain
many original ground-floor details.
Often we can match early occupants to houses. Take 9 Meard Street, Soho, for
example. It was constructed in 1732 by the speculative builder John Meard
and is one of few original houses in this largely intact early Georgian
street to have had a later shopfront inserted in its ground floor. In the
1760s it was home to the literaryminded Bet Flint who, according to Dr
Johnson, was “generally a slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief”
but also “a fine character”.
In reference to the Meard Street house, Johnson observed that “Bet ... had . .
. genteel lodgings, a spinet on which she played and a boy that walked
before her chair”. She had literary leanings and Johnson agreed to correct
the verse autobiography she was writing. Work was cut short when Bet was
arrested on the charge of stealing a counterpane from her landlord.
The task of imaginatively repopulating surviving Georgian houses in the heart
of the 18th-century red-light district is greatly helped by the existence of
one of the most notorious publications of the period: Harris’s List
of Covent Garden Ladies, which first appeared in the late 1740s. A sort
of Yellow Pages, it provided names and addresses — and sometimes
rather more. We know, for example, that 16 Goodge Street, now a restaurant,
was the residence and workplace of a Miss Corbel in 1788. Next door at 17
lived Miss Johnson, noted for “such elasticity in her loins that she can
cast her lover to a pleasing height and receive him again with utmost
dexterity”.
Many brothels and bawdy-houses of Georgian London operated within terrace
houses or larger mansions, or even taverns and coffee houses — none of them
a form of building exclusive to the sex industry. But there was one type of
building, of which no substantial and certain remains are known to survive
above ground, that was never fully visually documented, but which was
essentially the product of the capital’s sex industry.
The bagnio, hummums, or bath house, has a long history in London. It was
probably introduced in the 12th century by crusaders and pilgrims returning
from the Holy Land who had acquired a liking for Turkish or Persian baths.
With their relaxed dress codes, semi-naked bathing, and occasional mix of
male and female customers, it is easy to understand how bagnios soon
acquired a dubious reputation and often became centres of prostitution. Some
of the 17th and early 18thcentury examples seem to have taken elaborate
Turkish forms. The Duke’s Bagnio in Long Acre, for instance, had an elegant
cupola, colonnades, walks paved with marble, courts and service buildings.
It is possible that the remains of a small bagnio survives in a small building
on Strand Lane, where there is a plunge pool fed from the nearby spring or
well of St Clement, to which blue and white 17thcentury Delft tiles provide
discreet ornament. A more significant, and probably more certain, bagnio
discovery was made in 2005 near the southeast corner of the Covent Garden
piazza. This included networks of flues for smoke or heated water and
objects that we know were commonly found in bagnios, including the remains
of a jelly glass. Jellies and jelly houses were by the mid-18th century
associated with prostitutes and the sex industry.
Ned Ward, writing in The London Spy at the turn of the 18th century,
gives some idea of what life in a bagnio was like. He paid eight shillings
(equivalent to a couple of months’ rent for a poor Londoner) to sweat in an
“apartment” where he was rubbed down, soaked in a tub of hot water (to “boil
out those gross humours that could not be emitted by a more gentle
perspiration”) and “cupped” (a process by which “ill blood” was drawn from
the body). He asked the attendants about the well-known harlots who used the
baths and was told how a “very fine lady of the Town visited the hummums to
. . . refresh her body for the work ahead”. After the lady had left the
attendant was surprised to find she had relieved herself in the perfumed tub
in which she had soaked. An apt metaphor, perhaps, for the beautiful, yet
brittle, age.
The sex trade also played a significant role in the social life of Georgian
London. It was a sophisticated and well-organised enterprise that crossed
class boundaries, overlapped with most aspects of daily life and enjoyed a
highly ambiguous relationship with the law. It also had a profound influence
on the fine arts. Kitty Fisher and her like played the role of muse and
model for painters such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth. London’s
sex industry — a world of riches and glamour, yet equally of tragedy, brutal
abuse and disease — offered a mirror to society and was perceived to carry a
moral message for the age. It inspired writers such as Daniel Defoe, John
Gay, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and William Blake, many of whom saw
London’s underworld, which was deeply entwined with the illicit aspects of
the sex industry, as a metaphor for, and reflection of, the equally corrupt
and immoral worlds of politics and exploitative business. The only real
difference was in the accountability exerted in these parallel worlds. As
John Gay observed in 1728, through a character in his highly emblematic work The
Beggar’s Opera, “the lower sort of people have their vices in a
degree as well as the rich”, but only the poor “are punished for them”.
The sex industry also oiled the machinery of often dubiously wielded political
power. For instance, the members of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Monks of
Medmenham — the most notorious of the 18th-century Hellfire clubs — were
rakes and sexual fantasists, but also often politicians and men of wealth,
power and immense influence. Dashwood was Chancellor of the Exchequer from
1762 to 1763 and Benjamin Franklin visited him during his stay in England in
the early 1770s. The US Founding Father clearly believed that Dashwood’s
country retreat at West Wycombe would be a good place to meet the luminaries
of Britain’s government in relaxed circumstances. He was right, for it was
in this club — and others like it dedicated to sexual dalliance and
drinking, and graced by cavorting harlots often dressed as masked nuns —
that political decisions and alliances were made. The consequences of this
bizarre brew were to help to change the political complexion of Britain for
ever.
It is not until the revolutionary and radical attitudes of the age to sex are
appreciated that the symbolism, meaning and message of much 18th-century
painting, architecture and garden design can be fully understood. It is the
dramatic and paradoxical mix of worlds, the counterpoints of beauty and of
brutality that characterise its life — and not least the exploitative, yet
inspirational, role played by the sex industry — that make Georgian London a
forever fascinating and incomparable city.
Dan Cruickshank is author of The Secret History of Georgian London,
published by Random House on October 1 at £25. To buy it for £22.50 call
0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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