PIcturing Pregnancy In Early Modern Europe

 

 

 
When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings.

           Detail of The Figure of the Child Turning Itself to the Birth, an engraving from James Cooke’s Mellificium Chirurgiae              (1693), which bears a striking resemble to the birth figures pictured in works by Eucharius Rösslin and Jakob Rüff 

          more than a century earlier.

 
Showing two nested bodies, the pregnant and the gestated, the birth figure is an image of something that, to the early modern viewer, was not just invisible but saturated with secrecy, mystery, and power. It shows the hidden world of the bodily interior, the secrets of life before birth, and the unfathomable powers, both human and divine, of generation. The first birth figures to be printed — illustrations by Martin Caldenbach for Eucharius Rösslin’s 1513 midwifery manual, Der Swangern Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (The Pregnant Women’s and Midwives’ Rose Garden) — contributed to a project that had already been ongoing for centuries, of exploring, defining, controlling, and making safe the pregnant body.
 
In the Rösslin depictions, the womb is represented simply and schematically, as a transparent, flask-shaped container. By rendering the organ exposed, and see-through, the images promise knowledge of the mysterious body, a peek into the still-living interior. The fetus is represented as a cherubic toddler, with curly hair, big eyes, chubby cheeks, and a self-conscious expression. With his head slightly inclined toward us, he seems to acknowledge our presence, our looking at what, by rights, shouldn’t be seen. The images might be understood as an attempt to make known the mysterious generative womb; certainly they formed part of a text that had the aim of spreading knowledge about the body and regulating midwifery practice. But the simplicity of these compositions — the human figure encircled — gives them the capacity to mean in many ways. They point to the universal importance of generation to early modern culture, drawing a link between the fetus in utero and the human in the world, and they neatly encapsulate the origins of human life. From this starting point, the birth figure as an iconographic form could be read for significance within a multitude of different spheres of culture and knowledge: anatomy, alchemy, mechanical physiology, medical professionalism, prayer, magic, midwifery practice, haptic knowledge, and portraiture, to name but a few.
 

            Woodcut birth figures by the draftsman Martin Caldenbach, from the first edition of Eucharius Rösslin’s Der                
                Swangern Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (1513)

   

         Woodcut birth figures by the draftsman Martin Caldenbach, from the first edition of Eucharius Rösslin’s Der Swangern 
              Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (1513)

 
Birth figures helped midwives to envision the body, and particularly the position of the fetus, in a newly concrete way. Working as a key to malpresentation, birth figures pointed to how a midwife might alter a presentation and physically guide labor. For many midwives not only was this a newly interventionist approach, it fundamentally reformulated midwifery as an active process of aid, rather than a passive attendance on an inherently invisible, mysterious, and uncertain event. But midwives were not the only people looking at and using birth figures. Their widespread popularity in vernacular books indicates their use by people of all kinds, from curious lay readers to learned doctors to pregnant women. For many of these viewers, the images were not primarily ones that provided an anatomically derived and spatially concrete system of knowledge about the body. They were at the center of many webs of knowledge: from humoral to microcosmic systems; from uroscopy to alchemy; from religion to the maternal imagination. Birth figures, in their iconographic simplicity, offered a flexible, adaptable tool for thinking about the body in many modes, often simultaneously.
 
The Birth Figure and the Universe
 
One of the most widespread and deeply naturalized systems for understanding the body in this period was the theory of the microcosm. The theory taught that man was a version of the universe or world in miniature. This idea led to the practical framework of analogy: things in the body and in the world that resembled each other or worked similarly were in fact more fundamentally connected. Not only could knowledge of one explain the other, but their inherent link meant that they could also influence each other. Knowledge of the stars and planets could, for instance, tell you about a person’s health, and the inherent links between celestial and corporeal bodies meant that the planets could also be used to effect healing. The human body was, in this system, the center of all things, as Michel Foucault describes it, “the possible half of a universal atlas” and “the great fulcrum of proportions—the centre upon which relations are concentrated and from which they are once again reflected.”
 
Foucault describes analogy as a fundamental part of knowledge until the end of the sixteenth century, but among lay people, and even informally among physicians and scholars, there is much evidence to suggest that an analogical worldview remained widespread throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries. This understanding of man at the center of many circles of resemblance, his body mirroring and informing the universe, was something that learned readers would have been visually as well as textually familiar with. Astrological and microcosmic man illustrations common in medieval manuscripts showed a figure encircled by the zodiac or planets. Astrological and magical as well as microcosmic encircled figures continued in printed early modern books, describing the relations between man and the planets, or setting out horoscopes. In John Case’s The Angelical Guide of 1697, a circle with astrological figures and notations surrounds an oval containing a set of illustrations of the developing fetus borrowed from Theodor Kerckring’s Anthropogeniae Ichnographia. The image is accompanied by an English translation of Kerckring’s notes on the figures, which describe the age of the embryos and the anatomical parts, but no mention is made by Case of the astrological surround, or the four cherubs in the corners. The image shows how easy it was to combine new anatomical findings with old astrological systems — they did not even need to be mentioned. Case’s text discusses the human ovum with a mixture of physiological detail and mystical interpretation. This image makes the link between the circle of the heavens and the circle of the womb explicit, but the analogical resemblance was everywhere, present in birth figures as well as astrological figures. In the former, the circle of the womb could also stand for the world or the heavens. Indeed, looked at microcosmically, the birth figure becomes a summation of the microcosmic worldview: if the body was the world in miniature, then the unborn child was a microcosmic person in the world of the maternal body, as well as a person in the circle of the universe.

               Woodcut figure demonstrating anatomical and astrological relations, from John Case’s The Angelical Guide 

                      Shewing Men and Women their Lott or Chance, in this Elementary Life (1697)
 

 
The encircling womb was like the arch of the heavens and like the sphere of the world. The more three-dimensional and anatomical womb in Jakob Rüff's birth figures — originally appearing in both German and Latin editions in 1554 — draws out this comparison, not only situating the organ within contemporary knowledge gained from dissection, but also exploring its microcosmic resemblances to the verdant earth.
 
Field and Fruit
 
 
In the early modern period, pregnancy was perhaps most widely and fundamentally associated and interconnected with the daily processes of the rural agricultural life that most people led. Cyclical processes such as plowing, sowing, and harvesting were regularly used as frameworks for understanding pregnancy and birth, and are, arguably, at least as important in understanding the work birth figures did for early modern viewers as anatomical and practitional frameworks. Rüff’s images — produced for him by Jos Murer, which appeared in a 1637 English translation and many other midwifery manuals in the seventeenth century — look extremely fruitlike. The uterine wall and membranes resemble a skin or rind, protecting the tender flesh inside. The ovaries look like raspberries, and the vagina even resembles a stem or stalk. Rüff's anatomical images, too, are remarkably lush, with arteries and veins forming the trunk and branches of a bodily tree, on which organs are hung like fruits. Within this internal landscape, the fetus is simultaneously the “fruit” (a common verbal as well as visual analogy for children at this time) and a miniature person dwelling, hermit-like, in the maternal/arboreal environment. From farmers to physicians, this kind of verdant analogy was a powerful tool for thinking about the body. The child grew like a crop — it was fragile and important, a legacy and investment made by the parents. This kind of thinking gave ordinary people a sense of authority over the body, through association with work they knew. Good farmers husbanded land in order to produce healthy crops, and mothers did the same with the fetus.

 

          Woodcut figures of pregnant woman and foetus in utero from The Expert Midwife or an Excellent and Most Necessary               Treatise on the Generation and Birth of Man (1637), an English translation of Jakob Rüff’s midwifery manual,                             originally  published in German and Latin in 1554


 
Indeed, this kind of thinking was utilized not just by the rural laity but also by trained medical practitioners in their explanations and treatments of the body. The medically trained midwife Percival Willughby, for instance, frequently employed agricultural analogy in explaining the logic of his practice: “Let all midwives observe the wayes and proceedings of nature for the production of their fruits in trees, the ripening of walnuts, and almonds, from their first knotting, unto the opening of the husk, and falling of the nut, and considering their signatures, to take notice, how beneficiall their oiles may bee for use in their practice, for the easing of their labouring woman.” The midwife is enjoined to look carefully at the natural world, and specifically to look for signatures that related to the pregnant and laboring body. Here Willughby links the process of pregnancy and labor to the ripening of nuts. Of the process of labor, he writes: “as the fruit ripeneth, so, by degrees, this husk, of it self, will separate from the shell, which, at last, by it’s own accord, chappeth, and, with a fissure, openeth, and, by degrees, separateth from the fruit. Then doth the husk turn up the edges, and give way, without any enforcement, for the falling off the nut.”

  Woodcut birth figures from The Expert Midwife or an Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise on the Generation and Birth of Man (1637), an English translation of Jakob Rüff’s midwifery manual, originally published in German and Latin in 1554

At the time of Willughby’s writing, there were competing theories about how to ensure the safest labor. One held that the quicker the labor was, the better, and some authors, including Rösslin, advised that the midwife manually dilate the vagina and cervix to hasten delivery. Others, including Willughby, held that labor was safest when left to run its own course, however long that was. He enjoins his readers to wait, because “the fruit would fall off it-self, when that it was full ripe.” What was known to be true about fruit served also for the womb. His description of the ripening nut brings us back to Rüff’s birth figures. The peeled membranes enact this “natural” process of birth. The husk, or womb, slowly peels away, freeing the fetal fruit without need for violence or intervention. Thus, these openings, typically understood as an imagined anatomical cut, are perhaps better understood as symbolic of the natural capacity of the womb to open during labor.
 
The Womb and the Workshop
 
In verdant analogy the womb was a field, a tree, a fruit, a stone, but the system also worked for humanmade objects. Physicians and natural philosophers saw the organ in various pots, vases, jugs, and flasks associated with their disciplines. During the medieval period, the womb was widely compared to a cupping vessel, including in Muscio’s Gynaecia. Accordingly, in many birth figures from medieval manuscripts, the shape of the womb is rounder, with a wider mouth than in Rösslin’s first printed figures. By the sixteenth century, however, the comparison was more frequently made with the urine flask, which, like Rösslin’s figures, had a longer, thinner neck.
 
Uroscopy, or the examination of urine, was one of the most widely used diagnostic tools of the early modern era: the color, consistency, and sediments in urine were understood as indicators of sickness in the body, and of pregnancy. Michael Stolberg has recorded that uroscopy was particularly valued as a test for pregnancy that did not rely on the testimony of the mother, who might misinterpret or misrepresent the sensations she felt. Rösslin’s birth figures, in this visual context, flicker between test and embodiment, between pregnant womb and flask of urine.

           Birth figure engravings from an English translation of Eucharius Rösslin’s midwifery manual titled The Byrth of                             Mankynde, Otherwyse Named the Womans Booke (1545)

 

 
If the uroscopy flask analogically resembled the womb, it also resembled the alchemical flask. The two round-bottomed glass vessels were so similar that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the physician with his urine flask from the alchemist with his alchemical one in genre paintings. This flask was central to the special, complex symbolic language in which alchemical secrets and recipes were often recorded. In many alchemical illustrations, this symbolic marriage and birth happens inside a flask that is both the literal glass flask and a symbol for the generative womb. Anne-Françoise Cannella notes that the flask in alchemy was often understood as “mother” or “matrix”, that the two were analogically and symbolically intertwined, each standing for and explaining the other — both containers and both sites of generation. The macrocosmic generative earth, the microcosmic generative womb, and the artificial alchemical flask all enacted the same miraculous processes.
 
In the womb, according to some theories of conception, a process similar to the mixing and heating of sulfur and mercury was enacted. The male and female seeds met, mixed, and were heated and contained by the womb until they formed something finer and purer than the sum of their parts — a child. It would have been easy for an educated viewer to look at Rösslin’s birth figures and see both the womb and the flask, both the literal fetus in utero and the symbol of generation, alchemical and bodily. For the alchemically literate, birth figures would have been understood as a multifarious symbol of the generative faculty in the womb, in the world, and in the alchemist’s flask, and thus they symbolized the principle of generation itself, the power that spurred the turning of the universe.
 
To look at these images is to be confronted with what seem to us to be contradictions — images of medical practice, influenced by anatomy, that are also verdant and analogical, alchemical and humoral, even wondrous. Only by looking at these images as working simultaneously in multiple registers can we reconcile these seeming contradictions and gain a more thorough understanding of early modern body culture. The multiplicity, and the remarkably wide viewership, which makes it so hard to ascribe just one function or reading to these images, make them valuable sources for looking at a culture that was essentially inclusive, imaginative, and multifarious in its thinking about the body. Birth figures remind us that this was a period in which learned and vernacular, old and new, male and female ways of knowing met, interacted, and mingled at the site of the pregnant body. Just as the early modern woman could look at a birth figure as a window onto her own mysterious bodily interior, so we can approach these images as windows onto the rich and complex body culture of early modern Europe.
 
Adapted with permission from Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body by Rebecca Whiteley, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe. By Rebecca Whitely. The Public Domain Review, March 8, 2023.

 

University of Chicago Press

The new monograph of Dr Rebecca Whiteley—British Academy Fellow at the University of Birmingham, member of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective Manchester, and former Shreeve Fellow in the History of Medicine at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library—has now been published with Chicago University Press. Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body has been praised as an “appealing book” that “extends reproductive, gender, and visual studies, as well as histories of art, medicine, and the body,” and as a book that “offers fresh, sophisticated, and nuanced interpretations.”
 
Edward Wouk, Reader in Art History and Visual Studies at Manchester, and Leah Astbury, Research Associate at the Wellcome Trust-funded project Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World, both members of the Collective, have taken the time to interview the author.
 
 Edward Wouk [EW]: What would you describe as the main take-aways from your book?
 
Rebecca Whiteley [RW]: When I first began researching ‘birth figures’ (the images of fetal presentation that are the focus of this book) my main aim was to stop scholars of medicine and childbirth calling them ‘babies in bottles’ and dismissing them as naïve, uninformative or even damaging to the practice of midwives. In fact, birth figures were packed with relevant, novel and extremely useful knowledge for early modern viewers.
 
And birth figures were not the only small, unassuming printed images in the early modern world that had surprisingly various meanings and uses. As recent scholarship in print history and visual culture shows, this was rather the rule than the exception. I hope my book contributes to this new recognition of the importance of non-elite print and visual culture in writing history. Birth figures can tell us much about cultures of pregnancy and childbirth as they were experienced by women and midwives, by people who could not read or did not own books. They illuminate how body knowledge was made by all kinds of people, with all kinds of priorities, outside of the circle of elite medical authors.
 
Leah Astbury [LA]: What might surprise readers about your book?
 
RW: Central to my approach is the idea that one relatively simple-looking kind of image could have a multivalent life in early modern England: it could mean in many ways. Readers looking for a history of medicine may be surprised to find not just anatomical knowledge and medical practice, but also social, affective, magical, alchemical, aesthetic, and political bodies of knowledge represented in birth figures.
 
 EW: Could you say a few things about the role that the artists played in constructing the group of images at the focus of your analysis?
 
RW: Artists are a consistent presence in this book, of course, but they move from the background to the foreground, from anonymity to individuality, as I move through time. For the early birth figures, we sometimes know the name of an artist or printmaker, but it is almost beside the point. These images were so widely copied and iconographically consistent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that I approach them, not as the production of one individual, but as a manifestation of a collective and collaborative printmaking culture. This is rather freeing, as established modes of thinking about the artist’s contexts, techniques and motivations must give way to thinking about the very wide and diverse audience, their interpretations and uses of images.
 
From the late seventeenth century onwards, as is treated in Parts 2 and 3 of the book, birth figures become more individualised and the identities of the artists involved necessarily become more important. Writers began to praise the specific abilities of their artist in seeing, understanding and representing body knowledge. There is an increasing body of literature on the role of artists in the production of ‘epistemic’ images and I hope my later chapters contribute to this. It was particularly rewarding to think about the famous images by Jan van Rymsdyk for William Hunter (though actually they weren’t all drafted, and only one was engraved, by him!). So much art historical scholarship has considered these images as indicative of the new medicalised childbirth culture of eighteenth-century Britain, yet they were only one style of image. Other contemporary birth figures by artists such as George Stubbs, as well as van Rymsdyk himself for other authors, present very different understandings of the pregnant body.
 
 LA: What would you say are the difficulties as a historian of art and the body in using birth figures given, as you point out, they were used in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways?
 
RW: I actually found it liberating, rather than difficult, when I realised that I was going to have to look beyond what the medical authors said their images were for. As art historians, we are trained to centre our study on the image, to privilege it as a source. This allows us to see ideas and aspects of body knowledge that are not present in textual sources. Of course, there is a line to tread when describing ‘unsanctioned’ uses, between productive speculation, and support for your analysis. I was largely guided by a wider study of visual culture, and found drawing links between different kinds of images a rewarding and exciting way to investigate how birth figures worked for early modern viewers.
 
 EW: How did you strike a balance between using terminology from the time period whilst remaining sensitive to contemporary debates around terms relating to birth, gender and the body?
 
RW: Gender essentialism is something that, as historians, we have a responsibility to combat, particularly because over-simplified or simply misguided interpretations of historical cultures are often used to justify this approach in the world today. When editing my book, I thought hard about my use of ‘woman’ to describe the pregnant people depicted in birth figures, and the pregnant users of them. In the end, I decided to use this term in the body of the work because it was the one used at the time. It is true that for most early modern viewers of birth figures, the concept of womanhood was intimately tied up with the physical capacity to gestate a child. But this in no way makes early modern gender identity simple, nor was sex understood to be a concrete binary. People then, as now, had diverse and vibrant identities and dealt with cultural expectations around gender in many different ways. If birth figures equated womanhood with the womb, as some scholars have suggested, then by turning our attention to what individual users might have done with this statement, we can gain a better understanding of the period’s culture of gender. The author Justine Siegemund, treated in Part 2 of the book, could not have children and presents the birth figures she produced both as her biological children, and her intellectual offspring, creating an identity for herself as medical author that combined typically female and male attributes.
 
In the conclusion, I point out that birth figures persist in our own culture, where they can still perpetuate notions of the normal or standard body, against which individuals measure and define their own complex identities. Looking at the history of birth figures as cultural agents can help us to question essentialist or normative statements about the body in our own culture.
 
 EW: What was the role of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library in the making of this book?
 
RW: The initial research for the book was undertaken in the Art History Department at UCL, but its journey into a fully-fledged monograph happened during my time as the Shreeve Fellow in the History of Medicine at the John Rylands Research Institute. For a project so engaged with the material, affective and intellectual lives of books, this was the ideal environment. Not only was the community of book scholars and curators so diverse and interesting, but the medical book collections at the University of Manchester are enormous. I could access copies of many of my core works in the collections for both research and for photography. It is thanks to the photography department at the Rylands that my book is so well illustrated! The images they took for me are also now freely available via Luna and Manchester Digital Collections.
 
 LA: How does the book fit with the themes and interests of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective at the University of Manchester?
 
RW: The Collective, and the lecture series on Affective Artefacts, were enormously influential to the development of my book. Meeting the scholars in the Collective and attending seminars clarified for me that both affect and material culture were crucial themes for understanding birth figures. The image and the book as an object, and one that had physical as well as intellectual power over early modern users, came to be a central concept for me as I worked up my manuscript. Moving forwards with my research, I find I am increasingly working with material culture methodologies, in no small part thanks to the inspiration of the Collective!
 
 
Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body. An Interview with Rebecca Whiteley. By
Stefan Hanß.  The University of Manchester,  March 6, 2023

Rebecca Whitely  The University of Manchester

Harlots, Prostitution in London in the 18th Century

 

In 1757, Samuel Derrick, a penniless and homeless poet, created The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a compendium of information about London’s prostitutes. Historian Hallie Rubenhold, author of a book investigating the handbook of the '18th-century pimp', found it revealed much about the situation of the courtesans of the Georgian period…
 
It has often been claimed that the story of history’s underclass is a difficult one to tell as so few details of the lives of these individuals have been documented. However, in the second half of the 18th century, one astute observer left a remarkable and colourful record of London’s working women. In 1757, Samuel Derrick, a penniless and homeless poet, created The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a compendium of information about London’s prostitutes. Designed as a necessary accessory for the Georgian “man of pleasure”, the guidebook became an annual publication for the next 38 years. For 2s 6d, men like James Boswell could purchase this small leather-bound volume and read about the physical appearances and personal histories of London’s “votaries of Venus”.
 
As its name suggests, The Harris’s List was not entirely the invention of Samuel Derrick. For several years prior to its publication it existed in handwritten form as the sole possession of the self-proclaimed “Pimp-General of all England”, Jack Harris. Harris (whose real name was John Harrison) served as the head waiter at Covent Garden’s emporium of drink and sin, the Shakespear’s Head Tavern. Having gained a reputation for “making introductions” between patrons and ladies of the town, Harris fell back on the tradition of documenting his business by maintaining a ledger of prostitutes. As Covent Garden, with its theatres, bath houses, taverns, and coffee houses, was considered to be London’s centre of entertainment, Harris and his “ladies” did a booming trade. At the height of his dominion, in the late 1750s, it was rumoured that Harris’s handwritten list bulged with no less than 400 names. The head waiter of the Shakespear’s Head had also grown wealthy by his well-managed enterprise, claiming to have earned, “four or five thousand pounds in a half dozen years”; roughly £500,000 by today’s standards.
 
While prostitution and the “procuring of women” was illegal in 18th-century London, the law made few significant attempts to apprehend men like Jack Harris, its primary perpetrators. Sex was a profitable industry for the capital’s brothel-keepers, pimps, procuresses and courtesans, many of whom, like Moll King, the keeper of Tom King’s Coffee House, were able to retire to a comfortable existence with a fortune of thousands. It was natural, therefore, that those who found themselves in financial need often looked to the flesh trade for assistance.
 
Samuel Derrick was in just such a position when he alighted upon the idea of creating his own version of Harris’s list. Born into a family of Dublin linen drapers in 1724, Derrick had always fostered ambitions of becoming “a poet of the first rank”. This was never to be. Derrick set out for London around 1751 and attempted to establish himself, trying his hand as both a dramatist and actor. Although he managed to secure a meagre living as a literary translator and a Grub Street author, Sam chose to squander his money on the pleasures of Covent Garden. While his literary friends like Tobias Smollet occasionally offered him shelter and “slipt a guinea into his hand” at the worst of times Derrick was forced to sleep rough on the streets of London. In 1757 the author’s irresponsible spending finally got the better of him. Unable to pay his bills he was apprehended by the bailiffs and imprisoned in a “sponging house”, a privately operated lock-up for debtors. It was from these confines that Derrick concocted a money-spinning scheme designed to regain him his liberty.
 

Years of merry-making in the company of London’s prostitutes meant that Derrick knew the women of Covent Garden as well as Jack Harris. His version of The Harris’s List is not merely a record of those whose services were available, but a witty and journalistic chronicle of the area’s female characters. As a publication, its intention was to entertain Covent Garden’s regular crowd of “bucks and bloods” as much as it was to advertise the women listed within it. Derrick’s hastily scribbled manuscript was snapped up by the elusive Fleet Street publisher of obscenity, H Ranger, who was said to have paid “a handsome sum” for it, which “thereby secured Derrick his freedom”.
 
The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies became an instant sensation. It has been suggested that approximately 8,000 copies of it were sold yearly, though it is likely that these numbers are slightly exaggerated. Nevertheless, its production became an enduring enterprise. After Sam Derrick’s death in 1769, The List continued to appear on booksellers’ shelves, though the names of its ensuing editors are unknown. Increasingly, its succeeding authors were not as interested in documenting the area’s colourful personalities as they were in creating bawdy advertisements for the listees. By the time the publication was stamped out in 1795, the work was little more than a guidebook of names and addresses featuring reprinted stories from earlier editions.
 
Today, only a handful of The Harris’s Lists (those from 1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788–90 and 1793) remain in public collections. When examined alongside additional material from the period, such as diaries, newspaper articles and popular literature, they assist in painting a picture of the lives of poor and lower-middle class Georgian women.
 
In 1758, shortly after the first edition of The Harris’s List came into print, the magistrate and moral reformer Saunders Welch estimated that of a population of 675,000, London was home to approximately 3,000 prostitutes. Although Welch suggested that the majority of these women came from a class of “industrious poor”, a level just above the truly impoverished, there is much to suggest that their backgrounds were more wide-ranging than this. Among those names that appear on The Harris’s Lists are those who had previously worked as trained milliners, glove makers and seamstresses, in addition to domestic servants, shop-keepers, actresses, singers and married women. Women are often described as being literate or “having received a tolerable education”.
 
Information gleaned from The Lists also provides an insight into these women’s daily existences, and in particular their living arrangements. As each woman’s listing is accompanied by her address, it is possible to gain a picture of the demographic distribution of prostitution across London’s west end. Prostitutes were not geographically confined to “red light districts” during the 18th century. Instead they lived cheek-by-jowl with their more respectable neighbours and businesses, not only in and around Covent Garden but in Soho, St James, Piccadilly, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Marylebone. Rather than facing ostracism from within these communities, many trades-people let out lodgings to prostitutes. Sally Forman, for example lived “At a Chandler’s Shop, in Fleet Market”, while Sally Straton, could be found “at a Grocer’s in Little Wild Street”.
 
Similarly, not every prostitute worked out of a brothel. Many shared accommodation with fellow ladies of the town, like the notorious duo Miss Townsend and Miss Charlton of 12 Gress Street, who not only lived under the same roof but also shared the expenses of their own carriage. Others, like Becky Lefevre of Frith Street, who were fortunate enough to be placed in “high keeping” by a wealthy admirer, frequently let out spare rooms in their own houses to other members of “the sisterhood”.
 
As might be imagined, the experience of prostitution in Georgian London varied immensely. The Harris’s Lists contain an array of women’s stories, from that of the celebrated beauty Emily Coulthurst, who resided in splendour at Mrs Mitchell’s King’s Place “nunnery”, to the tragic Kitty Atchison who “more than once endeavored to extricate herself” from the grasp of her profession. The entries also reveal that the capital’s “legions of Venus” were a far from homogenous group. A surprisingly diverse population of continental and eastern European as well as American and West Indian women swelled its ranks. Some, like Madam Dafloz, came to London to escape from French revolutionaries. Others, like the Sells sisters, were the daughters of immigrants. It is their previously unheard tales that make The Harris’s Lists such a unique and fascinating set of documents.
 
A closer look at the ‘Ladies’ of Harris’s Lists
 
The following are extracts from later editions of the List, which was constantly updated to keep up with the changing fortunes of London’s ‘votaries of Venus’
 
Miss Wilkins
 
“What an angelic face! – but what a form!” This lady very lately resided in Princes Street, Bloomsbury, at a midwife’s. She is not above twenty, and has a very engaging countenance, with fine, dark, melting eyes, and very regular teeth. Her person does not entirely correspond; she is short and very crooked; but she has a certain latent charm that more than compensates for any deformity of body. In a word, take her all in all, she is a very good piece; and, if you can forget she is hunch-backed, she is a little Venus. (1773)
 
Mrs Horton, No 3, Beauclerc’s Buildings
 
“Ah! La jolie de petite Bourgeoise” Keeps a shop and sells gloves, garters, &c. and drives on a very capital trade, considering she has no shop-woman to assist her; her customers are but few, yet they are good ones, and always pay ready money; she is short and plump, has a good dark eye, and is full-breasted; her legs are remarkably well made, and she is reputed a most excellent bed-fellow. In trying on a glove she will create desire; and in selling her garters, she will commend that pattern which she wears herself, and will make no scruple of showing her legs; she has great good nature, and we do not recollect any woman who is better qualified as a shop-keeper; her age is twenty-six. (1779)
 
Lucy Bradley, Silver Street, Cheapside
 
Alow, square built lass, with a good complexion, void of art; her face is round, and her features regular; her hair is dark, and her eyes hazel. She lived as a nursery maid with a foreign practitioner of physic, near Soho, who took first possession of her, not without some force. She gets up small linen and works well with her needle; has some good sense, and honest principles. Necessity first compelled her to see company, and she seems conscious of its not being right. (1761)
 
‘The Abbesses’ of King’s Place
 
During the 18th century, King’s Place, a passage that ran between King’s Street and Pall Mall, was home to England’s most exclusive brothels or “nunneries”. It was patronised by the aristocracy and royalty. Prostitutes who plied their trade there included these two colourful figures:
 
Harriot Lewis
 
Born in Guinea, Harriott Lewis (or “Black Harriott”, as she was known) began life as a slave on a plantation of Captain William Lewis, who brought her to London as his mistress in 1766. The death of her lover left Harriott alone in the capital. With the help of John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich, she opened a brothel on King’s Place. Her business prospered until 1778, when her servants robbed her. Unable to recover financially, Harriott was committed to debtor’s prison where she died shortly thereafter.
 
Charlotte Hayes
 
The daughter of courtesan and brothel keeper Elizabeth Ward, Charlotte was born into a life of prostitution in 1725. Called “Santa Charlotta of King’s Place”, she was renowned for her “unaffected charm” and honesty. It was these qualities that inspired Samuel Derrick (her one-time lover) to bequeath the profits of his List to her. Charlotte, however, was a calculating business-woman. Despite a period imprisoned for debt, by 1769 she and her partner Dennis O’Kelly had built an empire around horse racing and brothel-keeping said to be worth at least £40,000.
 
The real Harlots: Hallie Rubenhold on Covent Garden’s courtesans. By Hallie Rubenhold.  History Extra, August 10, 2020.

In 1760s London, sex was big business. There were brothels on almost every street corner, and thousands of enterprising women collecting their share of the massive wealth that poured through the city.

 
Most people's views of sex workers in Georgian times are limited to a few glimpses of courtesans in paintings, or the occasional character on TV. However new show Harlots (which is now airing on BBC Two) follows the fortunes of women selling sex in the 18th century, giving us an intriguing insight into their everyday lives – and there are some surprising similarities with the sex we have today...
 
18th-century sex workers had client review websites (kind of)
 
In 2020, sex workers can post adverts online to market their services, and on some sites clients can even leave comments and reviews. The Georgian version of this was a book called Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. A bestseller in its day, it effectively functioned as a Who's Who of Covent Garden sex workers, telling potential punters where the best brothels were, who to ask for, which services could be procured and – of course – the price.
 
But as well as the headlines, Harris's List also contained intriguing snippets of back story, often explaining how the women came to be working in the city. Miss Le__ of Soho was a "tall and genteel" lady who was caught one day "with a certain naughty book". After being whipped by her governess, she ran away and was eventually taken in by a city merchant who was himself "fond of the rod". This submissive suitor helped Miss Le__ find her feet.
 
Sex work in Georgian times was big business
 
How big? Estimates vary but historian Dan Cruickshank, in his book The Secret History Of Georgian London, posits that the sex trade in London at the time had an annual turnover of around £20 million. That's close to £1.5 billion in today's money.
 
Why so much money? Well, back in Georgian times there were far more women working in the sex trade – it wasn't just the quickest route to riches, it was one of the few ways women really could earn money. As historian Dr. Kate Lister explains on her blog Whores of Yore, there were far fewer options than there are for women today: “Historically, men have always held the money and the power and there was only three ways a woman could access some of that for herself; she could inherit it, she could marry it, or she could shag it.”
 
Sex could cost anywhere from a few pennies to £9,000
As a Georgian sex worker, how much you could charge depended on a number of factors. Your Harris review would certainly make a difference, but so would the reputation of the brothel you were working in. Apparently, the average cost was just under one guinea (about £1), although haggling wasn't unheard of. Harris's List explains of one woman:
 
“Her price is one pound one, but, like many others of the fraternity, she will not turn her back on a less sum, she will rather accept of half a guinea, than her friend should return home with his burthen.”
 
More genteel establishments could command much higher prices, though. It is estimated that a night at one of the most fashionable and successful brothels in Soho – with an emphasis on well-groomed women and high-class clientele – could cost up to £2,000 in today's money.
 
Special services cost even more. Many would charge huge sums – up to £50 (£9,000 in today's money) – to people who wanted to buy a woman's virginity. Naturally, there was big money to be made, as a savvy businesswoman could sell her 'virginity' many times over.
 
Some rose to the status of major celebrity
 
Kitty Fisher, a real-life sex worker, was such a celebrity in her day that she even attracted the Georgian equivalent of paparazzi: newspapers and ballad-writers mocked her for falling off her horse one day, playing on the notion of the 'fallen woman'. Her portrait – by one of the most prominent painters of the time – hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
 

They used condoms (though not as we know them)
 
Long before the invention of latex there was... sheep intestine. Condoms in Georgian times were made from washed-out sheep guts, tied at the end to stop leaks, and sewn at the other end with ribbon. The resulting condom could be tied on to the penis before sex and rinsed out afterwards.
 
The Georgians were as keen on porn as we are
 
The more you look at the sex lives of the Georgians, the easier it is to spot similarities between the sex industry of the time and what we have today. Though our tech might be a little better – porn sites, webcams, nude selfies and the like – Georgians weren't limited to using their imagination. One of the reasons Harris's List was a bestseller was because it wasn't just used as review material, it also served as the Georgian equivalent of porn. People would buy it purely for the titillating reviews inside.
 
Like the review of Miss S__tt of Cavendish Square, who was “amorous to the greatest degree, and has courage enough not to be afraid of the largest and the strongest man that ever drew weapon in the cause of love.” Or Miss Fra___r, who “enjoys the sport with all the vigorous ardour that may be expected from a girl of one and twenty.” Or Miss H__y: “very active and nimble, and not a little clever in the performance of the art of friction.”
 
What Life Was Like As A Sex Worker In The 1700s. By Girl on the Net. Refinery , August 5, 2020
 

"The year is 1763. One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” So opens ITV Encore’s latest period drama; Harlots (Hulu in the US). Created by Alison Newman and Moira Buffini and directed by Coky Giedroyc, the eight-part drama follows the rising fortunes of London bawd, Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton) and her daughters, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Lucy (Eloise Smyth). Harlots has gone beyond simply dusting off the tit crushing corsets and has deftly woven historical facts into the warp and weft of this bloomer dropping, gin swilling, cinematic trupenny upright, and I love it. But, I'm not here to tell you how much fun the show is (and it really is!) I'm here for the history. Harlots tells a hell of a story, but there is more to consider here than a corseted dose of how’s your father in a sepia filter. That Harlots so clearly uses historical truth to embellish the show is what really piques my interest.

 Numbers

​We’ll start with that statistic “The year is 1763. One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” The simple truth is that we do not have accurate estimates for the numbers of sex workers in eighteenth-century Britain (or anywhere else) for several reasons. Sex workers were, and still are, a marginalised, criminalised community and ran the risk of being publicly shamed, punished and even deported if identified; subsequently, few people were open enough about selling sex to collect accurate data. The eighteenth century lexicon did not include words such as ‘sex worker’, but rather used words such as whore, harlot, strumpet or lewd woman. The definition of each of these terms covered women selling sex to those who had sex outside of marriage, or lived with a man they were not married too; so when number of whores are being recorded, it does not necessarily men someone who sold sex for a living. Quantitative data analysis around sex work in the eighteenth century was far closer to what we could politely call ‘guess work’, than anything that would pass peer review today. However, this did not stop people from having a damn good guess.

 In 1758, Saunders Welch, a Justice of the Peace for both the County of Middlesex and the City and Liberty of Westminster, published A Proposal to render effectual a Plan, To remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis and conservatively estimated there were some 3000 women who made their living selling sex in the capital. When Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz visited London in 1789, he estimated there were 30,000 ladies of pleasure living in the district of Marylebone alone (Archenholz, 1789). Michael Ryan, author of Prostitution in London (1839), estimated that by 1802 there were 80,000 sex workers and some 5000 brothels in London (Ryan, 1839). In 1795, police magistrate Patrick Colquhorn calculated there were 50,000 sex workers in London – which had a population of around 730,000. Viewing Colquhorn's data as the most reliable, modern historian Dan Cruickshank suggests that sexually active women will account for around 250,000 of that figure, which roughly equates to one in five women selling sex in Georgian London (Cruickshank, 2010).

 As you can see, estimates differ wildly and really the only thing we can say with some certainty is there were more than a few women on the game in eighteenth-century London. But, it shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise that so many women sold sex to earn a crust. Historically, men have always held the money and the power and there was only three ways a woman could access some of that for herself; she could inherit it, she could marry it, or she could shag it. Far from being a last desperate resort, as perilous as it was, sex work could offer a decent income, independence and social advancement in a deeply patriarchal world that barred women from positions of power. Of course, women could try to earn an income as a seamstress or some kind of domestic worker, but this was a long time before Destiny’s Child asked independent women to ‘throw their hands up’; working in the eighteenth century (especially for women) was damn tough. The eighteenth-century wage gap was not so much a gap as a vast, unforgiving ravine with horny sharks at the bottom; and the only kind of employment rights on offer was the right to work yourself to death (preferably quietly and without making a mess.) But, a sex worker could make serious cash, and there were many honeys makin' money.

 If a lowly female domestic servant could expect a wage of around £2 - 4 a year (with accommodation and food), a sex worker could earn that in one night (Oldbaileyonline.org, 2017). Of course, there was no standard charge for sexual services, and there were kept mistresses who could wouldn't get into bed for less than a hundred guineas (Casonova recorded that Kitty Fisher once ate a thousand guinea note on a slice of bread and butter). But, there were also many destitute people who would exchange sex for food. In 1762, James Boswell walked through London and recorded in his diary that he was "surrounded with numbers of free-hearted ladies of all kinds: from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to Honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’ (Boswell, 1762).

 The amount charged by the sex workers featured in Harris’s List varies, but averages at around one guinea per customer, which is slightly over £1 (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound and a guineas was worth 21 shillings.) Despite significant risks to health and well-being, many people sought out sex work and the wealth it promised.

 The eighteenth-century literary blockbuster, Harris’s List (1757 to 1795) is featured in the opening scenes of Harlots. Harris’s List was an annual almanac of London sex workers. A forerunner to TripAdvisor, the list detailed the appearance, skills, and prices of up to two hundred women selling sex in the capital. One source I heartily recommmend if you want to learn more about the list is Matthew Sangster's research project for "Romantic London". Sangster has created an incredible resource in an online map of Harris's List, using the addresses provided in the 1788 edition here. You can see exactly where these women lived in London, as well as read their description in the list; it's fabulous.

 The list seems to have been the result of a collaboration between an Irish Grub Street hack and poet, Sam Derrick, and London Pimp, Jack Harris. Only nine known volumes of the list survived today (1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789, 1790 and 1793), and they are scattered throughout various archives around the world. There have been a handful of reprints, but until 2005, if you wanted to see the list, an appointment at an archive and a pair of white gloves would have been required. It wasn’t until historian Hallie Rubenhold undertook the herculean task of researching and editing the list in her publication The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the extraordinary story of "Harris' List" (2005), that the list was dusted off and shown to the public anew. Rubenhold and her work remain the leading authority in the study of the list, and this article is likewise indebted; so, thanks Hallie!

 As you may well imagine, Harris’s List was a hugely popular work. As well as being a practical resource, the list also provided titilation. As Delinger notes, the list functions in two ways: ‘names, addresses, and prices all point to their practical use, while the lush descriptions of women also function as soft-core pornography’ (Denlinger, 2002). The list itself straddles the boundaries of fact and fiction; and we will never be able to attest to its accuracy; were Betsy Miles’s breasts ‘of immense size’? Was Nelly Anderson truly a ‘squat, swarthy round faced wench’? Were Miss Simms ‘low countries’ like ‘a well-made boot’? (Rubenhold, 2005). We will never know.

 

Episode one of Harlots opens with an excited group of young women anxiously awaiting their reviews, and with good reason; Harris’s List could make or break the fortune of London’s sex workers. In episode one, Emily Lacey’s favourable review as ‘young votary of Venus’ allows her to leave Covent Garden and approach an elite brothel in Golden Square to seek a better position. Like every profession, sex work was (and still is) densely layered, and a favourable review would allow a girl to command more money, richer clients and go up in the world. A bad review, or an accusation of carrying the pox (like Miss Young of Cumberland Court, who is described as spreading ‘her contaminated carcass on the town’), would see business dry up quicker than sawdust on sick.

 Despite Jack Harris’s narrative style of a cheeky scamp about town, sampling the delights of the city at random, the selection process was highly competitive; Harris knew the marketing value of his list. The memoirs of Fanny Murray, one of the most celebrated eighteenth-century courtesans, provides valuable insight into the processes. Fanny had to apply to Harris to have her name ‘enrolled upon his parchment list’. She then had to be interviewed, submit to a medical examination, agree give Harris a fifth of the money she earned and sign a contract that stipulated she must forfeit £20 to Harris if she is found to have lied about her health during the examination (Memoirs, 1759). Expensive this certainly may have been, but it could be a worthwhile investment, Harris’s List helped to launch the careers of several London’s top courtesans; Fanny Murray, Lucy Cooper and Charlotte Hayes.

 Cast of Characters

 Harlots has an impressive cast of characters and whilst the plot is fiction, many of the characters are impressions and composites of real lives lived on the fringes of the Georgian underworld. In an interview with The Radio Times, Alison Newman is quoted as saying when they ‘were dreaming up Charlotte Wells (Jessica Brown Findlay), they were thinking about Kitty Fisher’ (Griffiths, 2017). Whilst Kitty Fisher is a fascinating character (you can read more about her here), Charlotte Wells is clearly based on one of the most notorious and successful eighteenth-century courtesans turned madam, Charlotte Hayes. Charlotte Hayes is favourably described in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List.

 "Were we to enter into an exact description of this celebrated Thais; that is, were we to describe each limb and feature a party, they would not appear so well as taken altogether, in which we must acknowledge her very pleasing; and in our eye (and sure nobody can better tell what is what) she is as desirable as ever". (Harris, 1761)

 Despite a single entry in the list, a much fuller account of Charlotte’s life is found in another eighteenth-century text, Nocturnal Revels (1779), which you can read at this link. The most comprehensive studies of Charlotte’s life are to be found in Rubenhold’s The Covent Garden Ladies (2005), Dan Cruickshank’s A Secret History of Georgian London (2010) and Fergus Linnane’s Madams: Bawds and Brothel Keepers of London (2011). But, it is Rubenhold's biography of Charlotte that is most clearly expressed in Harlots.

 Charlotte clawed her way up from desperate poverty to become one the most successful bawds in London, and Madam of the King’s Place brothel. When she died in 1813, she had amassed a fortune of over £20,000, achieved celebrity status and hobnobbed with royalty; not bad for a girl from the gutter. Rubenhold’s biography of Charlotte suggests she was the daughter of another London bawd, Elizabeth Ward (who is on record in 1754, accusing Ann Smith of stealing clothing from her.) Rubenhold’s details how Elizabeth Ward bred Charlotte up for a life on the town and eventually auctioned off her daughter’s virginity to the highest bidder, which would have proved ‘one of her mother’s greatest business transactions’ (Rubenhold, 2005). This narrative is certainly played out by Harlots, where Charlotte’s mother, Margaret Wells, is shown taking ‘sealed bids’ for her youngest daughter’s virginity (which she sells twice), just as she did for Charlotte’s some years earlier (Harlots, 2017). Alas, I do not have access to the sources that confirms Elizabeth Ward was Charlotte Hayes’ mother. Nocturnal Revels seems to suggest that Ward was Charlotte’s madam, rather than mother, and ‘initiated her all the mysteries of a Tally-Women’ (Revels, 1779). But, Nocturnal Revels provides explicit details about the selling of virginity several times over, and quotes Charlotte herself as saying a virginity is ‘as easily made as a pudding’ (Revels, 1779). However, rather than her mother selling her virginity, here Charlotte reveals she had sold her own ‘thousands of times’ (Revels, 1779).

 Whomever Charlotte’s mother was, she managed to secure herself a very rich ‘keeper’ in Robert 'Beau' Tracy. Just like in Harlots, Charlotte financially drained her patron and was ‘notoriously unfaithful to him’ (Revels, 1779). When Tracey died Charlotte ended up in debtor’s prison. It was here that she met and fell in love with an Irish sedan-chairman, Dennis O’Kelly (Daniel Marney in Harlots). According to O’Kelly’s memoirs, before he met Charlotte, he had earned additional income by having sex with wealthy women who hired his chair, also seen in Harlots (O'Kelly, 1788). And it seems that whilst in prison together, Charlotte also called upon Mr O’Kelly’s services. She was soon ‘devoted to him’, and he in turn was ‘devoted not only to her person, but to her purse’ (O’Kelly, 1788). Whilst I do not know how this will play out in the show, the various historical texts tell is that the real life Charlotte’s patronage allowed O’Kelly to quit his job as a bar tender and sedan chair carrier and become a kept man. O’Kelly began calling himself ‘Count’ and after Charlotte had liquidated his debts, he became the owner of the most famous racehorse in Britain, Eclipse. He and Charlotte went on to open the exclusive brothel, King’s Place. A satirical list of services and prices available at Kings are given in Revels, and it gives some idea of just how lucrative this business could be.

 Mary Cooper, who is found dying of the pox in an alleyway in episode two of Harlots, seems to be based on Lucy Cooper, a courtesan who really did blaze her way through the ranks and beds of the London elite. Lucy’s life is detailed alongside Charlotte’s in Nocturnal Revels, and a description of both Lucy and Charlotte is found in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List; both women achieved fame and fortune, but Lucy did not have the business acumen of Charlotte and failed to save for the inevitable rainy day. In Harlots, Mary Cooper is celebrated for her sexual prowess, street smarts and dazzling beauty.

 "Mary Cooper, Mary Cooper. 

She's had every Lord and Trooper

Mary Cooper, Mary Cooper

Leaves her lovers in a stupor 

Ridin' high, no man can dupe her 

London's Venus, Mary Cooper!"

 The real Lucy Cooper also had a reputation for debauchery and songs were sung about her too.

 "Must Lucy Cooper bear the bell

And give herself all the airs?

Must that damnation bitch of hell

Be hough’d by Knights and Squires?

Has she a better cunt than I

Of nut brown hairs more full?

That all mankind with do her lye

Whilst I have scarce a cull?"

(The Gentleman's bottle companion, 1768)

 Whilst Mary Cooper dies of syphilis in Harlots, Lucy Cooper lived a life of excess and saw her wealthy, elderly protectors die one by one. Finding herself grog blossomed, partied out and the wrong side of thirty-five, Lucy was unable to replace them. Having set nothing aside from her heyday, Lucy could not meet her debts and soon found herself destitute and in debtor’s jail. She died in squalid poverty in 1772, just four years after being immortalised in song as the woman who ‘all mankind’ wanted to lie with. 

Nancy Birch, the bawd who birches her culls bloody in Harlots also has a real life counterpart in Ms Nancy Burroughs of Drury Lane, who appears in the 1789 edition of Harris’s List. This Nancy was said to use ‘more birch rods in a week than Westminster school in a twelvemonth’ (Harris’s List, 1789). Other women specialising in BDSM that appear in the list include Miss Lee of Soho who is ‘constantly visited of amateurs of birch discipline’, and Mrs Macatney who birches young girls for the amusing of her paying customers, both of whom appear in the 1793 edition.

 Harriet Lennox (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Violet Cross (Rosalind Eleazar) are both black sex workers in Harlots and both have real life counterparts. Moira Buffini revelled that Violet was based on a thief who appears in the Old Bailey records, a black woman called Ann Duck who was hung for highway robbery in 1744; “we sort of based Violet on her" (Griffiths, 2017). Harriet bears more than a striking resemblance to the real life story of ‘Black Harriot’. Harriot was brought to Jamaica as a slave, where British born plantation owner, William Lewis, fell in love with her and they married. Upon moving back to England, Harriot learnt all the airs and graces of high society, but when Lewis suddenly died, she found herself in a desperate situation. However, Harriot decided to take this lying down – quite literally; she turned to sex work and eventually opened her own establishment, becoming the only black madam in London (Arnold, 2010).

Trade in Virgins

 Sex work is a highly complex experience that resists simple stereotypes; sex work in the eighteenth century was no different. There was a dark side and for all the celebrated grande horizontals, when there is that much money at stake, many people were chewed up and spat out by the cities’ never ending demand for flesh. Harlots depicts the eighteenth-century sexual obsession with virgins; as Lady Repton quips in episode one at the auctioning of Lucy Wells’s virginity, ‘my husband loves a hymen’. In Nocturnal Revels, Charlotte Hayes discusses how easy it is to fake a virginity, we also see this trick in Fanny Hill where Fanny is instructed in how to fake a maidenhead;

 "In each of the head bed-posts, just above where the bedsteads are inserted into them, there was a small drawer, so artfully adapted to the mouldings of the timber-work, that it might have escaped even the most curious search: which drawers were easily opened or shut by the touch of a spring, and were fitted each with a shallow glass tumbler, full of a prepared fluid blood, in which lay soaked, for ready use, a sponge, that required no more than gently reaching the hand to it, taking it out and properly squeezing between the thighs, when it yelded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl's honour". (Cleland, 1749)

 This tells us two things; firstly, women have been faking things in the bedroom for a long time; secondly, there was such a demand for virgins, knowing how to pass yourself off as an innocent was a staple of any self-respecting harlot’s repertoire. But, for every virginity faked, there were real girls offered up for sale.

 William Hogarth’s 1732 A Harlot's Progress (a series of engravings) depicts a young Moll Hackabout who arrives in London fresh from the country, only to be tricked into prostitution by the cunning bawd, Elizabeth Needham. (In 1731 Mother Needham was convicted of keeping a disorderly house and sentenced to be pilloried, she did not survive the experience.) The madam seeking out young girls and tricking them is also seen in Harlots when Lydia Quigley stalks registry offices and stage coaches to find virgins to offer up to well-paying clients.

 Nocturnal Revels details how Charlotte Hayes procured an endless supply of new ‘nuns’ for her ‘cloister’. Just as Lydia Quigley did in Harlots, Charlotte would dress in a ‘plain and simple manner’ and approach employment offices, searching for any young girl who was seeking domestic work. Charlotte would then tell her she required a maid for her mistress and offer ‘very handsome’ wages. The unsuspecting victim would be taken to a house, plied with drink and be put to bed, only to wake in the night being raped by whomever had paid Charlotte for a virgin. Revels tells us after such a traumatic experience, the victim would be given a few guineas and removed to the ‘nunnery’ in King’s Place ‘in order to make room for a new victim, who is to be sacrificed in the like manner’ (Revels, 1779). When victims could not be procured in this way, Charlotte and other bawds placed advertisements, like the one opposite, in newspapers to bring the girls to them.

 Hellfire Clubs

 In Harlots, Lydia Quigley is supplying virgins to an anonymous, but aristocratic and powerful group of men; it is later revealed these men are murdering these girls. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the Hellfire Clubs across Britain and Ireland. These were exclusive, secretive clubs for wealthy libertines who met to engage in ‘the most impious and blasphemous Manner, insult the most sacred Principles of Holy Religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the Minds and Morals of one another’ (Gordon, 1721). The clubs were shrouded in mystery and historians have long tried to understand exactly what happened there. Rumours about Satanic abuse of women, devil worship and debauched behaviour circulated around the clubs from the beginning. Did these rich men really deflower virgins and worship the devil, or was it simply as case of, as Evelyn Lord suggests, ‘wealthy men with too much time and licence on their hands, wanting to assert their masculinity’ (Lord, 2010). The most notorious club was formed in 1746 by Sir Francis Dashwood with the motto "Fais ce que tu voudrais" (Do as you will). Lord Sandwich, Lord Bute, the Duke of Queensbury, the Prince of Wales and even Benjamin Franklin were all rumoured to be members (Arnold, 2010). Whist we will probably never know exactly what happened there, the public have always been willing to believe the very worst of them; including the kidnap and rape of virgins. It seems the secretive world of the Hellfire Clubs provided inspiration for the elite group of aristocrats seeking out and murdering virgins in Harlots.

 Harlots is a delicious peep up the skirt of the eighteenth-century sex trade. Far from being a make believe world, here fact and fiction lie side by side in a sweaty bed, smoking a post-coital cigarette and asking ‘how was it for you?’ The lives held up here are nods to history, but we must remember that the lives of the infamous, people like Charlotte Hayes, Black Harriot and Lucy Cooper, have always been subject to sensationalism. What we know about them is left to us through a series of texts that were designed to inflame the senses and have us clutching our pearls whilst eagerly turning the page for more. For me, the most fun part of Harlots are the background details; the reusable condoms, the women squatting over basins to wash themselves between clients, the perils of pregnancy, butter as lubrication, and the Foundling Hospital - all documented facts about sex in the eighteenth century. (If you would like to read more about birth control and abortion in the eighteenth century, you can read another article I wrote here.) I would urge you to enjoy Harlots for the fantastic romp in the hay it is, and view its reference to historical facts as the delicious sprinkles on top. But, remember a little history can be a dangerous thing and must not be understood to be the full picture. If you want to learn more about sex work in the eighteenth century, I cannot recommend Dan Cruickshank’s Secret History, or Rubenhold’s Covent Garden Ladies enough. And once you have read that, please read about current sex workers and sex worker rights. Historical sex work can be bawdy fun because it allows us to look at a distance and to tell fun stories, but always remember this is the history and heritage of sex work today, and that such stories really do matter to the people fighting the same systems today.

 ‘’I am Sunk in Lust and Lechery ‘’ : The History behind ITV’s Encore ‘’Harlots’’. By Kate Lister.   Whores of Yore, May 24, 2017.

 

People think I’m obsessed with syphilis, and maybe I am. But it’s only because of my recent indoctrination into 18th-century history by aficionados of the period, such as Lucy Inglis, Adrian Teal and Rob Lucas.  I can’t read 10 pages of a medical casebook without coming across a reference to lues venerea. By the end of the century, London was literally crawling with the pox.

 And it’s no surprise. Sexual promiscuity was as much a part of Georgian England as were powdered wigs and opium. For a few pennies, a gentleman could pick up Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar—a pocket guide to London’s prostitutes published annually starting in 1771—and peruse it as he might do a fine wine list.

 For three guineas, a man could partake in the pleasures provided by Miss L—st—r at No. 6 Union Street, whose ‘neighbouring hills [are] full ripe for manual pressure, firm, and elastic, and heave at every touch.’  If three guineas were too much, one could always spend a third of that for a night with Miss H—ll—nd at No. 2 York Street, who, ‘tho’ only seventeen and short, is very fat and corpulent…a luscious treat to the voluptuary.’   And for those who fancied a woman ‘rather above the common height’, they could visit Miss S—ms at No. 82 Queen Ann’s Street East, who frequently attracted lovers of a ‘diminutive size’ who loved ‘surmounting such a fine, tall woman.’

The guidebook wasn’t all slap and tickle, though. Hidden within these pages were warnings about the dangers of sleeping with diseased prostitutes.  Military men were cautioned against Matilda Johnson, since ‘it is thought by some experienced officers, that her citadel is in danger, on account of a quantity of fiery combustible matter which is lodged in the covered way.’ Some warnings were not so subtle (or hilarious). The guidebook alerts its readers to Miss Young, who had ‘very lately had the folly and wickedness to leave a certain hospital, before the cure for a certain distemper which she had was completed.’ The book ominously adds that she has ‘thrown her contaminated carcass on the town again.’

 Yes, syphilis was ubiquitous in 18th-century London. Aside from abstaining or entering into a monogamous relationship with a healthy partner, there was very little one could do to protect oneself from the pox. Condoms, though available during this period, were rarely employed. When used, they were frequently reused multiple times, defeating their purpose as safeguards against contamination.

 That said, the telltale signs of the disease could often be seen on those suffering from the pox, allowing the astute observer to steer clear of infected persons. In this wax moulage  by the talented artist, Nicole Antebi, you can see the effects of the disease on the face and mouth. Blemishes such as these came to be associated with prostitution. Georgian women went to great lengths to cover these marks with ‘beauty spots’ made of fine black velvet, or mouse skin.

 Those who suffered from the pox often turned to surgeons for help. Before the discovery of penicillin, syphilis was an incurable (and ultimately fatal) disease. The longer it went on, the worse the symptoms became. In addition to unsightly skin ulcers like the ones mentioned above, sufferers could experience paralysis, blindness, dementia and ‘saddle nose‘, a grotesque deformity which occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face.

 Many treatments involved the use of mercury, which could be administered in the form of calomel (mercury chloride), an ointment, a steam bath or pill. Unfortunately, the side effects could be as painful and terrifying as the disease itself (see illustration, right, of patient suffering from over-exposure to mercury). Many patients who underwent such treatments suffered from extensive tooth loss, ulcerations and neurological damage. In many cases, people died from mercury poisoning. Indeed, it’s hard to fault Miss Young for throwing her ‘contaminated carcass on the town again’ after refusing to continue treatment that most likely included mercury.

 Prostitutes bore the brunt of it when it came to syphilis in Georgian London. Yet despite the dangers, women entered into the profession at an astonishing rate. An estimated 1 in 5 women were ‘Ladies of the Night’ during this period. Some entered the sex trade as young as 12 years of age; and many could expect to make as much as £400 per year.

 Still, the financial advantages of prostitution meant little if one contracted the deadly disease. The two syphilitic women mentioned above did not appear in later editions of Harris’s List. Their fates were sealed once their secrets had been exposed. No doubt countless other women suffered the same future after they became infected, losing not only their livelihoods, but also their lives to this dreadful epidemic.

 Am I obsessed with syphilis? Yes. But for good reason!.  

The Syphilitic Whores of Georgian London. By Lindsey Fitzharris.  Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris , March 3, 2014. 

In the late 18th century, one in five Londoners contracted syphilis by their mid-30s, according to a fascinating (if you enjoy reading about the history of medicine, as I do) paper published online this week in the journal Economic History Review.

 Using data painstakingly collected from the archived admission records of London’s hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, the paper’s authors — historians Simon Szreter of Cambridge University in the U.K. and Kevin Seina of Trent University in Canada — estimate that 2,807 Londoners were being treated annually for syphilis in the “foul” (venereal disease) wards of those facilities in the 1770s.

 That’s twice as many people as were being treated for syphilis in the much smaller English city of Chester during that period and about 25 times more than as were being treated in rural areas of England and Wales.

 Based on those 2,807 cases, Szreter and Seina estimate (conservatively) that 20 percent of Londoners during the Georgian era could expect to have at least one bout of syphilis by their 35th birthday.

 Yet syphilis was just part of the considerable venereal disease problem in 18th-century London. “A far greater number would have contracted gonorrhea or chlamydia than contracted syphilis in this period,” the historians point out.

 No one who has read the surviving diaries of James Boswell (1740-1795), the biographer of the great English writer and wit Samuel Johnson, will be surprised by the findings in this paper. In his diaries, Boswell recounts no less than 19 episodes of venereal disease between 1760 (when he was 20) and 1786.

 “Our findings suggest that Boswell’s London fully deserves its historical reputation,” says Szreter in a released statement. “The city had an astonishingly high incidence of STIs at that time. It no longer seems unreasonable to suggest that a majority of those living in London while young adults in this period contracted an STI at some point in their lives.”

 “In an age before prophylaxis or effective treatments, here was a fast-growing city with a continuous influx of young adults, many struggling financially,” he adds. “Georgian London was extremely vulnerable to epidemic STI infections rates on this scale.”

 Georgians called syphilis “the pox,” while gonorrhea was known as “the clap.” Both tended to be lumped together as a single disease: “venereal distemper.” The first effective treatment for syphilis was not discovered until 1910, so Georgians who developed the disease had no real hope of recovery, although they didn’t know that at the time, as Szreter and Siena explain:

 ‘’On experiencing initial signs of discomfort, such as a rash or pain in urination, most hoped it was just ‘the clap’ and would have begun by self-medicating for many weeks with various pills and potions — there was certainly a large market for these.

 However, a substantial proportion would find that this failed to alleviate symptoms, which worsened, because the delayed secondary stage of syphilitic infection, when it arrives, typically produces debilitating pain and fevers lasting weeks and even months, which could not be ignored. Although they cursed their luck for getting the pox, most contemporaries believed that there was available to them a reliable, permanent cure. This was to submit to the rigours of mercury salivation treatment.’’

 The idea behind the mercury treatment was to get the patient to excessively salivate, which was thought to help get rid of the impurities causing the disease. The initial administration of the mercury often occurred in a hospital, where patients typically stayed for a minimum of five weeks. Mercury, however, is a poison, so the treatment led to severe side effects, including painful mouth ulcers, loss of teeth, kidney failure and often death.

 Despite doing more harm than healing, mercury treatments were administered for weeks, months and years, a factor reflected in a well-known Georgian saying: “A night with Venus, and a lifetime with mercury.”

 As Szreter and Seina emphasize, the incidence of syphilis and other STIs in 18th-century London was particularly high among “young, impoverished, mostly unmarried women, either using commercial sex to support themselves financially or in situations that rendered them vulnerable to sexual predation and assault like domestic service.”

 Indeed, Boswell’s STIs were the result of frequent encounters with London’s sex workers.

 It’s not surprising, therefore, that financially established men like Boswell also had a high incidence of STIs. The other group of men with a high incident rate were young, unmarried laborers who had migrated to London from other areas of Britain and who lived on the margins of the city’s economy.

 Both men and women who could not afford treatments could usually get them for free at London’s specialist hospitals and infirmaries, Szreter and Siena point out.

 This look at syphilis in the 18th century has ramifications beyond simple historical curiosity.

 “Syphilis and other STIs can have a very significant effect on morbidity and mortality and also on fertility,” says Szreter. “So infection rates represent a serious gap in our historical knowledge, with significant implications for health, for demography and therefore for economic history.”

 “Understanding infection rates is also a crucial way to access one of the most private, and therefore historically hidden, of human activities, sexual practices and behaviours,” he adds.

 One in five Londoners had syphilis by age 35 in the late 18th century, historians estimate. By Susan Perry.  Minnpost , July 8, 2020.

 

Further reading :  One in five Georgian Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s. Science Daily, July 6, 2020.