The Secret History of Georgian London

‘When a person unacquainted with the Town passes at night thro’ any of our principal streets he is apt to wonder whence the vast body of Courtezans, which stand ready ... to gratify the lust of every drunken Rake-hell, can take its rise,’ declared Father Poussin, the French author of a 1734 publication, Pretty Doings in a Protestant Nation. In his monumental new book, Dan Cruickshank explores the history and consequences of the flamboyant sex trade in 18th-century London. So highly visible that it shocked many visitors to the city, the industry’s profits, he argues, underpinned the city’s very development.

In Georgian London, we learn, prostitution generated the equivalent of £20 million a year – almost as much as brewing, construction and the docks combined. One in five of the capital’s women worked in the trade and men spent an average of £80 a year on it (when a skilled workman earned about £1 a week). In a series of superb chapters, Cruickshank explores the development of the spaces needed by prostitution. His careful reconstruction of the composition and functions of the bagnio, an establishment offering both hot baths and courtesans, will prove particularly valuable to researchers into the period.

This is a book of serious history, but Cruickshank is also a wonderful storyteller. He brings to vivid life high courtesans frequenting expensive ‘jelly houses’ in Covent Garden and low-class girls, struggling and poor. Celebrated characters such as the radical John Wilkes, courtesans Kitty Fisher and Mrs Abington, the magistrate Sir John Fielding and rake Colonel Francis Charteris shine in his descriptions and he gives gripping accounts of the mysterious kidnapping of Elizabeth Canning and the unsolved murder of Ann Bell, left brutalised by her client in a bagnio.

Cruickshank does not lose sight of the misery of what he describes. As he points out, very many of the ‘women’ were children and most died young and diseased. This is a fascinating and deeply researched book, an invaluable guide to the rumbustious sex life of the Georgians and an investigation into the often curious desires enabled by the city’s elegant façades. It is hard to imagine that it can be bettered.