Eighteenth Century Directory of Prostitutes
Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies a Sought after Publication
Nov 1, 2009
Georgian London was a rough and tumble place, where the lascivious appetites of the upper classes could be catered to, no matter what their nature.
Pimp General to the People of England
Jack Harris (his real name was John Harrison) was a waiter at a public house called Shakespeare’s Head and later landlord of the notorious pub The Rose. Georgian gentlemen looking for sexual entertainment knew that Jack was the man to contact. He even styled himself “Pimp General to the People of England,” and there was a steady demand for his introductions.
“English society expected, even encouraged, men to pay for sex.” This is a quote from an Economist review (October 15, 2009) of Dan Cruickshank’s 2009 book The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital.
As the magazine pointed out, “Prejudice barred women from all but menial jobs. Prostitution at least offered financial independence: a typical harlot could earn in a month what a tradesman or clerk would earn in a year.”
Scoundrels Produce Georgian Prostitute List
In 1757, the first edition of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies was published. It carried on as an annual publication for 38 years and sold an astonishing quarter of a million copies over its lifetime. It was widely thought to be the work of Jack Harris, but it was actually written by a wastral of a poet named Samuel Derrick, a man who claimed to be of noble Irish birth.
Writing in The Guardian, Maev Kennedy says of Derrick that he “was often reduced to sleeping in doorways, and was notoriously dirty and smelly. A diabolical poet, he was also briefly an actor. A playgoer wrote: 'Any other man might labour all of his life and at last not get into so bad a method of playing.’ ”
Listing the Whores and their Attributes
Derrick’s pen drew titillating portraits of about 80 women who, it must be assumed, where the crème-de-la-crème of Georgian London’s estimate 50,000 prostitutes who plied their trade according to a 1797 estimate made by Patrick Colquhoun in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.
An account from the 1773 edition of Harris's List describes one courtesan, in Georgian English’s somewhat lax spelling conventions, as “a well-shaped girl, about twenty-three, good-natured and said to be thoroughly experienced in the whole art and mysterie of Venus’s tactics and as soon reduce a perpendicular to less than the curve of a parabola. She is rather generous and you may sometimes find your way in there free of expence.”
Another entry is described by the BBC: “Miss Kilpin, who offers her favours inside the privacy of hackney carriages, but who is in reality ‘a married city lady, who takes this method of getting home deficiencies supplied abroad.’ "
Investigation of Harris’s List
Historian Hallie Rubenhold has uncovered much of the background to Jack Harris, Samuel Derrick and their legendary catalogue of prostitutes. She published her findings in the 2005 book entitled, The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List. She also made a BBC 4 documentary (November 3, 2007) on the topic.
She found that Derrick eventually became quite respectable, as master of ceremonies at Bath. This was a position that commanded an annual salary of £800, which says The Guardian would translate into £96,000 today, about $192,000.
When he died in 1769 he left his sizeable fortune to a former mistress and brothel keeper, Charlotte Hayes. “The money that she earned through London’s booming flesh trade ultimately bought her two country houses and a collection of residences in Mayfair and Piccadilly, proving the maxim, ‘sex sells’ to be a perennial one.”
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