NOTHING changes. If you want sex today the choice is abundant, from cards in phone boxes and the audacious adverts of massage parlours to agencies offering call girl names and even more contact numbers now available on the internet.
Go back 250 years and it wasn’t quite the same, but just as salacious, in particular in London and around what we now call Camden.
Pop into a pub and the barman might well be a pimp plying names and addresses, as well as beer and sandwiches and entree to private rooms and brothels.
But better still he would sell you a copy of the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. This titillating little black list, brilliantly and wittily written in parts and selling more than 250,000 copies, provided not only the vital addresses of prostitutes and whore houses but details of their “specialities” and the social mores of those dark days.
During its heyday from 1757 to 1795, Harris’s List was the essential guide and accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure, whether he be titled and of a respected profession or an adventurer or sailor seeking to satisfy his lust.
And the quite extraordinary saga of the list and the three characters who created it is told in this book, the work of historian Hallie Rubenhold, 34, who spent three years researching and writing it.
“I became a street walker on the pavements of Camden,” she says with an innocent smile. “I walked through Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Covent Garden checking on the addresses in the Harris’s List where the prostitutes operated.
“I was looking up at doorways and windows and wondering what happened there in the past. These women were mostly ordinary who just happened to make their money in this way and they were living side by side with grocers and tailors.
“It always tickled me walking round the Seven Dials area in Monmouth Street. This was perhaps the dodgiest area in the Parish of St Giles, somewhere you just wouldn’t go if you were at all respectable.
“Now it is packed with cafes and boutiques and is one of the trendiest parts of the West End.”
She found too that the Shakespeare’s Head and Rose taverns, plus the boisterous Bedford Coffee House and the brothel of Mother Douglas, the essential dens of iniquity, have long been demolished. But Drury Lane and its theatre, where actresses and women of fashion were automatically deemed to be whores, is one remaining reminder of the shocking misery that existed amid the horrors of London centuries ago.
But it is her search for the three remarkable characters behind the Harris’s List which is the essence of her fascinating story, which is packed with fastidious detail you might have thought lost long ago, such as how the word “spunging” came out of the debtors’ prison.
They are Jack Harris, head waiter and tavern keeper, real name Jack Harrison, who lent his name to the list and became pimp general, Samuel Derrick, the bedraggled, itinerant Irish poet who actually wrote it, and Derrick’s own mistress Charlotte Hayes who aided and abetted. They were a triumvirate whom together created something of literary value, as well as social historical worth, a rare copy of the list today demands at least £5,000 at auction.
The oldest copy of Harris’s List lies in the National Library of Scotland. And Ms Rubenhold went there to see it. But it was in the British Library that she found Derrick’s own admission that he was its author, itself an historical coup along with her proof that he wrote the lists, although she has yet to discover where he is buried.
“That was probably known to the raikes in society at the time, who were aware of him as a kind of joke,” she points out.
“And when he died the mask was lifted, but one of the wow factors was when I found in the British Library his admission that he wrote the lists.”
Ms Rubenhold found herself overwhelmed by the wealth of unpublished information still available about London’s underworld and underclass – what has been written so far she calls lazy history – despite the hypocritical Victorians who destroyed and censored so much.
And she is aware of the parallels with society today, which is equally covered with a curtain of puritanical morality since she came to London seven years ago from Los Angeles, where she was born and brought up, lived first in Hampstead, and now in Muswell Hill.
“The Georgians were not dissimilar from us, and we are more like the Georgians than the Victorians,” she insists.
“We are money and sex obsessed and we are definitely more bawdy than our great grandparents were.”
The abuse of women remains and while she believes that prostitution, as the oldest game, cannot be eradicated, she calls for it to be legalised, as it is in Holland. “If we deny the existence of something like prostitution then it makes it more unsafe,” she says. And to support her case she has the vast evidence she has unearthed of the Covent Garden Ladies who once paraded in the piazza, earned themselves a place in Harris’s List, and now in posterity – thanks to this evocative and exciting book that bring history to shameful life.