Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies - Modern View

Modern View

Harris's List was published for a city in which prostitution was rife. London's bawdy houses had, by the 1770s, disappeared from the poorer areas outside the city wall, and in the West End were found in three areas; St Margaret's in Westminster; St Anne's in Soho and St James's; and most especially, with more than two thirds of London's "Disorderly Houses", around Covent Garden and the Strand. The area was noted for its "great numbers of female votaries to Venus of all ranks and conditions", while another author distinguished Covent Garden as "the chief scene of action for promiscuous armours". The Scottish statistician Patrick Colquhoun estimated in 1806 that of Greater London's approximately 1,000,000 citizens, perhaps 50,000 women, across all walks of life, were engaged in some form of prostitution.

Whether any of these women could confirm their addresses for publication in Harris's List is something that author Sophie Carter doubts. She views the annual as "primarily a work of erotica", calling it "nothing so much as a shopping list ... textually arrayed for the delectation of the male consumer", continuing "they await his intervention to institute an exchange", epitomising the traditional male role in pornography. Elizabeth Denlinger includes a similar sentiment in her essay, The Garment and the Man: "This varied display of women to satisfy the 'great itch' ... is a fundamental aspect of the sphere to which Harris's List offered British men a carte d'entrée" Rubenhold writes that the variability in the descriptions of prostitutes over the years the list was published defy "all attempts to categorise it as either exclusively up-market or simply middle of the road." She suggests that the annual's purpose was to "conduct the desirous to the embrace of a prostitute", and that its prose was designed for "solitary sexual enjoyment" (H. Ranger also sold back-issues of Harris's List). Sold to a London public which was mostly patriarchal, its listings reflect the prejudices of the men who authored them. They were therefore not representative of women generally, and as she concludes, "it is likely that their stories would have differed quite significantly from those recounted by their customers for the benefit of the List's publishers."

Not every commentator agreed with Colquhoun's estimate, which became "the most widely quoted sum", but in the opinion of Cindy McCreery the fact that most people agreed there were far too many prostitutes in London is indicative of widespread concern about the trade. Attitudes toward prostitution hardened toward the end of the 18th century, with many viewing prostitutes as indecent and immoral, and it was in this atmosphere that Harris's List met its demise. Books such as the Wandering Whore and Edmund Curll's Venus in the Cloyster (1728) are often mentioned alongside Harris's as examples of erotic literature. Along with the anonymously written Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead (1707), Garfield and Curll's works were involved in cases that helped form the 18th-century legal concept of "obscene libel"—which was a marked change from the previous emphasis on controlling sedition, blasphemy and heresy, traditionally the ecclesiastical courts' province. No laws existed to forbid the publication of pornography and therefore when Curll was arrested and imprisoned in 1725 (the first such prosecution in nearly 20 years), it was under threat of a libel charge. He was released a few months later, only to be locked up again for publishing other materials deemed offensive by the authorities. Curll's experience with the censors was uncommon though, and prosecutions based on obscene publications remained a rarity. Although their court action spelled the end for Harris's List, despite the best efforts of the Proclamation Society (later the Society for Suppression of Vice), the publication of pornography continued apace; more pornographic material was published during the Victorian Era than at any time previously.