Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of Amorous Histories! I’m Annie Harrison, thank you for joining me and thank you to everyone who has supported me so far with social media follows, likes and shares. Hopefully you’ll like what you hear and keep spreading the word! And if you haven’t already found my social media pages I am @AmorousHistories on Instagram and Facebook, and @AmorousHistPod on Twitter. I also set up a website which is amoroushistoriespodcast.wordpress.com/.
Today we’re going to be talking about Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies and I have to start off by saying that if after listening to this episode you want to learn more go and find one of Hallie Rubenhold’s books on the topic because they are fab and her research has contributed a lot to this subject. I’ll put my source list in the show notes (which will be on the website) so you can get the details of her work if you so wish. I’ll also link to an essay I wrote on Harris’s List during my MA in 18th Century Studies at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at York Uni. I basically just debate the pornographic merits of the List’s so feel free to give it a read and tell me what you think.
Please be aware that although there is nothing sexually explicit in this episode, it does get pretty heavy with innuendo at points!
Right let’s get to it.
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies was an annual directory published from 1757 – 1795 listing the prostitutes available in London’s Covent Garden area. If you’ve watch the TV series Harlots you will have seen the List referenced in the very first episode where one of the characters read the entries for the women in her brothel. I remember when I first saw that I squealed in nerdy excitement. The List took the form of a catalogue detailing the names, prices and physical descriptions of the women, as well as where they could be found and any so-called special talents they possessed. Although the List was published under Jack Harris’s name, the real and celebrated Covent Garden pimp never actually authored the work.
Originally the guidebook was written anonymously in 1757 by Irish poet Samuel Derrick in “an act of desperation”, a money-making scheme to ensure he avoided Fleet debtors’ prison.[1] The publication proved such a success that he continued to compile it every year until his death in 1769. Copies of the small six-by-four-inch List were sold for two shillings and sixpence each, and originally they could be obtained in Covent Garden from the Shakespear’s Head tavern, or the neighbouring brothel of Mother Jane Douglas. As Harris’s List became more popular it also became much more widely available. It could be purchased on Fleet Street, from the kiosk in the Covent Garden Piazza, and from many of the brothels that lined the streets of Covent Garden and that area of London.[2]
The conception of Harris’s List does not suggest that Derrick had a particularly savvy business mind, nor that he was eager to write about the debauchery that surrounded him, instead to me it suggests that he needed to increase his finances quickly.
In 1751 Derrick quit Dublin and a career as a linen merchant and moved to London in the hope of becoming a successful poet.[3] He spent his time in Covent Garden, frequenting establishments such as the Shakespear’s Head and Bedford Coffee House soaking up both the atmosphere and the alcohol. Derrick had expected to collect subscriptions from wealthy patrons in order to fund the publication of his poetry, however his campaign was unsuccessful and he was left empty handed, with only one published poem to his name. By 1752 his savings had significantly depleted so Derrick turned to London’s Grub Street and took a job as a hack writer, whilst still chasing subscriptions.[4]
Derrick continually made poor economic choices throughout his life, and never learnt from his previous mistakes. Eventually, despite the kindness and generosity of his friends, in 1757 Derrick’s taste for drinking, prostitutes and fine clothes had landed him in Ferguson’s sponging house, awaiting transfer to Fleet Street debtors’ prison. It was this dire situation that led Derrick to first write Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies in a desperate attempt escape prison and pay back his creditors.[5]
Now, you may be thinking if Samuel Derrick authored this list why isn’t it Derrick’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. Enter Jack Harris aka John Harrison (yes I really do hope we’re related) was a famed pimp and waiter at the Shakespear’s Head in Covent Garden.
The Shakespear’s Head catered to all crowds, from destitute hacks like Samuel Derrick to aristocrats like Beau Tracy, all in search of alcoholic refreshment and some intimate company. Harris plied his trade as a pimp whilst in the Shakespear’s Head connecting men in need of ‘servicing’ with one of the many prostitutes working around Covent Garden.
In order to work effectively as a pimp Harris kept a list of all the women he could call on to pleasure a paying customer. It was common during the eighteenth century for pimps to carry with them a list of the prostitutes on their books, however Harris compiled a list that “through its sheer volume” surpassed all others:[6]
Harris’s list bulged with a variety of intimate details […] the names of women […] [their] most current addresses where they might be found […] their ages and prices, descriptions of their physical characteristics, biographical details, comments about their health and, of course, their specialised services.[7]
One contemporary account of Jack Harris’s list comes from the 1759 second edition of Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M—, the life story of famous eighteenth-century London courtesan Fanny Murray. Although not written by Murray herself and therefore containing false stories for the readers pleasure, this whore biography does give us an interesting insight into knowledge of Harris’s personal list and Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies at the time. Whore biographies are a whole other subject which hopefully I’ll be able to do an episode on at some point.
Anyway, the author claims that Jack Harris wished to have Fanny Murray “enrolled upon his parchment list”, so a surgeon performed “a complete examination of her person […] to report her well or ill” making sure she was free of venereal disease. A lawyer was present “to ingross her name”, and “after having signed a written agreement, to forfeit twenty pounds, if she gave [Jack Harris] a wrong information concerning the state of her health in every particular” her name, along with a short description and her address was added to Harris’s list of prostitutes.[8]
Samuel Derrick would have come across Harris’s handwritten list of some four hundred women whilst drinking at the Shakespear’s Head. Many of Derrick’s female acquaintances and lovers would have been among Harris’s extensive “Whore’s club”.[9] Although Jack Harris played no part in writing Harris’s List it was probably his notorious name that helped to sell it. Each copy of the List carried the signature of Jack Harris (which is actually written in Samuel Derrick’s handwriting) on the title page to prove authenticity.[10]
Interestingly Rubenhold suggests the publication of the List may have initially been Harris’s idea, saying:
“Whose idea precisely it was to lay the work in print shall never be known. Either the entrepreneurial Harris may have planted the seed in the author’s mind or Sam, after spying the ordered entries of the pimp’s personal catalogue, became fascinated by its contents.”[11]
In my opinion given the nature of Harris’s List it is more likely that Derrick conceived of the idea himself, as a genuinely extensive directory of prostitutes being made available to the general public would have undermined Harris in his work as so-called “‘Pimp General of all England’” and removed him from the lucrative middle man position.[12]
Harris would have received a one-off payment from Derrick for the use of his name in the title, however neither the hack or pimp could have predicted the success of the List, or the financial gain that accompanied it.[13] Harris would not have received any further payment from the annual publications, which perhaps explains why in 1766 he wrote and printed his own version of the list; Kitty’s Attalantis.[14]
Like Harris’s List, Kitty’s Attalantis was full of the names, addresses and descriptions of London prostitutes from elite courtesans to streetwalkers.[15] Due to Harris’s shortage of literary flair Kitty’s Attalantis lacked the pornographic language and titillating story-telling Derrick and his successors had made the core of Harris’s List. Consequentially Kitty’s Attalantis sold poorly and Harris decided against a second run.[16]
In a “century virtually obsessed by sex” it was “common practice” for the metropolitan elite to have one or more mistresses in keeping, doing so became a show of status and wealth that set aristocrats apart from the lower echelons of society.[17] The publishing industry reacted to this explosion of rakish behaviour by creating more and more pornographic material to serve customers of every economic circumstance:
The price of the material varied from penny sheets and sixpenny books to expensive, leather-bound books costing up to six guineas, the majority of them falling somewhere between one shilling and three shillings. Similar stories and poems could be found in chapbooks, magazines, newspapers pamphlets.[18]
As well as pornography, directories listing the names, prices, and places a prostitute could be found were not uncommon in eighteenth-century England, and the very first such publications can be traced back to the sixteenth century.[19]
One of the earliest of the eighteenth century was The London Belles, or A Description of the Most Celebrated Beauties in the Metropolis of Great Britain printed in 1707.[20] It featured thirty-two ladies of pleasure, however the poetic descriptions of each prostitute are quietly suggestive compared to the bold sexual entries found in Harris’s List fifty years later.
The entries in Harris’s List are vivid accounts of the prostitutes available to purchase within the Covent Garden area. Rather than just recounting the physical details of the women the author slips into his own fantasy world, describing the women in a plethora of poetical, hyperbolic and metaphoric terms.
In the 1787 issue Mrs. B—nn—r of “No.4 Walnut-tree walk, Lambeth” is described as having “an irresistible eye, capable of firing the most torpid imagination with as fierce desire, as a torch dipped in the ever-burning flame upon the alter of Venus”.[21] Similarly in the 1773 edition Betsy B—l—w, in Castle Street, Oxford Market, is portrayed as near perfection, the writer describing her skin as “polished ivory” with “firmness and smoothness of which are unparalleled”.[22]
The writing takes a distinctly more pornographic turn when the author bends his pen to illustrating the women and their fantasy partner’s sexual organs. Mrs. B—nn—r is described as having a “Blissful font hid within the centre of her bewitching grove”, and her:
[I]nvoluntary sighs of excess of pleasure, solicit the endearing clasp of manly pleasure, whilst the titillation of nature in her favourite spot below, feelingly call for the Priapian weapon to receive it in her sheath at its most powerful thrust up to the hilt.[23]
Harris’s List provides the details of hundreds of supposedly sexually voracious prostitutes who chose this career because of their “love for the sport”.[24] The List is selling men the fallacy of “inexhaustible plenitude of female sexual generosity and attractiveness,”, and casting them as the man these make believe women desire the most, when in fact the ladies of Covent Garden would receive almost any customer able to pay the fee.[25]
In a more obvious attempt to arouse readers the Lists offered coy descriptions of the specialised sexual services on offer from the ladies of Covent Garden. Miss Noble “a fine girl, with a lovely fair complexion” has the particular “skill of reviving the dead”.[26] The author writes that:
[H]er tongue has a double charm, both when speaking and when silent; for the tip of it, properly applied, can […] send such feelings to the central spot, that immediately demand the more noble weapon to close the melting scene.[27]
Newspaper adverts announcing the publication of a new issue of the List also advertised the back copies that were still available for purchase. For example, on 6th February 1775 an advert in the Public Advertiser advices readers that Harris’s List had “This Day” been published and was available to buy from “H. Ranger, Temple Exchange Passage, Fleet-street” where copies of “Harris’s List for 1771, 1772, 1773, and 1774” could also be purchased.[28]
In my opinion the only reason someone would buy outdated copies would appear to be so they could use them for their own sexual pleasure. Interestingly in January 1780 an advert in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser lists the available back copies still obtainable as “the years 1771, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9”.[29] The advertisement of an entire decade of back copies certainly implies that there may have been demand for issues of Harris’s List to be almost constantly available, so once the issue a reader was currently consuming had been exhausted, they could move onto the next copy, or perhaps go back to their favourite entries from past years.
During her research on the publishing history of Harris’s List Janet Ing Freeman found that “in 1781 ‘complete setts [sic] from the year 1771, to the present year’ were offered at one guinea” in an advert from the March Morning Herald.[30] The offering of the List as an entire set demonstrates that the writers knew their work was being used as pornography, otherwise it is doubtful they would have advertised their availability of back copies so abundantly.
It is unknown who assumed control of the List after Derrick’s death in 1769, but by the late 1780s the writing roles had been adopted by brothers John and James Roach, along with John Aitkin, who were responsible for the book’s publication until January 1795. In early 1794 John Roach and John Aitkin were convicted of libel for publishing Harris’s List, despite this James Roach went on to publish one further issue which ultimately led to his imprisonment for libel a year after his brother.[31]
Scholars such as Hallie Rubenhold have concluded that after the sentencing of the Roach brothers’, production of the List ceased as by the end of the century the legal and financial risks to any potential writers or printers were too high. This was due to the crack down on immoral behaviour championed by supporters of King George III’s 1787 ‘Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness, and Immorality’. A society of moral reformers “headed by the Bishop of London and comprising of ‘A great number of Gentlemen of the Highest Rank and Estimation’” were increasing their attempts to find and prosecute those who did not meet their own moral standards, and of course Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies offended them deeply.[32]
Personally, I find Harris’s List fascinating. The author is writing about real women who prostituted themselves in eighteenth century London, but he blends their authentic lives with a fictional hyperbolic narrative to firstly earn himself money, but it also would have driven customers towards the women. To my knowledge there aren’t any sources that offer the women’s opinion on being part of the list, but that may be my memory failing me, let me know…
So that’s Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, like I said earlier if this has whetted your appetite (pardon the pun) then check out the source list and digitised copies of the original pamphlets are available online. There are so many angles you could look at Harris’s List from and this was just a bit on an introduction really.
Thank you so much for listening! we’ve made it through my first podcast. Let me know what you think, dm me or drop an email to amoroushistories@gmail.com. It will definitely be a learning process, figuring out the best way to structure my script, editing the recording and technical stuff like that. But if you’re here with me now you get to watch me grow and fingers-crossed, get better!
Thank you again, I’ve been your host Annie Harrison and this has been Amorous Histories.
Source List
Browne, Joseph. The London Belles, or A Description of the Most Celebrated Beauties in the Metropolis of Great Britain. London: Samuel Bunchley, 1707.
Denlinger, Elizabeth Campbell. “The Garment and the Man: Masculine Desire in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, 1764-1793”. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11, 3, (2002): 357-394.
Freeman, Janet Ing. “Jack Harris and ‘Honest Ranger’: The Publication and Prosecution of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, 1760–95”. The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 13, 4, (2012): 423-456.
Harris, Jack and Rubenhold, Hallie. Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: sex in the city in Georgian Britain. Stroud: Tempus, 2005.
Harris, Jack. Harris’s list of Covent-Garden ladies: or, man of pleasure’s kalendar, for the year 1783. Containing the histories and some curious anecdotes of the most celebrated ladies now on the town, or in Keeping, and also many of their keepers. London: H.Ranger, 1783.
Peakman, Julie. “Kitty’s Attalantis (1766)” In Whore Biographies, Vol.4, edited by Julie Peakman, 391-450. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
Peakman, Julie. “Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M—, 2nd edn (1759), vol. I” In Whore Biographies, Vol.3, edited by Julie Peakman, 5-220. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.
Peakman, Julie. Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Rubenhold, Hallie. The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List. Stroud: Tempus, 2006. https://uk.bookshop.org/a/11019/9781784165956
Article references
[1] Jack Harris and Hallie Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: sex in the city in Georgian Britain (Stroud: Tempus, 2005): 13.
[2] Harris and Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: 19.
[3] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 44.
[4] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 85.
[5] Harris and Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: 13.
[6] Harris and Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: 15.
[7] Harris and Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: 15.
[8] Julie Peakman, “Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M—, 2nd edn (1759), vol. I” In Whore Biographies, Vol.3, ed. Julie Peakman, 5-220, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006): 118.
[9] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 76.
[10] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 171.
[11] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 123.
[12] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 124.
[13] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 125.
[14] Julie Peakman, “Kitty’s Attalantis (1766)” In Whore Biographies, Vol.4, ed. Julie Peakman, 391-450, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006): 391.
[15] Peakman, “Kitty’s Attalantis (1766)”: 391.
[16] Peakman, “Kitty’s Attalantis (1766)”: 391.
[17] Peter Wagner, “The pornographer in the courtroom: trial reports about cases of sexual crimes and delinquencies as a genre of eighteenth-century erotica” In Sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 120-141, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 134-135.
[18] Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: 14.
[19] Janet Ing Freeman, “Jack Harris and ‘Honest Ranger’: The Publication and Prosecution of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, 1760–95”, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 13, No. 4, (2012): 425.
[20] Joseph Browne, The London Belles, or A Description of the Most Celebrated Beauties in the Metropolis of Great Britain, (London: Samuel Bunchley, 1707).
[21] Jack Harris, Harris’s list of Covent-Garden ladies: or, man of pleasure’s kalender, for the year, 1787: Containing the histories and some curious anecdotes of the most celebrated ladies now on the town, or in keeping, and also many of their keepers.(London: H.Ranger, 1787): 19.
[22] Harris and Rubenhold, Harris’s list of Covent Garden ladies: 160.
[23] Harris, Harris’s list (1787): 19.
[24] Harris, Harris’s list (1787): 13.
[25] Denlinger, “The Garment and the Man”: 360.
[26] Harris, Harris’s List (1788): 31.
[27] Harris, Harris’s List (1788): 31.
[28] Public Advertiser, 6 Feb, 1775.
[29] Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 3 Jan, 1780.
[30] Freeman, “Jack Harris and ‘Honest Ranger’”: 433.
[31] Hallie Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List (Stroud: Tempus, 2006): 313.
[32] Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: 312.
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