The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack & the Extraordinary Story of Harris' List

This is a great little book. I'd heard of Harris's List from my studies of the period at university, and had read some extracts from it. This book traces the interweaving stories of three of the people involved in its production, and in doing so, introduces a lot of other personalities and explores a lot of the issues. <br /><br />There are a lot of the usual problems in writing social history of the poor - the relative lack of documentary evidence, and the propensity of people to change their names, does make it hard to piece together people's lives - and sometimes the author is forced to rely on conjecture. None of her conjectures are unreasonable but some are longer reaches than others, especially when it comes to what one or other of the people must have felt.<br /><br />But these are quibbles. It's an engaging, accessible account, which is sensitively written. It is compassionate to the women (and men) who found themselves drawn - or forced - into prostitution. It acknowledges that for some it was a good career choice, while recognising that for many it was exploitative and horrid. It explores the prevailing gender stereotypes that drove the trade and the attitudes towards prostitutes and their clients, and in a move that made my feminist heart glad, it includes an appendix, listing four pages of names of men who regularly used prostitutes - the men who, as the author points out, have been able evade the scrutiny and judgement heaped on the women who serviced them.<br /><br />It did strike me how much our sexual 'morality' has changed. We regard the 18th century - especially in terms of high society - as a time of rigid sexual morality compared to our own. Certainly, any breath of impropriety could ruin a woman's reputation - and chance of a decent life - forever. Same sex relationships were illegal and harshly punished. But by modern standards, many of the men on that list - who no doubt felt themselves blameless and were pillars of society - would be regarded as criminals. Many of these girls were children. Many 'seductions' were, in fact, rapes. Many of these 'filles de joie' were no more than indentured slaves. People who condemn modern morality and long for a return to old fashioned values would do well to remember that. <br />This book is a welcome antidote to the over-romanticisation of the Regency period. I like a Regency romance as much as anyone, but this provides a good companion piece.

Interesting look at prostitution, sexual and literary, in Georgian London, via Harris' List. This makes for fairly grim reading in the utter callousness of the time about rape, child abuse, misogyny, and the lack of any help for the desperate destitute. The author quotes a long string of Harris 'reviews' of the sex workers, chirpily smutty accounts that frequently seem not to notice they're describing women in hell, and you do kind of want to set fire to pretty much every man in the eighteenth century. <br /><br />However. It's an interesting read. The author acknowledges we're mostly seeing these women through exploitative male eyes; their voices are long gone. At least we get a sense of Charlotte Hayes, bred to prostitution, who became successful and was unquestionably loved and happy, at least sometimes.

On the plus side, this book is a compelling narrative about figures we don't hear much of in history, namely prominent members of London's underworld during the Georgian Era. Rubenhold's prose is good and it's a fast read.<br /><br />Rubenhold's obvious disdain for her titular subjects is the book's major weakness and oh man, it's a big one. While she's not without pity for the titular Covent Garden Ladies, that pity is mixed with enough disdain to make it feel disturbingly familiar to actual Georgian and Victorian middle to upper class writings. You might hope some things have changed in the last centuries but apparently, not for Rubenhold. While she acknowledges many of these women had little choice in their given profession, she also describes their work as sacrificing their integrity, a frankly baffling and archaic moral read on the whole situation. She also wants you to know they were gross! REALLY gross! We get references to "whores", "harlots", "foul mouthed, tipple loving prostitutes", "writhing" posture girls (posture girls being something of the 18th century equivalent to a modern day stripper) and brothels that "infested" London. She also puts scare quotes around "ladies", just to be sure we get it. It's jarring to read Rubenhold whipping back and forth between pity and disdain, but the two seem closely intermingled, much as they were for actual 18th century commentators.<br /><br />The main focuses of the book are Jack Harris, a pimp, Samuel Derrick, a failed middle class Irish poet and Harris' copywriter, Charlotte Hayes, a courtesan-turned-madam, and Dennis O'Kelly, Charlotte's common law husband, horse breeder and co operator of her brothels. All four of her central protagonists commit appalling acts and all four of them seem to escape the stinging disdain she lavishes on any female sex worker who isn't Charlotte. Her admonishments to take these people as products of their time would be a little more compelling if she hadn't spent so much time criticizing women who did far less. O'Kelly's attempted rape of a young noblewoman and his subsequent arrest is described as English society putting him in his place. Maybe there's a grain of truth in this, as upper class Englishmen rarely suffered consequences for the same act. But it's just jarring to read after reading paragraphs slamming poor women for having the nerve to pick up a bottle of gin. Hayes is a compelling figure, and not an unsympathetic one, who both faced horrific abuse and inflicted it on others as a madam. But it's hard not to feel like Rubenhold is comparatively easy on her due to her high earnings and relatively demure personality. It's not that I'd exactly prefer to see her deny any sympathy to Hayes, who in my view is worthy of a nuanced look, but surely her crimes (such as kidnapping twelve year olds) are more serious than being "foul mouthed" or "tipple loving".<br /><br />The real nail in the coffin here is the sourcing. I've read a lot of historical biographies that I didn't particularly like or agree with, but I was at least able to find and trace sources. Rubenhold does provide a bibliography but her chapters are littered with quote marks that don't seem to have any particular attributed source. Her notes explain the meaning of specific terms, but they don't actually point to where she got her quotes or provide any context for them. I have never seen this in a historical biography before and it's extremely shoddy. I might say this book was worth it for the information alone, but the mess that is her notes pretty much kills that. Don't read.

Apparently this book was an inspiration for the tv show Harlots, which I haven't seen. I picked it up for two reasons. One because I read Hallie Rubenhold's book about the five victims of jack the ripper and two because to get more "backstory" on one of my top favorite books ever (The crimson petal and the white by Michel Faber ) as it revolves around a young woman in that tragic life situation. I love the way the author writes her non fiction, they are readable and very easy to learn without being overwhelmed. Tragic but interesting

I picked this up because I heard it inspired the TV show Harlots, and it was absolutely fascinating.<br /><br />Review to come.<br /><br />Read for Medievalathon.

After reading Hallie Rubenfold'<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/37570548.The_Five_The_Untold_Lives_of_the_Women_Killed_by_Jack_the_Ripper" title="The Five The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold" rel="noopener">The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper</a>s, I suppose I was expecting the same level of intrigue and suspense. I did enjoy parts of this book, but certainly not all. <br /><br />The book reads like a biography, but it was like three biographies entwined together, and it explains how the three people knew one another, and how they came to be in one another's lives. Covent Garden is probably one of my favourite parts of London, not just because of it's attractiveness, but because it houses the famous Moomin Shop, so one can probably imagine why I was eager to read this and learn about the ladies that roamed the streets there. <br /><br />There were many stories about the women that turned to prostitution here, and obviously the majority didn't choose that life, being manipulated into it by an arrogant male. I got the vibe here the the males were congratulated for doing such a deed, and a lack of criticism prevailed. This to me is strange, as I would feel nothing but contempt. <br /><br />There was a rather long, bit interesting list of the Covent Garden women, which comprised of names, addresses, personalities of these women, and the kind of sex speciality that they offered.<br /><br />This was readable, but parts I had to skim through really, but overall, this gives an insight into the ghastly conditions that women lived and worked in during that time. <br />

<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1534637347i/26153355.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>An interesting story, sensitively told, <i>The Covent Garden Ladies</i> fleshes out what life was like for both men and women in Georgian London, through the eyes of three of its players: Jack Harris, Samuel Derrick and Charlotte Hayes. I would like to have seen more details r.e. individual women beyond Charlotte Hayes. The women mentioned are seen almost exclusively through the male gaze; it would be nice if some of them had a chance to tell their own stories but perhaps source material is limited. The read has given me a new perspective on <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5761478" rel="nofollow noopener">Harlots</a>.

<i>The Covent Garden Ladies</i> explores the careers of three people associated with the notorious "Harris's List", a Who's Who of sex workers in Georgian London: the eponymous pimp who inspired it; Samuel Derrick, its likely first author; and the brothel-owner Charlotte Hayes. Hallie Rubenhold generally does a good job of highlighting just how precarious life was for many people at this time, especially for sex workers. <br /><br />However, the slightly arch/affected tone of voice Rubenhold adopts here—while clearly a deliberate attempt to echo the eighteenth-century texts she's drawing on—didn't really work for me given how utterly bleak are most of the glimpses we get of the lives of the women included on the List. It was too breezy for the subject matter, and made me feel a bit queasy.

The title did not do justice to this book. Indeed, it almost kept me from reading it. What it is is a group biography of three people involved with prostitution in mid-1700s London. The author weaves their stories together in a way that illuminates their sordid world.<br /><br />Rubenhold manages to find a way of telling this story that avoids both prurience and fingerpointing, letting the story arouse our outrage instead of telling us to be outraged. She gives us the information we need to draw our own conclusions. <br /><br />Very impressive. <br /><br />My only quibble is that much of the information comes from fake biographies published by hack writers which may be largely fiction. A bit more discussion of her sources in the text would have been illuminating. I understand how limited valid sources would be for a book like this, I just wanted a little more insight into what we know about these sources.<br /><br />This is the latest of a long series of books I've read that make it clear how little respect any modern person should give the British ruling class. As Rubenfeld states, their sexual tastes would have put most of them in prison today, and they would have deserved it. They delighted in rape, especially that of children. They had no compunctions about having people kidnapped for their sexual use. Why do so many people romanticize these people and continue to think there was something magical about their "high birth?"<br /><br />And what is it about British culture that makes their ruling class so prone to sexually abuse children? Though Rubenfeld seems to think this was confined to the 18th century, the biography of Waugh I just read made it clear that social acceptance of the sexual abuse of children (in that case boys) was common well into the 20th century. And child prostitution, too, as long as the children were not of one's exalted social class.<br /><br />Very radicalizing!<br /> <br /><br />

4.5 <br /><br />review coming soon