



1 / 4 Chevron Chevron Courtesy Wellcome Library

Mrs. Fr—d—r—ck can be found at No. 20 Carlisle Street, in Soho, and “is rather remarkable in having a fine Roman nose.” Mrs. Mck—z— of No. 12 John Street is “just come from the North, as her speech will testify,” and, more to the point, she is “formed to excite desire.” Miss Charl—tte C—ll—ns of Oxford Street is burdened with “indifferent” teeth, small breasts, and arms and legs that are “too much in the gothic stile,” but, thanks perhaps to her previous employment as a milkmaid, she “is said to have . . . a delicate hand at stroaking.” So, at least, promises the author of “Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies,” a popular eighteenth-century Zagat-style guide to the prostitutes of London, published annually between 1757 and 1795.

Earlier this year, London’s Wellcome Library, whose collection focusses on medical history, acquired and digitized two copies of “Harris’s List”: the 1787 and 1788 editions, bound together in a single volume. Although contemporary reports estimate that the list sold as many as eight thousand copies a year, it is now extremely rare, with just a few copies from a handful of years surviving. “It seemed like a bit of a no-brainer when it was offered to us,” explains Richard Aspin, the head of research at the Wellcome Library. “The only stumbling block was the price.” From their humble origins—bought for half a crown at a tavern, gin joint, or coffee shop—the Wellcome’s copies travelled to the Continent, were annotated in Italian, were later expensively bound in red and gold leather, in Paris in about 1880, and then made their way to another Italian private collection in the nineteen-fifties, before their recent return to London. “It is a bit of Cinderella story,” Aspin says, laughing. “These grubby little things eventually became lords of the manor in this smart binding.”

This curious combination of high-end craftsmanship with lowlife literature adds an extra frisson to the Wellcome’s copy, but the entire series offers several enticing mysteries—its authorship among them. Although Harris was a real person—Jack Harris (born John Harrison), an entrepreneurial waiter who worked at the Shakespeare’s Head Tavern in Covent Garden and was renowned for his ability to procure a prostitute to suit any taste—scholars generally concur that he was not the list’s author, and simply licensed his name to its publishers. In 2005, the historian Hallie Rubenhold suggested that Samuel Derrick, an Irish writer variously described as a “drunken poet,” a “Grub Street hack,” and “notoriously dirty and smelly,” was the original author. Derrick died a pauper in 1769, however, meaning that the Wellcome’s edition must have been written by someone else.

Aspin has no theories as to its authorship, but he brings up another point of scholarly contention: whether “Harris’s List” was actually soft-core erotic fiction, merely served up in the guise of a practical guide. “If you compare the cast of characters in these two editions, there seems to be almost a wholesale replacement of the names from one year to the next,” he points out. The book purports to list “the most celebrated ladies now on the town”—but it seems quite unlikely that the top one hundred or so prostitutes of London would really change so radically from year to year. “Compare it to ‘The Good Pub Guide,’ which is basically the same each year,” Aspin says. “There are some new pubs, and some old ones get dropped, but change is much slower.”

Even assuming the descriptions are of real people, or at least based on real people, Aspin points out that eighty-six ladies (the tally in the 1787 edition; the total varies from year to year) is an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of prostitutes in London at the time, which is estimated to have been more than sixty thousand, or one in five women in the city. This raises the question of how the lucky eighty-six were selected. Aspin suggests that the list __might have operated on a “pay-to-play” model, charging women to be included, and that the handful of unflattering entries represent those who failed to settle their accounts. “Miss Y–ng,” of No. 5 Chapel Street may indeed have been “short and thick,” with “indifferent” teeth and “offensive” breath—or she may simply not have paid up on time.

Whatever the explanation, many historians believe that “Harris’s List” was intended for solo, armchair enjoyment, rather than for planning a night on the town. But, as Aspin leafs through the Wellcome’s edition, he points out several clues that imply that this copy, at least, might have been used in both ways. Next to the entry for Miss Cl—nt—n, “a very genteel made little girl,” whose address is listed as simply “near Middlesex Hospital,” someone has written “No. 17,” possibly in reference to a house number. Meanwhile, the binding is damaged such that the book consistently falls open on the entry for the “most amorous” Mrs. Banner, of Lambeth; this may hint at the preferences of at least one of the book’s later owners, the library’s manuscript conservationist speculates. Certainly, Mrs. Banner’s entry is among the raciest: her “irresistible eye” is said to be capable of raising a man’s lust to an “unbearable pitch,” while her “favourite spot below” apparently “calls for the Priapian weapon,” eager “to receive it in her sheath at its most powerful thrust up to the hilt.”

In 1795, the printers of “Harris’s List” were convicted of selling “a most indecent and immoral publication” and sentenced to a hefty fine and a year in prison. The culture was changing, with the gin-soaked bawdiness of Georgian London inching toward Victorian prudishness, and “Harris’s List” and its numerous imitators gradually ceased publication.

Today, however, Yelp-like sites for reviewing sex workers abound once again: on PunterNet UK, “Bigbadste” describes Rebecca of Manchester as a “blond bombshell” and notes that she was so energetic that “now I know how a horse feels in the Grand National.” Adultfax, The Erotic Review, and Eccie.net provide a similar service in the United States. The quality of the prose has suffered somewhat since Harris’s day, and there are fewer references to the teeth of the ladies in question, but similar tropes recur: rave reviews stress not only the sex worker’s feminine charms, but also the enthusiasm she brings to the job. Whether it is Layla Angelique being “so hot for it” in Dallas, in 2009, or the Lambeth-based Mrs. Banner’s eagerness to receive the Priapian weapon, in 1787, many men paying for sex evidently desire that the women they are paying display a need for the act. And in both today’s reviews and those from two centuries ago, one often detects sad stories lurking behind the titillation: several of Harris’s ladies are rebuked for being overly fond of gin (though the smell of juniper, we’re told, at least masks their putrid breath), while Rebecca of Manchester loses a star for being “newly arrived from Romania, so her English isn’t really good enough.”

Perhaps the most striking comparison to be made, however, is between the licentious chaos of Georgian London and the Internet. Aspin compares looking at “Harris’s List” to “kicking an anthill—you see all the ants running out of it and you suddenly get a sense of this huge, unregulated, crazy world that lies underneath.” “Harris’s List” was merely the most popular among a slew of cheap prints and pamphlets that circulated in Georgian London, a city whose population reached a million people by the end of the eighteenth century, but which still had no sewer system and no municipal police force. The Internet, with its explosive growth and paucity of regulation, may be the closest thing to it today.