Even babies had it hard under the Georges. Before Captain Coram built his Foundling Hospital, unwanted ones were routinely abandoned on dunghills. Once the hospital existed, luckless infants were packed up and "posted" there by carrier, mostly dying en route. Adults didn't have it much better, staggering under a "disease burden" of parasites, untreated infections and badly-healed injuries that eventually killed them off. STDs were rife, and since the disappearance of symptoms was taken as proof of cure, the poxed went on poxing others. Surgery was available; anaesthetic wasn't. Sailors could be made drunk and insensible, but not a gentlewoman like Fanny Burney, whose mastectomy was performed while she was fully conscious. Yet Burney was lucky by Georgian standards. The operation was successful, saving her life.

If you managed to elude the press-gang, the bawds posing as helpful old dears in order to ensnare girls into brothels, the alcoholism, gambling, card sharps, pick-pockets, priggers, highwaymen, bullies and mohocks, you could still fall victim to apparently innocent foodstuffs: sewage-tainted water, bread containing ash and ground bones, milk thickened with minced snails. Overcrowding and an obscenely long working day helped ensure that at some periods deaths outstripped births and only immigration kept London in existence. Dying penniless, you could be buried in the disgusting "poor's pit", a mass grave heaped with coffins before being earthed in ― though looking on the bright side, perhaps the putrid stench of the pit would repel the "resurrectionists" who stole cadavers for dissection. Compared with a cheap and disposable labourer, a fresh corpse was a real prize.

Covering much more than "perils", this has to come first for its scholarly detail and exhaustiveness. White considers the city as it would appear to people in various walks of life, including architects, journalists, prostitutes, reformers and revolutionaries. A must-read for anyone interested in Georgian London.

Mary Bowes, an ancestress of our present Queen, spent years being tortured by her psychopathic husband. The story isn't entirely London-based but I couldn't resist including this book, revealing as it does how inequality before the law made marriage itself a peril for many women. Mary's story, as dramatic as any novel, inspired Thackeray's Barry Lyndon.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the gin crazes and yes, the cover does feature Hogarth's Gin Lane.

Virtuous, fatherless and naive, Evelina has to learn the pitfalls of society. Though there's never any serious chance of her heroine coming to grief, Burney's novel shows how purgatorial the obligatory social gatherings of the period could be for sensitive souls. Poor Evelina's uncongenial company – predatory, boorish, spiteful or embarrassing – and her idealised love interest anticipate the work of Jane Austen.

A beautifully-written walk on the wild side, chronicling the careers of three raffish Georgians on the make: pimp Jack Harris, brothel-keeper Charlotte Hayes and poet Sam Derrick, secret publisher of a catalogue of whores known as Harris's List and also – bizarrely enough – Master of Ceremonies at Bath. Derrick's career is just one instance of how closely the Georgian sex trade and respectable society were intertwined.

Now getting on a bit (published in 1981) but a moving portrait of a great altruist and his legacy. It's also wonderfully detailed: you can find out what the foundlings had to eat on a Tuesday "in the pork season" in 1747, should you so wish. McClure reveals just how dedicated and canny the governors were, attracting the patronage of Hogarth and Handel, bending over backwards to suit the whims of Parliament and tirelessly adapting to conditions. The hospital's regime was so humane that opponents tellingly complained of foundlings receiving better treatment than "respectable" children.

7. The Tyranny of Treatment edited by Natasha McEnroe and Robin Simon

A grisly, engrossing collection of essays exploring the medical histories of those in Samuel Johnson's circle, including Boswell's claps, Johnson's scrofula and Fanny Burney's mastectomy. Pass those smelling salts.

Fancy that: impressment didn't end with the Georgian era but remained an option, in theory, right up to the first world war. Not that recruiters had it all their own way – they were so hated that locals sometimes got up a posse, driving them out of town or even murdering them. Rogers explores the social, economic and political background to impressment, bringing home to the reader the horrors of a system that was essential to maintaining Britannia's rule over the waves.

For Boswell, London's perils revolved principally around drink and sex: he recorded 19 separate "poxes" or "claps" over 30 years, dying at 54 (Samuel Johnson, crippled from infancy but sexually abstemious, made it to 75). Armed with an impressive sense of entitlement, Boswell met everybody who was everybody; his journals read like an 18th-century Who's Who.

Despite her repentance in old age, the magnificent Moll is nobody's idea of a virtuous heroine as she rattles through her tale of life on the edge. Defoe was a champion of female education; Moll's story illustrates how a woman unable to earn her living must seek male protection, first in marriage, then in prostitution. Finally, when she is too faded to find customers, Moll has no resort but crime. The emphasis on hard cash rather than sexual pleasure makes Moll Flanders possibly the most unerotic novel ever written about a prostitute, but it's engaging for all that. Defoe, himself a tradesman, gives his heroine a distinctive voice – and the shrewdness and energy of the born chancer, an energy that remains with the reader when the book is finished.

• Maria McCann's new novel Ace, King, Knave, set in Georgian London, is published by Faber

• The exhibition Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain opens this week at the British Library and runs until 11 March 2014