Prostitution in Covent Garden

The sex trade from the 16th to the 18th century

By Nigel T Espey

The great square of Venus

-Sir John Fielding

Morning in Covent Garden by Spooner, 18th Century. Depicts Prostitutes meeting with clients outside Tom and Moll King's Coffee House. Copyright Westminster City Archives

From the 16th century to the 18th, Covent Garden, and in particular Drury Lane, was London’s prime location for the sex trade. Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Police Court, called it “the great square of Venus,” and it certainly lived up to the name. The market may have raged in the daytime, but at night men flocked to the square not for perishable goods, but for two things: theatre and sex. With the monopoly on spoken drama granted them by King Charles II, the Theatre Royal and the Royal Opera attracted droves of theatre-goers, inadvertently creating a customer-base ripe for the sex trade.

In this period, Covent Garden prostitutes had plenty of competition. Coming in all shapes and sizes, from a variety of backgrounds, they were given different names. There were low-class “flash mollishers”, theatre-dwelling “spells”, bagnio-owning “bawds”, and scores of “Covent Garden Nuns” (a synonym, predictably, for prostitutes) all cashing in on the rich market for sex at Covent Garden.

The forerunners of Covent Garden prostitution, or “spells” as they were called, took full advantage of the theatre scene. Many stood outside theatres waiting for potential clients to emerge in the intermission, or adjourning with audience members to different locations when the show was over.

Other girls used prostitution to upplement their day jobs. Some flower girls for instance would stay out later than their more virtuous peers, looking to sell a different kind of flower when night fell. “Flower-seller” even came to be known as short-hand for prostitute; one of the many reasons why being a flower seller was a disreputable profession, and perhaps why Eliza Doolittle from the play Pygmalion, herself a flower-seller, is so insistent of her virtue: “I’m a good girl I am!”

Customers looking to hire the services of a spell or part-time flower girl typically had to do so in the open.

A monument proposed satirically for Tom King, proprietor of Tom King's Coffee House, Covent Garden .Black Betty also known as Tawny Betty is one of the figures depicted. 19th October, 1737 Copyright Westminster City Archives

For those customers with a little more discretion, brothels and places like Moll King’s Coffee House were extremely important. Moll King’s, located on Drury Lane, was not a brothel in earnest, but was widely known as a place for prostitutes and their customers to meet and plan liaisons. From 1722, Moll and Tom King ran their coffee house, facilitating the booming sex business, surviving Tom’s death until Moll King’s retirement in 1745. Because nobody actually had sex there (except for, presumably, the Kings themselves in their own bedroom), the Kings were able to avoid prosecution. Many bawds and their “nymphs” frequented the place, and they were eagerly met by men from a range of social classes.

It was the bawds, or bagnio owners as they were sometimes called (as many of them owned bagnios which means “baths” in Italian but in this instance is a thinly-veiled synonym for “brothels”),who worked most at keeping the business alive. When they were not running their bagnios, bawds could be found plucking homeless girls from the streets and training them for prostitution. Depending on the kind of place the bawds ran, they would teach prospective nymphs how to speak to noblemen and dress in clothes suited to the customers’ tastes. Elizabeth Dennison in particular, who ran a high-class brothel from 1730 to 1760, was well known for “supplying the best ‘pieces’ in the Garden; [training and launching] upon society some of the most glamorous courtesans ever known.” Dennison’s ability to turn street girls into ladies resonates with George Bernard Shaw’s character Henry Higgins' aim to create a lady out of the poor Covent Garden flower girl Eliza Doolittle.

One of the most famous courtesans of the day was Betty Careless, who is remembered today for being emblematic of a prostitute’s lifestyle; enjoying great success for a time, becoming a bawd, and then dying penniless when her beauty faded. She established herself as a successful courtesan by the 1720s, popular enough that she was referenced in popular culture at the time. In a publication of Joe Miller’s Jests, an admirer tells her that her legs are so perfect that “they must be twins”, to which she replies: “Oh no sir, for I have had more than one or two in between them.”

She is most notably portrayed in Louis Peter Boitard’s picture, The Covent Garden Morning Frolic, in which she is depicted riding in a sedan chair, with her supposedly insane protector Captain “Mad Jack” Montague riding on top, and her personal lead boy “Little Cazey” (otherwise known as Laurence Casey) in the front.

Due to the theatres located there, Drury Lane was actually the locus of most prostitution on Covent Garden. Much of it started there. Print by Ernest George, looking towards the church of St Mary-le-Strand. 1884. Copyright Westminster City Archives

But for every Sally Sallisbury, Betty Careless and Mother Douglas (who, one after the other, achieved varying degrees of fame)there were dozens of prostitutes who would never become quite so famous. However, they would not be entirely obscured. For them, there was the “List of Covent Garden Ladies”. There is some confusion as to whether the publication was written by Jack Harris, head waiter at the Shakespeare Head Tavern, or Samuel Derrick, an Irish sailor who used 'Harris' as a pseudonym, but either way, the List was an abundantly-sold guide book of Covent Garden’s prostitutes. Printed every Christmas from 1760 to 1793, it detailed the appearance, sexual skills, and fees of around eighty prostitutes, reviewing them as one would a movie or a restaurant for the benefit of the everyday London rake. Eventually Harris was committed to Newgate prison for being “a common pimp and procurer of lewd women.” A similar publication to the List was released in the form of “The Covent Garden Magazine or Amorous Repository”, which was “calculated solely for the entertainment of the polite world and the Finishing of a Young Gentleman’s Education.”

Though the business could be said to be glamorous, prostitution was generally only resorted to because so many girls had no other choice. In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew discusses how numerous women took up the trade as a way to build funds to open up small businesses in the future. Sadly, a great many of these women would end up catching sexually-transmitted diseases, typically syphilis. Some hospitals specialized in treating these cases, but as there was no known cure for it at the time, many young women had to return to the streets where they unintentionally spread the disease further.

Prostitution hasn’t died out in Covent Garden, but its prevalence there can be estimated to have petered out around the end of the 18th century, likely giving way as the market itself grew greater and larger. Not since then has London seen so rich a culture of prostitution, with its low-class “flash mollishers”, theatre-dwelling “spells”, bagnio-owning “bawds”, and scores of “Covent Garden Nuns” (a synonym, predictably, for prostitutes).

There are no longer notorious figures like Betty Careless prominent in London society, or at least not quite so out-in-the-open, and any attempts at re-creating Harris’s prostitute guide book have been severely halted (someone did try). The culture, as with many things, is now just one more shade of London’s colourful past.