Felicity George's Blog
November 15, 2023
My Inspiration for A Courtesan’s Worth: Sex Workers of Georgian Britain
The idea for my second Regency romance, A Courtesan’s Worth, arose from a long-time fascination with Georgian sex workers. The Georgian Era, which lasted from 1714 until 1837, was a bawdy time, much less strait-laced than their Victorian successors. The Georgians enjoyed ribald jokes, they produced erotica, both visual and written; this was the era of Tom Jones and Fanny Hill, of kings and princes who flaunted their mistresses, of the cult of the libertine, the rake, the ‘man about town’, the ‘buck of the first head’, the Corinthian. Sex was woven into literature, art, theatre, and poetry.
It is no wonder, then, that there should be a prominent and lively sex trade during this era, and that the trade would interest society in general, even those who didn’t partake. In fact, some historians estimate that one in five Georgian women were sex workers, from poverty-stricken streetwalkers to high-priced courtesans.
We can’t paint these women with a single brush, for their lives were far too varied. Some entered the profession by choice, some by necessity, and some had the profession thrust upon them. Some were happy in their work, others were miserable. Some prospered, at least for a time, but many, many suffered the ravages of disease, pregnancy, poverty, and violence, if not immediately, then ultimately. In a late eighteenth-century report, The Times wrote that five thousand prostitutes died annually in London. The profession was inherently risky, and it was not entered into lightly.
We have an amazing record of Georgian London prostitutes in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a poetic directory/catalogue of the sex workers of Covent Garden, published annually from 1757 until 1795, with about eight thousand copies distributed every year. If you’d like to read a selection of these entries, I highly recommend Hallie Rubenhold’s Harris’s List: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain. They are a delight!
Some prostitutes reached celebrity status in Georgian society. Betty Careless was one of a handful of 18th-century Covent Garden prostitutes who became so notorious that even the ladies of the haut ton followed their antics. Author Henry Fielding once saw her at the theatre, the picture of elegance & virtue – only days after seeing her at a bagnio (bathhouse) ‘in bed with a Rake, smoking Tobacco, drinking Punch swearing & cursing with all the Impudence of the lowest Trull of a Soldier’. She was evidently very beautiful, with a pair of stellar stems. When an admirer praised her legs’ symmetry by saying they must be twins, she replied: ‘Oh no sir, for I have had more than one or two between them’. Her beauty apparently drove men to madness – or so legend claimed – and the artist William Hogarth depicts her name scratched into a madhouse stairwell in ‘A Rake’s Progress’. As Betty aged, she tried her hand at brothel ownership. She was never as successful a bawd as she was a prostitute; ultimately, she died penniless but still famous at the age of thirty-five. Fielding himself wrote her an epitaph, declaring that Betty was known ‘by the gay Gentlemen of the Town, of whose Money she had been the Occasion (it is said) of spending upward of fifty thousand Pounds, tho’ at last reduced to receive Alms from the Paris; almost a certain Consequence attending Ladies in her unhappy Cast of Life’.
Fielding’s epitaph might strike us as moralistic and heavy-handed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that all Georgian women who engaged in the sex trade were victims, but the fact of the matter is, sex workers of the past did not have the choice of safe working conditions that some sex workers of today have. While rudimentary forms of birth control and venereal disease prevention existed, they were not highly effective. In a time in which all women had to take a gamble on life when they engaged in sexual relations because of the relatively high rate of death in childbirth, it is important, I think, to acknowledge and respect the risk that sex workers of the past took.
They left us great stories, but their lives were not easy.
It is no wonder, then, that there should be a prominent and lively sex trade during this era, and that the trade would interest society in general, even those who didn’t partake. In fact, some historians estimate that one in five Georgian women were sex workers, from poverty-stricken streetwalkers to high-priced courtesans.
We can’t paint these women with a single brush, for their lives were far too varied. Some entered the profession by choice, some by necessity, and some had the profession thrust upon them. Some were happy in their work, others were miserable. Some prospered, at least for a time, but many, many suffered the ravages of disease, pregnancy, poverty, and violence, if not immediately, then ultimately. In a late eighteenth-century report, The Times wrote that five thousand prostitutes died annually in London. The profession was inherently risky, and it was not entered into lightly.
We have an amazing record of Georgian London prostitutes in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a poetic directory/catalogue of the sex workers of Covent Garden, published annually from 1757 until 1795, with about eight thousand copies distributed every year. If you’d like to read a selection of these entries, I highly recommend Hallie Rubenhold’s Harris’s List: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain. They are a delight!
Some prostitutes reached celebrity status in Georgian society. Betty Careless was one of a handful of 18th-century Covent Garden prostitutes who became so notorious that even the ladies of the haut ton followed their antics. Author Henry Fielding once saw her at the theatre, the picture of elegance & virtue – only days after seeing her at a bagnio (bathhouse) ‘in bed with a Rake, smoking Tobacco, drinking Punch swearing & cursing with all the Impudence of the lowest Trull of a Soldier’. She was evidently very beautiful, with a pair of stellar stems. When an admirer praised her legs’ symmetry by saying they must be twins, she replied: ‘Oh no sir, for I have had more than one or two between them’. Her beauty apparently drove men to madness – or so legend claimed – and the artist William Hogarth depicts her name scratched into a madhouse stairwell in ‘A Rake’s Progress’. As Betty aged, she tried her hand at brothel ownership. She was never as successful a bawd as she was a prostitute; ultimately, she died penniless but still famous at the age of thirty-five. Fielding himself wrote her an epitaph, declaring that Betty was known ‘by the gay Gentlemen of the Town, of whose Money she had been the Occasion (it is said) of spending upward of fifty thousand Pounds, tho’ at last reduced to receive Alms from the Paris; almost a certain Consequence attending Ladies in her unhappy Cast of Life’.
Fielding’s epitaph might strike us as moralistic and heavy-handed, and I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that all Georgian women who engaged in the sex trade were victims, but the fact of the matter is, sex workers of the past did not have the choice of safe working conditions that some sex workers of today have. While rudimentary forms of birth control and venereal disease prevention existed, they were not highly effective. In a time in which all women had to take a gamble on life when they engaged in sexual relations because of the relatively high rate of death in childbirth, it is important, I think, to acknowledge and respect the risk that sex workers of the past took.
They left us great stories, but their lives were not easy.
