Review of In Bed With The Georgians, by Mike Rendell, pub. Pen & Sword 2016

I’ve already reviewed Mike Rendell’s more recent Georgian Harlots and Whores here, and you will not be surprised to learn that this covers some of the same ground, but it is far more wide-ranging. Georgian Harlots concentrated, as its title implies, on the ladies at the top of the Georgian sex trade and how they exploited their celebrity. The subtitle of this volume is “Sex, Scandal and Satire in the 18th Century” and it focuses not only on the racy ladies but on various more or less immoral Georgian gentlemen – a word fairly inappropriate to some of them, like Lord Baltimore, rapist and kidnapper, Field-Marshal Earl Ligonier, notorious paedophile, and Colonel Charteris, fraud and serial rapist with, as Rendell tartly remarks, no redeeming features that anyone could see. These appalling excuses for men relied on their birth and money to save them from the law, which it did, but they were ruined in society and often had to seek refuge abroad, which was largely due to the fearlessness of the Georgian press.

The role of the press, in fact, produces some of this book’s most fascinating moments. On the one hand, the laws against libel, particularly seditious libel, were more stringent than now – it was not, as it now is, a defence to prove that what you had written was true, hence you could be imprisoned for calling the Prince Regent a fat debauched spendthrift, which he undeniably was. Yet these vicious laws in no way appear to have dampened either the propensity for muck-raking or the sheer courage of Georgian journalists and cartoonists. The elegant savagery of Gillray’s cartoons (there are several here, for the volume is lavishly illustrated in colour), and the obituaries of royal personages printed in respectable papers, eg the Spectator on William IV: “His late Majesty, though at times a jovial and, for a king, an honest, man, was a weak, ignorant, commonplace sort of person” or the Times on George IV; “there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king”, would lead one to wonder why our own press is usually so much more mealy-mouthed when it comes to the great and supposedly good, reserving most of their savagery for those less able to hit back.

This book deals with the whole of the sex trade, from high-end courtesans like the ladies of Georgian Harlots to the virtual prisoners in brothels, hapless, exploited and often alarmingly young, for even though the age of consent was then only 12, many Georgian men still seem to have preferred their partners younger. It’s a moot point whether these women, who at least had some assurance of food and a bed, were worse off than the freelance street-walkers known as “threepenny stand-ups”. Except at the top, there was little romantic about the trade, and it is unsurprising that the women involved in it so often took to drink or drugs to palliate their existence. Talking of which, I might take issue with Rendell’s evident dislike of the “moralising” in Hogarth’s prints. Yes, maybe they are preachy, and sometimes too obviously so. But Hogarth may have been hoping to reach not just an educated audience but one that needed “messages” spelled out, and anyway he was a good egg, pouring money into Captain Coram’s Foundling Hospital to rescue the sort of infants the kindly captain had been appalled to see discarded on London’s rubbish heaps.

The illustrations in this book, and the background to them given in the text, are one of its best features. Another is Rendell’s ability to unearth the sort of odd fascinating facts that enliven any narrative and stick in the memory. I knew about molly houses, but jelly houses? These were not in themselves houses of assignation, but cafes where one might assess possible partners for later (pick-up joints, as it were) and yes, one did also eat jelly there. I may never connect that comestible with children’s parties again…