Wandering over Covent Garden Piazza at any time of day - Hogarth's engraving above is entitled 'morning' - you'd be likely to encounter a fair number of young ladies at a loose end: as James Boswell described them in his London journals "the civil nymph... who will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling."
Then as now, the profession was divided into grades of respectability and was priced accordingly, from the 'tuppeny uprights' against the wall offered by gin-sodden trulls to the guineas charged by those who worked from home, and whose addresses were numbered in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies.
'Harris's List' was born when an impoverished hack named Sam Derrick paid Jack Harris, self-styled 'Pimp-General-of-All-England', for the use of his name. Under this pseudonym Derrick compiled a guidebook to London's baser pleasures between 1757 and 1795. Like all the best stocking-fillers or toilet books, it was released annually each Christmas.
A representative entry from the 1793 volume includes:
Mifs B--lford, Titchfield-street
The British fair to manly hearts inclin'd,
Their passions open and their souls unbind,
'Tis nature prompts, what harm can be in this,
To give and take from each the balmy kiss.
This child of love looks very well when drest. She is rather subject to fits, alias counterfeits, very partial to a Pantomime Player at Covent Garden Theatre. She may be about nineteen, very genteel, with a beautiful neck and chest, and most elegantly moulded breasts, her eyes are wonderfully piercing and expressive. She is always lively, merry, and cheerful, and will give you such convincing proofs of her attachment to love's game, that if you leave one guinea behind, you will certainly be tempted to renew your visits.
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