Hallie Rubenhold (2005 [2012, 2020]) The Covent Garden Ladies.

Sex sells. It’s older than Adam and Eve. Whisper it, before the internet, people had sex and were even naked together, sometime even at the same time, in the same room, without a phone. Hallie Rubenhold has turned a Ph.D. into an international bestselling book of non-fiction (which we used to call factual) based on a list of prostitutes that sold their bodies around the Covent Garden region of London.

Her parameters of study were centred on a List, much like the List Jeffrey Epstein carried of fellow travellers, such as the current American President, the moron’s moron Trump and former Presidents and fellow rapists, such as President Bill Clinton.

But Rubehold’s list was in the public domain. Initially, published by an Irish writer, poet and womaniser, Samuel Derrick in 1757. It continued being reprinted and bowdlerised, degenerating into a wank rag for the middle and upper classes who could afford it until near the beginning of the nineteenth century and sold about 250 000 copies.

Had John Logie Baird invented television, it would have been serialised and a BBC documentary would have breech birthed and fronted by that rough-voiced blonde Lucy Worsley and the programme labelled Harlots (which I’ll now watch).

The list in its various formats contained around 3000 names. John Harrison, who used a pseudonym of Jack Harrison, the Pimp Master General, who initially operated from the Shakespeare’s Head Tavern in Covent Garden, sampled the wares, and helped compile the list.

Location, location, location. The Shakespeare’s Head was near both the Covent Garden Theatre and Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. This brought the best and worst of London under one roof. Patrons of the Arts, artists and actresses, writers and whores.  Harrison’s dad had been a publican that had gone bankrupt. His advice to his son was ‘study men’s passions’. To graduate, ‘ply them’. This he did to make himself rich, and a known figure in the service industry. The product he sold was women.

As a bridge between poet and procurer, Rubbenhold follows the progress of Charlotte Hayes, a noted beauty, who burned through her admirers and ended bankrupt in Fleet’s debtor prison, but who rose again with the help of another bankrupt, the rakish Irish gambler, Dennis Kelly. She would always be regarded as a whoremistress in polite society, but he could be friends with royalty and have aristocratic friends. Wealth could give them aristocratic connections, but it couldn’t raise them up to respectability.  

In Marxist terms, those that owned the land owned the people on the land. Similarly, Charlotte Hayes owned the women’s bodies she sold to rich men. She too had been sold to the highest bidder by her mother. A girl’s maidenhead was a much sought-after commodity. It could only be sold once. When a serving girl’s annual income was around £6 per annum (often less) a girl’s virginity with the right connections could be sold for hundreds.  Multiple times. Fake news existed then too.

For the aristocracy, it was a guarantor that the girl wouldn’t have syphilis or venereal disease. That was worth paying the premium.

For those that had syphilis, the ‘cure’ of mercury could lead to a loss of teeth and hair and death, which it often did after remission.

A ‘cure’ without mercury and other highly toxic substances was believed to be taking the maidenhead of a virgin.

Shagging a wee girl. I’m not sure what Marx says about that. Rubenhold suggests entrapment of wee girls and young women was part of the business model of successful dealers. Some girls on the list weren’t yet pubescent. Factor in girls nowadays mature to adolescence earlier. Making an honest living out of yourself is one thing, raping and creating a toxic mix of alcoholism, pregnancy, abortions and all the factors we now associate with negative mental health, well, that’s pretty much standard. But as Rubenhold suggests, aristocratic men—most men, in general—worked from an assumption of superiority and entitlement. They don’t want to know. When a lower-class girl was deflowered, she was a whore, gagging for it.

Sound familiar? We don’t want to know. My mate, Gordy, saves up every year and flies to Thailand for a month or more. A couple of hundred years ago, he’d have gone to Covent Garden or, more recently, one of the many massage parlours in Edinburgh, Glasgow or most large cities. Everything is online. More and more middle-class doctors, lawyers, businessmen get that knock on the door for viewing child porn. The List, and our excuses, is endless.  Read on.

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