The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital - Hardcover

Cruickshank, Dan

3.85

310 ratings by Goodreads

9781847945372: The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847945376 ISBN 13: 9781847945372

Publisher: Random House Books, 2009

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Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings and fine art, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife, houses of ill repute widespread, and many tens of thousands of people dependent in some way or other on the wages of sin. The sex industry was, in fact, a very powerful force indeed, and in The Secret History of Georgian London, Dan Cruickshank compellingly shows how it came to affect almost every aspect of life and culture in the capital. His approach is an ambitiously wide-ranging one. He examines the nature of the sex trade and the sort of people who became involved in it. He looks at the ways in which it shaped the building of Georgian London, from the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone to the squalid alleys around Charing Cross, and from the coffee houses where many prostitutes operated to the popular bathhouses, or bagnios, now known to us often only from fleeting references and tantalising archaeological remains. He examines the impact of prostitution on the arts and, in particular, on such artists as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. And he discusses the very varied attitudes of contemporaries – those who sympathised (the writer Richard Steele, for example), those who indulged (including the notorious Sir Francis Dashwood), and those who condemned (not least Saunders Welch, author of A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of This Metropolis). Finally, he draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts and court records to give us vivid portraits of some of the women who became involved in the world of prostitution. As Dan Cruickshank powerfully argues, these women, and many thousands like them, shaped eighteenth-century London, and they also helped determine its future development.

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Review:

Fascinating ... Cruickshank removes the bland fa�ade to expose one of London's biggest and most lively industries - its trade in sex ... a lively and scholarly panorama of Georgian London before the sex trade was chased underground by the Victorians and we all became prudish instead --Daily Mail

This is a colossal melting pot of a book: ambitious, rigorously researched, vigorously narrated and marvellously illustrated. All of life is here, but not as we know it --Sunday Times

Dan Cruickshank enters this world with relish ... the book's capaciousness and breadth is tremendous, providing much to fascinate, provoke and inform --Country Life

From the Publisher:

One of our leading historians describes how Georgian London was shaped by the sex industry

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