Published from 1757 to 1795, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies is generally attributed to the
pen of Jack Harris, the self-proclaimed “Pimp General of All England;” when
Harris found himself in Newgate prison for debt, he arranged for publication to
continue through the authorship of an Irish poet, then living in London, called
Samuel Derrick.
Produced annually, as a pocketbook directory of prostitutes
working in London,
the 1789 edition introduces its list of available courtesans by describing the sexual impulse as an existential
response of human nature. The author
says:
In the succession of natural things, their progress, and their decay,
individuals seem, like atoms in the sunbeams, of little moment, in the
great scale of Providence. The preservation of the species in general
appears to engross the whole scope and attention of nature; she is
eternally busy in supplying the place of particulars that fall under
the
hand of time, and by a kind of plastic renown reviving in a blooming
offspring the departed fire; and if you trace her through all the
various
motions in her wide extent, she will be every where found to tend to
one great act of love…
Amongst the more than one hundred listings provided, readers
will find, the
imperious and haughty
Miss Thomas of
No.28 Frith Street,
whose dedication to the motto, “Days of ease and nights of pleasure,” demanded
the same lewdness in all her clients that she, herself, possessed; the multilingual
and musical Mrs Russel of Bolton street, who engrossed a man’s attention fully
and would not offer her own attention for less than five guineas; Miss Smith of
Rathbone Place, “so well
proportioned, she might be styled symmetry’s truest self,” was never available
when her favourite, the coach-maker’s son, was about; and Miss Maria Spencer of
South Moulton Street, whose wicked
black eyes spoke “the language of her mind.”
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