After reading this book, I am quite grateful to have been at the time and place that I was! Though young Henrietta is fictional, I have no doubt that there were many kernels of truth in her experience. Henrietta was raised by an aristocratic family, told that she was the orphaned daughter of the ...
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies was a bestseller of the 18th century, selling 250,000 copies in an age before mass consumerism. An annual "guide book," it detailed the names and "specialities" of the capital’s prostitutes. During its heyday, 1757–1795, Harris’s List was the essential access...
The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of Samuel Derrick, Jack Harris, and Charlotte Hayes, whose complicated and colorful lives were brought together by the publication of Harris' List, an infamous guidebook of prostitutes which detailed addresses, physical characteristics and "specialties." T...
In 1775, a shallow young baronet married an eighteen year old lady with far more money than looks or learning. They lived tolerably well together for a few years, until at last Lady Seymour Dorothy Fleming Worsley ran away with their mutual friend, Maurice Bisset. The lovers hoped Sir Richard Wor...
It began in a pile of paper: letters with strong sentiments scratched into them, pages of inky philosophy addressed to newspapers and journals. As it picked up momentum it whirled around the houses of London’s authorities, Justice John Fielding and Saunders Welch, the High Constable of Holborn. I...