Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #601 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

Review
Fascinating ... Cruickshank removes the bland façade 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

About the Author
Dan Cruickshank is an architectural historian and television presenter. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Executive Committee of the Georgian Group, and on the Architectural Panel of the National Trust. His recent work includes the television programmes and accompanying books Around the World in 80 Treasures (2005) and Dan Cruickshank's Adventures in Architecture (2008). He lives in Spitalfields, London.

Customer Reviews

The truth about 18th century London finally revealed.
Dan Cruickshank really gets under the skin of the true eighteenth-century in this wonderful volume which follows similar approaches to the other key book on eighteenth-century Britain: Derek Jarrett's England in the Age of Hogarth. As I read his wonderfully shaped text, I couldn't stop thinking about the monologue speech delivered by the character Sarah Millwood - the impressive angry feminist heroine of George Lillo's hit play The London Merchant (1731) - on stages across Westminster and England throughout the eighteenth century.

It's about time, frankly, that a historian as esteemed as Cruickshank has(since Jarrett) finally tried to view
London in the 18th century through the same eyes of William Hogarth. Unfortunately, the tendency of conservative English historians to regard this period through the eyes of the monarchy and their abusive aristocrat friends wearing ridiculous wigs, frilly lace handkerchiefs and carrying snuff boxes still persists. London at this time really was not the way it is too often presented by bad BBC period dramas.

Thankfully Cruickshank takes a drastically different approach. As we read we feel like he might be writing about aspects of our own lives. Words like "sentimentality" (which normally dominate books about this period) barely appear here. The shocking and tough working lives of those most poverty stricken citizens of London including its prostitutes confront us with vigour, together with the shameful abuses of their masters. The women who worked as prostitutes and who gave up so much for the benefit of our city today have in this volume now found a monument they deserve as some of our most poverty stricken heroines.

I would have preferred it if Cruickshank had used the term "the Long Eighteenth-Century" instead of "Georgian London". This loathsome habit of historians naming whole periods of British history after the redundant names of useless, lazy and (as in the case of George III) completely mad monarchs is embarrassing for the majority of British citizens and does little to market excellent books like this one to the Americans. (It also leads to the omission of monarchs who contributed a great deal to England's development of democracy, like Queen Anne.) Mark Howell

Georgian London
I love the history of London having read just about everything pubished. This comes very near the to the best I have read. Informative and extremely entertaining, Dan Cruikshank is a great writer equal to Liza Picard in my view when it comes to historical London.