Rubenhold’s edition starts out with an informative and interesting introduction which puts the List into its historical context.  Harris’s List was not written by a man named Harris at all, but by an Irish poet named Samuel Derrick who had fallen on hard times and needed to find a way to keep himself out of debtor’s prison.  Jack Harris was a notorious London pimp who allowed Derrick the use of his influential name and his extensive list of contacts in return for a one time fee, and so he only became bitter while Derrick became increasingly wealthy.

The entries on each girl provide a surprising amount of detail, and they are often miniature character studies rather than just bawdy adverts promising pleasures.  Obviously there is physical description and a summary of which particular tastes a girl caters to along with her prices (as a rule, the more specialised the tastes, the higher the price) but there are also details such as how she came into ‘the public life‘ as the List euphemistically terms it.  In some cases, the writer expresses sympathy for a girl who has been led astray by a man and is forced to turn to this particular line of work, as in the case of Miss Char-ton:

This is an old observation, but certainly a true one, that some of the finest women in England are those, who go under the denomination of ladies of easy virtue.  Miss C- is a particular instance of the assertion; she came of reputable parents, bred delicately, and her education far superior to the vulgar; yet the address of a designing villain, too soon found means to ruin her; forsaken by friends, pursued by shame and necessity; she had no other alternative, than to turn -, let the reader guess what.  – She was long a favourite among the great, but some misconduct of hers, not to be accounted for, reduced to the servile and detestable state of turning common.  She is a fine figure, tall and genteel, has a fair round face, with a faint tinge of that bloom she once possessed, is rather melancholy, ’till inspired with a glass, and then is very entertaining company.  (pp. 56-57)

In others, girls appear to bring about their own falls through their lusty natures and to thoroughly enjoy doing so, like Miss Jo-es:

This lady was born in the country, but the circumstances of her parents, when she was sufficiently grown up, obliged them to send her into London to get a livelihood, she was not long before she got a place in St. James’s Market, where, whither, by being accustomed to see the poor lambs bleed, or rather a desire of becoming a sacrifice to the goddess of love, is left for the reader to judge, but she was shortly found stabbed to the heart in the most tender and susceptible part of her body, in short she was unable to withstand the powerful impulse of nature any longer, so was ravished with her own consent, at the age of sixteen; her mistress on the discovery, thought proper to send her going, for fear her good man should take it in his head to kill the lamb over again.  She began now to show the bent of her inclinations, she listed under the banners of Cupid, and marched at the head, being of a courageous disposition, and always ready to obey standing orders, she had great success, and often made the enemy to yield, by which means she gained no inconsiderable share of spoil, but her charitable disposition, (being always ready to relieve the naked and needy) soon reduced her. (pp. 69-70)

As you can see, this book contains euphemisms a-plenty.  At times it felt like reading one of Shakespeare’s dirtier plays, the amount of veiled references to sex, body parts, prostitutes and plenty of less orthodox sex acts there were.  As a social and cultural historian this must be a fascinating book to examine.

However, it might not come as a shock to learn that I am not a jolly Georgian gentleman out looking for a good time, and so consequently a lot of these descriptions started to blur into one after a while.  They were interesting, and the book itself is fascinating because of what it is, but there were just too many of them without anything to break them up for it to be a riveting read.  In the final section of the book which looks at excerpts from outside 1793 the girls are grouped together by type (red heads, foreign beauties, buxom etc.) and I think I might have enjoyed it more had the whole book been arranged like this with some sort of commentary from the author accompanying each section.  I know Rubenhold has written two other books on the subject: The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List and The Harlot’s Handbook, both of which sound as though they are more along those lines, using the List as a means of illustrating a point rather than as the raison d’etre of the book.  I’ll definitely be on the lookout for these as this has proven to be an unexpectedly fascinating topic.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain by Hallie Rubenhold.  Published by Tempus, 2005, pp. 158.  First edition.

As anyone who has seen the recent BBC adaptation of the book will know (I haven’t, for the record), The Crimson Petal and the White tells the story of Sugar, a girl forced into prostitution by her mother the famed brothel keeper Mrs Castaway.  Well-read and highly intelligent, Sugar spends her spare time writing a vicious novel in which her protagonist gleefully tortures and murders the men with whom she has sex.  Her life changes when she attracts the attentions of William Rackham, the heir to the Rackham Perfumeries fortune who refuses to take an interest in the business until the desire to possess Sugar as his own means that he needs to make money in order to set her up as his mistress.  As Sugar becomes totally dependent on William, she also becomes more and more involved in all aspects of his life, from his business to his child-like wife Agnes, to his young daughter Sophie.

The novel opens with this passage, which instantly draws the reader in:

Watch your step.  Keep your wits about you; you will need them.  This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before.  You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged.  The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.

When I first caught your eye and you decided to come with me, you were probably thinking you would simply arrive and make yourself at home.  Now that you’re actually here, the air is bitterly cold, and you find yourself being led along in complete darkness, stumbling on uneven ground, recognising nothing.  Looking left and right, blinking against an icy wind, you realise you have entered an unknown street full of unlit houses and unknown people.  (p. 3)

The voice is powerful, cynical, intelligent and utterly absorbing.  It acknowledges the problems that quite a lot of readers have with present tense narratives then brushes them aside as unimportant, which is perhaps why I was less bothered by it than I usually am.  It is an atmospheric and compelling beginning and the rest of the novel easily lives up to the high expectations that this creates.

Faber is not only brilliant at setting scenes and giving the writing a real period feel, he is also a master of characterisation; although the story may seem a little like the seedy underbelly of a Dickens’ novel, the characters who people if could not be further from Dickens’ enjoyable but often one dimensional charicatures.  Faber makes his characters all so distinct with totally different voices and, frequently, some strange quirk which allows them to transcend the stereotype of their role within the book.  Sugar, for example, has a skin disease, yet she is still desired by the men of London because it is rumoured that she will do anything.  This is not because she is desperate, but because when the reader meets her she genuinely does not seem to care what happens to her outer self as long as she is able to preserve the inner self who writes and plots and schemes.  Mrs Castaway is set apart by her peculiar collection of pictures of Mary Magdalen, which she pastes into scrapbooks.  Sophie has a perfect childhood logic and solemnity which just leap off the page.

The most fascinating character for me was Agnes, William Rackham’s wife.  Never have I read more convincingly written madness.  It has its own internal logic which makes it seem completely understandable, even as the reader knows that Agnes is mad.  Her attempts to seek solace in the Convent of Health and her abiding, if somewhat off-kilter, Catholic faith are touching as they show how deeply unhappy and unsettled she is in her current life.  Her horror and frantic desperation to escape the life she leads, which does not improve after Rackham regains his fortune, are so well drawn that they feel almost tangible.  Her madness is interspersed with periods of complete lucidity, when she is possibly even more unhappy, which make her all the more compelling.  The way that the reader discovers Agnes along with Sugar through reading her hidden diaries is a clever stroke and helps to bind the reader into their complicity which will become so important.

Given the subject matter of The Crimson Petal and the White and other reviews and comments that I’d read about the sex in the book, I was surprised at how restrained I found it.  Although there is a fair amount of sex which is described in detail, it feels clinical and matter of fact rather than graphic and titilating, and it is never gratuitous.  Because Sugar and her fellows see nothing unusual or even particularly exciting about the acts that they perform, they come across as rather mundane and this, conversely and rather brilliantly, makes them even more disturbing than if they were luridly detailed encounters designed to be erotic.  It is all the more sordid because it is presented as being so normal.

All in all, this is a fabulously written book which evokes the Victorian era through a series of unique characters who fascinate and repel in equal measure.  I’m definitely in the market for a copy of The Apple, a collection of stories which fills in some more details of Sugar’s story and follows some of the lesser characters.  I only hope it is anywhere near as good as this book.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber.  Published by Harcourt, 2002, pp. 838.  Originally published in 2002.