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

An 18th-century portrait of the palace most recognized as an official home of several British royal family members focuses on the Hanover family during the reigns of George I and II, describing the intrigue, ostentatious fashions and politicking that marked court life. By the author of Cavalier.

In Georgian London: Into the Streets, Lucy Inglis takes readers on a tour of London's most formative age - the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. Travel back to the Georgian years, a time that changed expectations of what life could be. Peek into the gilded drawing rooms of the aristocracy, walk down the quiet avenues of the new middle class, and crouch in the damp doorways of the poor. But watch your wallet - tourists make perfect prey for the thriving community of hawkers, prostitutes and scavengers. Visit the madhouses of Hackney, the workshops of Soho and the mean streets of Cheapside. Have a coffee in the city, check the stock exchange, and pop into St Paul's to see progress on the new dome. This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and artists to rent boys and hot air balloonists meeting dog-nappers and life-models along the way. It investigates the legacies they left us in architecture and art, science and society, and shows the making of the capital millions know and love today. 'Read and be amazed by a city you thought you knew' Jonathan Foyle, World Monuments Fund 'Jam-packed with unusual insights and facts. A great read from a talented new historian' Independent 'Pacy, superbly researched. The real sparkle lies in its relentless cavalcade of insightful anecdotes . . . There's much to treasure here' Londonist 'Inglis has a good ear for the outlandish, the farcical, the bizarre and the macabre. A wonderful popular history of Hanoverian London' London Historians

Georgian London evokes images of elegant mannered buildings, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife and houses of ill repute widespread in a sex trade that employed thousands. In London's Sinful Secret, Dan Cruickshank explores this erotic Georgian underworld and shows how it affected almost every aspect of life and culture in the city from the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone, to the squalid alleys around Charing Cross to the coffee houses, where prostitutes plied their trade, to the work of artists such as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Cruickshank uses memoirs, newspaper accounts and court records to create a surprisingly bawdy portrait of London at its most-mannered and, for the first time, exposes its secret, sinful underside. "A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters." - Kirkus Reviews

“The author has done an outstanding job of making the colorful Georgian world come alive in all its contradictory, bawdy, and utterly fascinating glory.” —Britain Express Could you successfully be a Georgian? Find yourself immersed in the pivotal world of Georgian England, exciting times to live in. Everything was booming—the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the nascent Empire—in an era inhabited by Mary Shelley, the Romantic poets, and their contemporaries. Find everything you need to know in order to survive as a time traveler from today, undetected among the ordinary people: how to dress, behave yourself in public, earn a living, and find somewhere to live. Just as importantly, you will be given advice on how to stay on the right side of the law, and how to avoid getting seriously ill. Monica Hall creatively evokes this bygone era, filling the pages of this book with all aspects of daily life within the period, calling upon diaries, illustrations, letters, poetry, prose, eighteenth century laws, and archives. This detailed account intimately explores the ever-changing lives of those who lived through Britain’s imperial prowess, the birth of modern capitalism, and the upheaval of the industrial revolution, major political reform, and class division. “A fantastic piece of social history that fills in a huge number of gaps in our knowledge. First class entertainment and educational at the same time!” —Books Monthly

Ebenezer Sibly was a quack doctor, plagiarist, and masonic ritualist in late eighteenth-century London; his brother Manoah was a respectable accountant and pastor who ministered to his congregation without pay for fifty years. Drawing on such sources as ratebooks and pollbooks, personal letters and published sermons, burial registers and horoscopes, Susan Sommers has woven together an engaging microhistory that offers useful revisions to existing scholarly accounts of brothers Ebenezer and Manoah, while locating the entire Sibly family in the esoteric byways of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A historian reveals the grittier side of Regency England, far from the country houses and costume balls of high society. Often upheld as a period of elegance with many achievements in the fine arts and architecture, the Regency era also encompassed a time of great social, political, and economic upheaval. In this insightful social history, the emphasis is on the lives of those not born into nobility—what it was like for the poor, and what challenges they faced. Using a wide range of sources, James Hobson shares the stories of real people. He explores corruption in government and elections, “bread or blood” rioting, the political discontent felt, and the revolutionaries involved. He explores attitudes to adultery and marriage, and the moral panic about homosexuality. Grave robbery is exposed, along with the sharp pinch of food scarcity, prison, and punishment. Venturing beyond the images we have from Jane Austen’s novels or costume-drama films, this book reveals a society where the popular hatred of the Prince Regent was widespread and where laws and new capitalist attitudes oppressed the poor—a society in the throes of change.

It is safe to say that selling sex constituted a significant, and visible, part of urban culture in Georgian England. Alongside the rise of the 'polite society' of Jane Austen's novels, the city of London, so described in 1758, had long been portrayed as a centre of vice and debauchery. In the shadows of the fashionable public parks and gardens, in alleyways along the banks of the Thames, even at church doors, there lurked a world of criminality and prostitution for which the bawdyhouse became one of the most potent symbols. The book will explore what is was like to run, work in, and frequent these establishments, which ranged from the filthy East End hovel to grand upmarket apartments. Through newspaper reports, criminal trials, political speeches and bawdy pamphlets and prints, it will also explore how they were perceived and, as the nineteenth century dawned, how the threat of disease and Victorian prudery meant that they were increasingly feared by the public and controlled by the legal system - and the 'happy hooker' firmly confined to the past.

'Like bawdy Shakespeare meets wild Wycherley filtered through the formalised camp of John Osborne's A Patriot for Me...how wonderful to see the rabid raw talent of Ravenhhill given the full works' Michael Coveney, Daily Mail It's London 1726, and Mrs Tull's got problems. The whores are giving her a hard time, a man in a dress is looking for a job, her husband has a roving eye and the apprentice boy keeps disappearing for 'a wander'. Meanwhile in 2001 a group of wealthy gay men are preparing for a raunchy party.Mother Clap's Molly House, a black comedy with songs is a celebration of the diversity of human sexualtiy, an exploration of our need to form families and a fascinatig insight into a hidden chapter in London's history.'Ravenhill's writing is tough, eloquent, sardonic, with some of the barbed formality of the Resotration style, which gets brutally peeled off in the present-day scenes. This is not a play you "enjoy". This is not a gay play either...The message of this play is not "Come out", but "Come in".' John Peter, Sunday Times.'Mark Ravenhill clearly likes to have it both ways. In this wonderfuly exuberant new musical play, he celebrates Sodom like there's no Gomorrah... Delicate souls may be offended but there is no doubting the sincerity of Ravenhill's assault on the tranformation of sex into a dirty business.' Michael Billington, Guardian'A theatrical manifesto for sexual tolerance that teeters wildly between the politics of Bertolt Brecht and the in-your-face deviancy of a gay nightclub... Ravenhill combines graphic sex with a generosity of spirit' Charles Spencer, Daily TelegraphMother Clap's Molly House premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London in October 2001.