Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis

Julie Peakman, Reaktion Books, 2024, 352pps., £25

KEN BELL surveys sexual mores of yore

With Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis, Julie Peakman has given us an intimate portrayal of women’s sexual activity during the long eighteenth century, which ran from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to Waterloo in 1815. Peakman ends her long century in 1830, but I doubt if many readers will quibble at her fifteen-year addition, since many of the chapters that make up Libertine London are a fine introduction to the social history of the period, which aims to look at that magnificent yet squalid era through the eyes of the sex hustlers of the time.

Each type gets a chapter devoted to her, starting with the drabs who worked the streets to the bawds who managed the brothels, then up to the courtesans. Finally, the volume culminates with the royal mistresses who were at the pinnacle of the oldest profession.

By dividing these women up into categories, Peakman shines a light on the niche each one inhabited, as well as open up the broader society to the modern reader. The raddled street prostitutes inhabited a world of extreme poverty, as did tens of thousands of Londoners in those days. It was a world where a child could have his head crushed under the wheel of a cart and where street crime was so ubiquitous that even the link boys who carried a blazing torch and were hired to light the way often worked with street thugs who relieved the victims of their wealth.

Many women were actually semi-whores. “Milliners…were particularly known for their sideline in prostitution,” Peakman tells us – as indeed they were until well into the twentieth century. The actresses who trod the boards often supplemented their income with acting of a different kind, as did the girls who sold fruit and nuts at the theatres, which reminds this reader of the legend of Nell Gwynn who took the fancy of Charles II when she offered him an orange from her basket.  Of course, there was also the army of seasonal workers who brought in the crops, along with the milkmaids who sold their product on the streets. Peakman doesn’t mention the milkmaids who were seen by many as innocent country girls, ripe for the plucking, but who this writer suspects knew exactly what they were doing and the role they were expected to play.

Peakman does touch on that theme when she reminds us that brothels could charge extra for a guaranteed virgin and that many a whorehouse bed had a secret compartment with a cloth soaked in red juice that the highly experienced trollop could use to show to her client that she had indeed just been deflowered.

One chapter that jars as it is so unconnected to the rest of the volume is the one dealing with homosexualism during the period. The chapter presents upper class homosexuality between consenting adults as being the norm, and ignores the, frankly, odious nature of the abuse that went on between wealthy pederasts and young boys. When it comes to the rape of servant girls by their employers, Peakman gives us chapter and verse on matters such as the trial of Colonel Francis Charteris in 1730 on a charge of raping a maid. She concludes: “Sadly, as with most aristocratic men who had committed rape or other crimes, Charteris managed to wheedle his way out of the death penalty.” That is true, as he got a royal pardon, but he still had to pay his victim £30,000 and when he died in 1732 his coffin was covered in dead cats before the gravediggers could shovel the earth over it. Libertine London also gives us horrifying accounts of the rapes of young girls, many not even in their teens and discusses the ways in which wealthy, well-connected abusers escaped from what passed for justice in those days.

However, what it does not do is even consider the equally vile crimes committed by wealthy homosexuals against lower-class boys. Two cases spring to mind, and both were covered by the pamphleteers and newspapers of the day, but neither is mentioned by this authoress.

The first is so famous that from the date of the trial in 1772 right up to the Oscar Wilde scandal over a century later, it was debated and chewed over long after all the participants were dead. Captain Robert Jones of the Royal Artillery (he may have been a lieutenant, but is usually given the rank of captain) was convicted of the buggery of a boy of 12. His victim was Francis Henry Hay who spoke clearly and bravely at the trial and almost certainly helped the jury return a guilty verdict, whereupon Jones was sentenced to death. Perhaps needless to say, he was pardoned on condition that he left the country and never returned, and left to live his life in Florence, although it is possible that he never got further than Lyon.

Then we have the matter of General Sir Eyre Coote in 1815 who was involved with some boys at Christ’s Hospital school. This involved the giving and receiving of the birch and did not lead to a trial, but Coote was dismissed from the army. Throughout the nineteenth century, the fictional character of Rosa Coote was used by Victorian writers of pornography as a stock figure that was presented as either the general’s daughter or his niece. It is unlikely that this character would have been created had the readers not understood the reference to the general, even many years after the scandal.

It is impossible to believe that Julie Peakman did not know of these cases as people were writing about them for decades afterwards. Why she chose to ignore them is a matter for her, but it does leave this reviewer wondering why this carefully curated account of upper-class homosexuality was even included in a volume that aims to show the lives of women in the sex trade.

Julie Peakman’s argument as she expresses it is to show us the lives of those women who had transactional virtues by presenting them as the victims of “misogyny,” a word that was not even invented until this century and a concept that was as alien to the long eighteenth-century as it is to many of us in the twenty-first. This was a world of utter poverty for the many and fabulous wealth for the few. Women, being great survivors, have always been aware that they have a commodity in their own bodies and when times are bad they will rent out that commodity to ensure their survival. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the going rate for sex in Vienna was three cigarettes. That is not three cartons of cigarettes, or even three packs, but three individual cigarettes. A girl with three cigarettes could exchange them for three eggs, or three loaves of bread: she could survive another day in other words. It was this need to survive, rather than “the prevalence of men’s unabated lusts and the sexual vulnerability of women” that was at work in Libertine London. That said, this reader did find the conjuration of the spirit of Mary Whitehouse that is implicit in that sentence very entertaining.

One does not need to over think what was going on during this era, and in most of her individual chapters, Julie Peakman presents clear, thoroughly researched and well-written accounts of the lives of many London women. It was a time when men murdered and robbed, with many ending their days dancing the hempen jig at Tyburn Tree, and women survived by renting themselves out. It was a hard time to be poor, is the conclusion that this reviewer took away from Libertine London.