When Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz visited London in 1789, he estimated there were 30,000 ladies of pleasure living in the district of Marylebone alone (Archenholz, 1789).
In 1758, Saunders Welch, a Justice of the Peace for both the County of Middlesex and the City and Liberty of Westminster, published A Proposal to render effectual a Plan, To remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis and conservatively estimated there were some 3000 women who made their living selling sex in the capital. However, this did not stop people from having a damn good guess. Quantitative data analysis around sex work in the eighteenth century was far closer to what we could politely call ‘guess work’, than anything that would pass peer review today. The definition of each of these terms covered women selling sex to those who had sex outside of marriage, or lived with a man they were not married too so when number of whores are being recorded, it does not necessarily men someone who sold sex for a living. The eighteenth century lexicon did not include words such as ‘sex worker’, but rather used words such as whore, harlot, strumpet or lewd woman. Sex workers were, and still are, a marginalised, criminalised community and ran the risk of being publicly shamed, punished and even deported if identified subsequently, few people were open enough about selling sex to collect accurate data. One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” The simple truth is that we do not have accurate estimates for the numbers of sex workers in eighteenth-century Britain (or anywhere else) for several reasons.
We’ll start with that statistic “The year is 1763. So with all of that in mind, what is the ‘real’ history behind Harlots? Sex work is a highly complex experience and must not be reduced to sensationalised fictions that do nothing to capture the lives of the very people being depicted.
If you write a history of sex work and use ugly, shaming words like ‘prostitute’, or write from a perspective that assumes all sex workers were women, or were all unhappy, or doomed to a miserable existence, you are using history to reinforce ongoing stigmatised narratives around sex work. If we read history within the same stigmatised narratives that continue to damage sex workers who are alive today, we are complicit in harm. How we write about the history of sex workers matters because whilst the people whose lives are being examined may be long dead, the attitudes, prejudices and narratives that shaped that person’s life are resurrected whenever that story is told. So when we read a fiction as being historically factual, we need to ask at which end of the pushmepullyou are we? Did this really happen? And when we are dealing with the history of a socially marginalised and vulnerable community (in this case, sex workers), the history we believe becomes even more important as it exerts a palpable influence on current issues and debates. As Slavoj Žižek argued ‘as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency’ (Žižek, 2004). Whilst there may seem nothing wrong with exercising creative licence and spinning a good historical yarn, what we must remember is that stories are incredibly powerful things and whilst fiction is a story that doesn’t need facts, and history is a story that requires facts, stigma is another story made of the two. When fiction embeds itself within historical truth, we are left with a pushmepullyou of facts embellishing stories and vice-versa. That Harlots so clearly uses historical truth to embellish the show is what really piques my interest. Harlots tells a hell of a story, but there is more to consider here than a corseted dose of how’s your father in a sepia filter. But, I'm not here to tell you how much fun the show is (and it really is!) I'm here for the history. Harlots has gone beyond simply dusting off the tit crushing corsets and has deftly woven historical facts into the warp and weft of this bloomer dropping, gin swilling, cinematic trupenny upright, and I love it. Created by Alison Newman and Moira Buffini and directed by Coky Giedroyc, the eight-part drama follows the rising fortunes of London bawd, Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton) and her daughters, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Lucy (Eloise Smyth). One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” So opens ITV Encore’s latest period drama Harlots (Hulu in the US).
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