BOOK
The Secret History Of Georgian London
by Dan Cruickshank
Random House, £25
IN A NUTSHELL
The TV historian assesses how the wages of sin percolated through the London economy
REVIEW
TV's Dan Cruickshank is best known for his velvet-voiced appreciations of our urban landscapes and he ropes in his architectural know-how to help form the foundation of this major work.
But the subject of the book, subtitled How The Wages Of Sin Shaped The Capital, has all the hallmarks of a bedevilling lovely who caught his eye and lured him down an unexpected sidetrack.
It is as though, on a tea break, Cruickshank peered behind the elegant facades of Georgian London he so admires and alighted upon a world of immorality, duplicity and hypocrisy with all the down and dirty intrigue of a Hogarth etching.
Once there, behind the curtain, he finds that the sex industry, with all its brazen incontinence, tawdry hues and colourful characters, was a considerable economic and political force in the 18th century, with its influence spreading, like syphilis, to every echelon of society and every aspect of the culture - art, theatre, literature, architecture.
Cruickshank does not shirk from the seamier aspect of his challenge. He picks through the dirty laundry to pluck out tales of the moralists, the victims, the rakes and the harlots who peopled this wheeling, vivid capital of carnality.
Down wretched lanes of unspeakable deprivation he finds the artless lasses who came to London in search of work only to be betrayed by soulless crones and their predatory clientele. In the drawing rooms and bath houses, he alights upon flint-eyed ladies, who could turn a man's head and twitch his purse to elicit a fortune of their own.
Cruickshank paints a portrait of a capital ambivalent to the sexual tumult played out on its streets.
On one hand, high morality condemned the sin but saved the sinner, with homes for penitent prostitutes and help for their unfortunate offspring. On the other hand, the great and the good often saw women as little more than slaves to casual lust and attended Hell-Fire parties to express their libido in its full majesty.
Cruickshank explores all these aspects exhaustively and clinically but also with an eye to the amateur. For the nature of the subject and the manner of its study make this handsome book a welcome intersection between the very different circles of dry academia and wet-lipped soap opera prurience.
