Brothels

Both creators and products of sociability, brothels are slippery signifiers, easy to conflate with eighteenth-century coffeehouses, bagnios, taverns, and respectable homes in London and beyond. These sites of sex work, mostly aimed at a male clientele, provided spaces for sociability across gender and class lines, as well as fodder for debates about the public good, morals, and taste. While most paid sex acts typically took place in the streets or other outdoor spaces, the concept of the brothel loomed large as a place of gentlemanly whoring, female sexuality, and transgression. This entry includes an overview of 1) what we factually know about brothels and prostitution in eighteenth-century London and which gaps remain elusive for scholars today, 2) how a twenty-first-century audience can decode the wide-ranging vocabulary connected to 1700s sex work, 3) brothels outside of London, and 4) how the brothel acts as agent of sociality in print culture throughout the period. In an effort to balance modern terminology with that of the period, I use both the terms ‘sex work’ and ‘prostitution’ to refer to sexual exchanges where one party pays another.

Brothels in London

It is difficult to get a sense of how many brothels and sex workers were active during the long eighteenth century since period reports vary widely. Period writers consistently underline the sheer volume of prostitutes working in London, lamenting how men could barely walk certain streets without being overwhelmed by women propositioning them. A 1758 pamphlet by Jonas Hanway claims that in London ‘the number of prostitutes is so great in the evening, that we should doubt whether every woman we meet, is not of that stamp.’1 In the 1720s, Swiss traveler César de Saussure (1705-1783) was assured of there being over 40,000 active prostitutes in London alone.2 Mid-century estimates ranged from 20,000 to 40,000 sex workers; in the 1780s Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz claimed a total of 50,000 active prostitutes in London, with 30,000 in Marylebone parish (including 1,700 ‘reckoned to be house-keepers’ or ‘matrons’ running brothels there).3 Although street soliciting, keeping a brothel, and procuring were considered crimes, historical accounts broadly indicate that as many as one in five women in mid-century London engaged at some point in a kind of sex work.4

• 1. Jonas Hanway, Letter V. to Robert Dingley, Esq; Being a Proposal for the Relief and Employment of Friendless Girls and Repenting Prostitutes (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1758), p. 23.
• 2. Cesar de Saussure, Lettres et voyages de Monsr César de Saussure en Allemagne, en Hollande et en Angleterre, 1725-1729 (Lausanne: Chez G. Bridel, 1903), p. 197.
• 3. Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830 (New York: Longman, 1999), p. 178; Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England, 2 vols (London: Edward Jeffery, 1789), vol. ii, p. 89–90.
• 4. Dan Cruickshank, London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London’s Georgian Age (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), p. xi.

Geographically, London brothels are often linked to eighteenth-century Covent Garden, a commonly cited location for sex work at all price points, from 6 pence to multiple guineas. Beyond brothels—buildings where sex workers lived and plied their trade under the supervision of a keeper or bawd—this area was also famous for the availability of sex workers in its coffeehouses, bagnios, taverns, and streets. However, both brothels and less formal locations of sex work could be found across the entirety of the city, from Marylebone to Whitechapel. Many studies of sex work in eighteenth-century London since the 1990s demonstrate its ubiquity across the city along with the difficulty of identifying all the spaces where sex acts for money could take place. In addition to the brothels of Covent Garden and beyond, London’s public houses, disorderly houses (places of entertainment selling drinks where sex workers were present, but did not reside), lodging houses, and even private rooms were also sites of sex work. As Tony Henderson’s foundational research on prostitution in London from 1730 to 1830 demonstrates, most London sex workers did not actually work in brothels but solicited clients on the streets, then repaired to darkened corners of said streets, outdoor spaces, room rented by the hour in a bagnio or public house, or their own quarters (31, 193).

Prostitutes were not therefore geographically separated from the mass of the city’s population. Nor were they separated socially. They walked the same streets, drank at the same public houses and gin-shops, frequented the same parks, and in many cases lived in the same houses as Londoners of most, if not all, social classes. (Henderson 194)

London brothel keepers, or bawds, were typically women. Bawds such as Mother Elizabeth Needham (1680-1731) and Elizabeth Wisebourn (1653-c. 1720) kept exclusive brothels targeting rich clients and were blamed for entrapping younger women into prostitution. Wisebourn’s biography, published in 1721, offers an ‘true’ overview of her life sprinkled with political attacks, sexual encounters in her establishment, and examples of her business acumen.5 As the faces of their houses, bawds were often targeted in anti-prostitution discourse, yet amassed both fame and wealth through their establishments.

• 5. Anodyne Tanner, The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Vulgarly Call’d Mother Wybourn (London: A. Moore, 1721).
   

For example, Mrs. Goadby ran a stylish house in Berwick Street, Soho, modelled on the brothels she had studied on a visit to Paris. Aiming for a refined atmosphere, ‘She fitted up a house in an elegant stile; engaged some of the first-rate filles de joye in London; employed a surgeon to examine them as to their health, and to admit none that could in this respect be pronunced [sic] doubtful.’6 Goadby’s success continued for years, inspiring other famous brothel keepers and sex workers including Charlotte Hayes (c. 1725-1813). A letter to the editor reports Goadby as ‘laying In a stock of virgins for the ensuing season’ after visiting ‘most of the watering-places’ during the summer of 1773, which expectations to return ‘from her tour in a few days, with a numerous retinue’ to add to her Marlborough Street house with ‘extraordinary accommodations for gentlemen of all ages, sizes, tastes, and caprices.’7

• 6. Monk of the Order of St Francis, Nocturnal Revels, or the History of King’s-Place and Other Modern Nunneries, 2 vols. (1779), vol. 1, p. 29.
   
• 7. The Covent Garden Magazine Or the Amorous Repository: Calculated Solely for the Entertainment of the Polite World and the Finishing of a Young Gentleman’s Education (vol. 2, October 1773), p. 384.
   

Although high prices and luxury were often desired associations for London’s brothels, evidence points to a range of prices and accommodations for indoor sex workers. Directories and lists of sex workers, such as A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-Walkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women, and Others of The Linnen-Lifting Tribe… (1691) and the long-running annual Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (1757-1793), served to advertise locations, prices, and specialties of London prostitutes (although it can be unclear when the publications are satirizing or critiquing sex work practices of the period). The 1764 edition of Harris’s List includes information about brothels run by women in Bow Street and Long-Acre, as well as the range of prices charged by sex workers.8 Poll Johnson has a sliding scale system with prices ‘from ten shillings to five guineas, according to the pocket of her cull’ while several women charge one guinea (£1 1s or 21 shillings) all the way to Miss D-v-s, who “is never less than ten guineas” for a single night (102, 51, 61). By the Harris’s List 1793 edition most women with listed prices ask for at least one guinea, although others will only accept “a bank note,” making their minimum £10 for a night. To put these numbers into context, the buying power of a single guinea changes over the course of the eighteenth century but always equals at least 7 days of work for a skilled worker; a housemaid would expect to earn between £4 and £11 for the year.9

London brothels encouraged sociability across class, race, and gender lines. Both Old Bailey records and editions of Harris’s List record Black women performing sex work in brothels.10 In fact, one of London’s most famous Black sex workers, Harriott, opened her own establishment in St James in the early 1770s. Her clients included multiple peers of the realm, including the Earl of Sandwich, and politicians such as MP John Wilkes, who would never pay ‘with anything less than soft paper’ (i.e., banknotes) (Nocturnal Revels, vol. 2, 101-3). Molly houses, establishments that catered to men wanting to have sex with other men, often get classed as brothels but also were social clubs where men might gather to cross-dress, drink, and watch performances. Since penetrative sexual acts between men were legally punishable by death, the Old Bailey proceedings have been a key archival source for modern researchers wanting to better understand molly house culture.11

• 8. Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: Or, New Atalantis for the Year 1764 (London: H. Ranger, 1764), p. 11, 53, 118.
   
• 9. Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2017), p. 133–35.
   
• 10. Nicole N. Aljoe and Savita Maharaj, ‘The “Black-Birds” of St Giles: Rethinking Place and Community in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson (eds.), Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (Bloomsbury, 2024), p. 38.
   
• 11. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); ‘Gay Communities | The Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, accessed 25 March 2025, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/gay.
   

Decoding Eighteenth-Century Sex Work Terms

According to de Saussure, many coffeehouses or chocolate houses in 1720s London were actually ‘temples of Venus’ recognizable by having ‘a woman’s arm or hand holding a coffee-pot’ as a sign.12 Keeping track of the terms used for sex workers, brothels, and even sexual acts remains a challenge for anyone today attempting to understand the realities and prevalence of eighteenth-century sex work. For example, brothels were often referred to as ‘nunneries,’ their keepers as ‘abbesses’, and their workers as ‘nuns.’ Venereal disease was ‘clap,’ ‘fire,’ ‘Covent Garden ague,’ ‘pox,’ ‘Drury Lane ague,’ or ‘Venus’s curse.’ Even the word ‘conversation’ can denote sexual activity, and ‘commodity’ or ‘case’ is slang for vagina, giving even the most innocuous texts potential to contain coded sexual meanings.13

• 12. Cesar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, trans. Madame Van Muyden (London: J. Murray, 1902), p. 164–65.
   
• 13. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785).

Discussions of venereal diseases often were encoded through the language of gift-exchange, as men complained of getting a ‘present’ or ‘curse’ they did not ask for. Brothels frequently emphasized measures taken to ensure the health of their sex workers—and thus clients—from regular exams to having contraceptives made available. Sex workers faced ongoing threats of syphilis and other venereal diseases, along with pregnancy, which they attempted to combat through contraception methods such as condoms and sponges, sexual techniques, and often dodgy medical treatments. Guides such as Harris’s List often mention prostitutes’ supposed health status, counseling men away from brothels known to have infected workers. Youth and virginity were particularly prized in sex workers because these women were considered less likely to have transmittable infections and thus ‘clean.’14

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• 14. Sara Fernandes, ‘An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-Skin Contact in Eighteenth-Century London’, Medical History (vol. 63, no. 4 , October 2019), p. 494–511, https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2019.46; Lena Olsson, ‘Idealized and Realistic Portrayals of Prostitution in John Cleland´s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, in Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (eds.), Launching Fanny Hill : Essays on the Novel and Its Influence (New York: AMS Press, 2003), p. 81–101.

Brothels outside of London

Most historical analysis of brothels and sex work in this period has focused on major urban centers (London, Paris, Amsterdam). However, Marion Pluskota’s Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Ports compares the port cities of Bristol and Nantes, finding that brothels with a controlling supervisor were less common that individual workers, though both could be found across both cities.15 Margaret Leeson (c. 1742-1797), also known as Peg Plunkett, ‘kept a flourishing brothel in Dublin where she entertained most of the elite men of Dublin’s high society,’ later writing her own memoirs to get herself out of debtor’s prison.16 As with London, the actual number of prostitutes working in Dublin remains unknown, although records do show arrests of brothel keepers throughout the 1700s and concentrated effort by police in the last decades to shut down bawdy houses.17 Legislation made streetwalking illegal, but left open a loophole for those working in brothels, which was not explicitly against the law. In the 1790s Dublin saw a series of riots driven by ‘the public’s frustration with the police and magistracy’ for giving brothels and bawdy houses too much leniency (Fleming 13).

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• 15. Marion Pluskota, Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Ports (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 149.
   
• 16. Julie Peakman, Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 82; Margaret Leeson, Memoirs of Mrs. Margaret Leeson. Written by Herself, 3 vols. (Dublin: printed for the authoress, 1795).
   
• 17. David Fleming, ‘Public Attitudes to Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History (vol. 32, 2005), p. 8–11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24338937.
   

Brothels in print and visual culture

Brothels loom large in period discussions and representations of sex work, despite evidence that independent streetwalkers were much more common than prostitutes working in brothels. William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1731) series opens with Moll’s arrival in London, where Mother Needham greets her, suggesting Moll being tricked into sex work at Needham’s exclusive Park Place, St James brothel.

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The six images depict interiors for Moll’s rise as mistress to wealthy merchant and then descent into cheap lodgings, prison, and finally death, but features no brothels.18 Hogarth’s later Marriage A-la-Mode (1743) sets the earl’s death in the interior of Turk’s Head Bagnio, an actual brothel in Covent Garden. Since brothels were often unmarked, being able to recognize a space as a brothel today often requires the inclusion of a deliberate sign or allusion by the artist. Images such as this flagellation scene from the 1740s highlights the ambiguity of these spaces, as the British Museum’s own description explains the setting might be ‘in a bedroom in a brothel, or possible a girls' school.’

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Literary depictions of brothels span the century, highlighting its function as scene of female relationships and sexual connection. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) follows Fanny Hill through multiple brothels to create its ‘pornotopia’ of idealized sex work. Instead of disease, violence, unwanted pregnancy, exploitation, and other hazards of prostitution, ‘in the elite bawdy house of Mrs. Cole, clients cheerfully pay their bills, profits stay high, and enjoyable labor merits not just comfort but luxury’ as Fanny and the other women ply their trade.19 Less idealized brothels appear in works such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-1748), William Dodd’s The Sisters (1754), the anonymous The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, as Supposed to Be Related by Themselves (1760), and Sophia Watson’s Memoirs of the Seraglio of the Bashaw of Merryland (1768). The recent television series Harlots (2017-2019), based in part on Hallie Rubenbold’s research into Harris’s List and historical figures, also gives insight into eighteenth-century brothel life.

• 18. Charlotte Grant, ‘Visible Prostitutes: Mandeville, Hogarth and “A Harlot’s Progress”’, in Ann Marie Lewis and Markman Ellis (eds.), Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), p. 99–113; Sophie Carter, Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
   
• 19. Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 123; Markman Ellis and Ann Lewis, ‘Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture’, in Lewis and Ellis (eds.), Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), p. 10. For Steven Marcus’s concept of ‘pornotopia’ vis-à-vis Cleland’s novel, see Leo Braudy, ‘Fanny Hill and Materialism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies (vol. 4, no. 1, 1970), p. 38, https://doi.org/10.2307/2737611.
   

Many pamphlets or supposedly ‘true’ biographies of sex workers laud brothels as educational institutions. In the introduction to Authentick Memoirs of the Life Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), Charles Walker extolls how prostitutes ‘Tame’ young men and prepare them for ‘the dull Solemnity of Marriage,’ favorably comparing prostitutes to the ‘wisest Law-givers, Princes, and States in all Ages.’20 W. Rider, another contributor to this crowd-sourced biography, explains how he met Salisbury at Mother Wisebourn’s ‘university’ where ‘I had been too assiduous a Student’ (92). This type of didactic framing continues across other texts, presenting brothels as spaces to educate men on how to successfully perform sexual intercourse, not be cheated or lose all their money, and avoid getting sexually transmitted infections. Brothels were also places for women to learn key lessons such as how to manage money and clients, who to trust, or even how to fake virginity.21

The ubiquity of brothels in print media echoes the geographical and social prevalence of these social spaces. While it is not surprising to find sex work on the pages of erotically focused monthly periodicals such as Covent Garden Magazine (1772-1775) and The Bon Ton Magazine (1791-1795), prostitutes and bawds also appeared in daily newspapers alongside other society blind items and general news of the day. Of course, much printed about brothels did not come directly from sex workers themselves but was written about them, often without their permission. After the publication of The Juvenile Adventures of Miss Kitty Fisher in 1759, an anonymously authored, picaresque account of the sex worker’s life (supposedly translated from Spanish), the following advertisement appeared in The Public Advertiser on 24 March 1759:

• 20. Charles Walker, Authentick Memoirs of the Life Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (London: s.n., 1723), p. 5.
• 21. Corrinne Harol, ‘Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela’s Virtue’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction (vol. 16, no. 2, 2004), p. 197–216, https://doi.org/10.1353/ecf.2004.0030.
   

She has been abused in public papers, exposed in print-shops, and to wind up the whole, some wretches, mean, ignorant and venal, would impose upon the public, by daring to pretend to publish her Memoirs. She hopes to prevent the success of their endeavours, by thus publicly declaring that nothing of that sort has the slightest foundation in truth. C. Fisher

Whether or not this advertisement was placed by Catherine Maria “Kitty” Fisher (1741-1767), one of the most famous sex workers of the period, is impossible to ever know. Yet it underlines a central challenge today in understanding the social realities of eighteenth-century sex work and brothels in particular: with so little historical record directly coming from sex workers themselves, and the sources that exploited their stories and fame as the main avenues for information, where can a foundation for truth ever be found? In other words, despite knowing the truth claims made by texts to be suspect, we find ourselves turning to them to help keep this history alive.