The Whore Next Door: William Blake’s Neighbours in South Molton Street.

I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear

In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets.

William Blake, Jerusalem (E 180)

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In September 1803, after an absence of three years in the coastal village of Felpham in Sussex, William and Catherine Blake returned to London. Initially they lodged with William's brother and sister, James and Catherine Elizabeth Blake, at 28 Broad Street, later Broadwick Street, Carnaby Market. Less than a month later, William and Catherine moved into a two-room flat on the first floor of 17 South Molton Street, off Oxford Street. During their 17 years of residence there, the Blakes printed and coloured their most ambitious illuminated books.

The house was shared with their landlords, successively the tailor William Enoch (c 1803-4) and his family, and the staymaker Mark Martin (c 1805-21), his wife Eleanor and their family. There were presumably other lodgers on the upper floors.

In 1958 the Westminster voters’ list records the following persons as resident at 17 South Molton Street: Ida Golz, Anthony S. Gotlop, Frank Holland, Leah Laden, Minnie Sandground, and Stanley V. Sandground. I believe at this time the residents occupied cold-water flats on the upper floors, with commercial premises on the ground floor and basement.

By 1965 the sole resident remaining, at least as shown on the electoral register, was Anthony S. Gotlop. (Anthony Saul Gotlop was born 21 Nov 1928 in Hendon. From South Molton Street, Mr Gotlop moved to Nether Street, Finchley, where he died, aged 88, on 24 Oct 2016.)

Subsequently 17 South Molton Street changed largely to commercial use but with an otherwise unidentified prostitute occupying the top floor. It was she who installed the shower.

Following Reed International’s acquisition of a fifty-year sub-lease of the property, usage became completely commercial but with some upper floors left vacant, enabling Tim Heath to gain a toehold for the Blake Society (initially on the first floor).

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There is, it seems, a long history of sex-workers in South Molton Street.

Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, published from 1760 to 1795, was a directory of the more up-market prostitutes then working in Georgian London. Each annual edition usually contained no more than 150 pages on which are printed the details (addresses of course, but also the physical appearance and sexual specialities) of between 120 and 190 prostitutes then working in and about Covent Garden. A small pocketbook, it sold for two shillings and sixpence. A contemporary report of 1791 estimates its circulation at about 8,000 copies annually.

Harris's List was published for a city rife with prostitution, an undeniable feature of life in eighteenth-century London; its conspicuousness was frequently commented on by both foreign and domestic visitors alike. William Blake's friend John Gabriel Stedman noted in his diary in August 1795: “Met 300 whores in the Strand”. The Scottish statistician and magistrate Patrick Colquhoun estimated in 1806 that of Greater London's approximately 1,000,000 citizens, perhaps 50,000 women, across all walks of life, were engaged in some form of prostitution. Perhaps responding to the moral panic of the time, Colquhoun’s estimate is a gross exaggeration. The real figure was probably never more than 6,000 or 7,000 individuals.

In 1795 the Proclamation Society, created several years earlier to help enforce King George III's proclamation against “loose and licentious Prints, Books, and Publications, dispersing Poison to the minds of the Young and Unwary”, and “to Punish the Publishers and Vendors thereof”, brought those involved in the publication of Harris's List to be fined and imprisoned. After these trials, the list was no longer issued. Only seven editions of Harris’s List currently appear in the English Short-Title Catalogue (1761, 1773, 1774, 1788–90, and 1793), but at least seventeen, as well as one edition of the spurious Harris's List Newly Revised published by John Sudbury, can be located in public collections in Europe and the United States. No copies survive of the 1760 first edition.

Early editions stick closely to the Covent Garden area of its title. Only in 1788 do prostitutes located further afield, such as in the fashionable and expensive South Molton Street, make their appearance. We can now read of

Miss G--rge at a Grocer's Shop, South Moulton-street. [The British Library copy (P.C.22.a.12-15) adds a handwritten “no. 39”.]

Hast thou beheld a fresher, sweeter nymph,

Such war of white and red upon her cheeks,

What stars do spangle, Heaven, with so much beauty,

As those two eyes become that Heav'nly face.

    At the tempting luscious age of nineteen, this lovely girl presents us with a face well worth the attention of the naturalist; She is of a fine fair complexion, with light brown hair, which waves in many a graceful ringlet, has good teeth, and her tell-tale dark eyes, speak indeed, the tender language of love, and beam unutterable softness; she is tall of stature; and of the most tempting en bon point; plump breasts, which in whiteness surpass the driven snow, and melt the most snowy of mankind to rapture. Her name she borrows from a gentleman, who, some little time ago, possessed her (as he thought) entirely for some time, but finding himself mistaken, and tired with the cornuted burthen on his brows, he left her about six months ago, to seek support in this grand mart of pleasure; and as she has been remarkably successful, and still remains a favourite piece for the enjoyment of her charms, and the conversational intercourse, with a temper remarkably good, for a whole night she expects five pounds five shillings. (Harris's List for 1788, pages 41-42.)

Then in Harris’s List for 1789:

Page 46

Miss Maria Sp-nc-r, No.59, South Moulton Street.

Page 54

Miss Ch-rl--n, No. 59, South Moulton Street, Grosvenor Square.

Page 63-64

Mrs. S-lt-r, No. 15, South Moulton Street.

If still there in 1803, Mrs. S-lt-r would have been the Blakes' next-door neighbour. Her account reads as follows:

If lovely youth, with potent wine inspir’d,

Whose blood is fond and generously fir’d;

Must have a wanton, sprightly, youthful wench;

In equal floods of love his flame to quench;

One that will hold him in her clasping arms,

And in that circle all his spirits charms;

That with new motion, and unpractis’d art,

Will raise his soul, and reinsnare his heart.

    Let him visit the agreeable Mrs. S—r, who received her infant training in the West of England, where she learned the art of cap-making, &c. Her pride and wantonness lost her the affections of her parents, and they readily consented o her leaving the country; and in Cranbourn Alley, round the experienced female circle, she soon learned how best to dispose of her maiden treasure. A young surgeon was the happy man, he lived with her till every purse was drained; after him a certain foreigner of particular note, and now she trades the independent lass, always agreeable, chatty, lively, and entertaining, with charming eyes, fair complexion, and tho’ little in every respect, she possesses a mouth that will swallow the largest morsel, and loins that she is ever ready to bet a couple of guineas, will heave up the heaviest burden. (Harris’s List for 1789, pages 63-64.)

 

(Harris's List 1793, frontispiece and engraved title-page. Click on the image to enlarge.)

And finally, in Harris's List for 1793

Page 22-23

Miss Br—ley, No. 61, South Moulton-street.

Page 30-31

Miss Gronmos—d, No. 59, South-Moulton-street.

Page 43-44

Miss Wa—s, No. 60, South Moulton-street.

Page 49-50

Mrs. G——ge, No. 13, South Moulton-street.

 

(Harris's List 1793, pages 49-50.)

Could this last be the same Miss G—rge formerly at No. 39 but now two doors away from the Blakes? Her account reads as follows.

This lady has not been in business long; she surrendered her citadel to a captain of the navy, who in his attack upon her, united the seaman with the lover, and the ingenuity of the one won her heart as much as the passion of the other. As a specimen of his epistolary method of corresponding with her, we shall subjoin a part of one of his letters to her, which runs exactly thus; he tells her that he had often thought to reveal to her the tempests if his heart by word of mouth, to scale the walls of her affection, but terrified with the strength of her fortifications, he had concluded to make more regular approaches, to attack her at farther distance, and to try what a bombardment of letters would do, whether those carcases of love thrown into the sconces of her eyes, would break into the midst of her breast, beat down the out-guard of her aversion and indifference, and blow up the magazine of her cruelty, that she might be brought to terms of capitulation; which indeed she soon was, and upon reasonable terms. The captain was with her but a short time, being obliged to repair to his station; and after his departure, she was kept by one in the army, who was obliged to give way to the more powerful solicitations of one of greater force. She is just thirty, pretty and amorous, has a charming lively eye and a handsome mouth; she is rather short but very delicately made, a charming colour which seems to be natural, is finely diffused over her cheeks, and sets her face off to great advantage, and she has fine brown hair, is good temper’d, and very free and merry.

    She drives a very handsome curricle, and is in keeping by a Mr. C-----ns. (Harris’s List for 1793, pages 49-50.)

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Thanks to Harris's List, the whore next door now has a name and a story.

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce

And dost not know the Garment from the Man

Every Harlot was a Virgin once

Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan

William Blake, For The Sexes THE GATES OF PARADISE (E 269)

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In the 1789 edition, these short erotic narratives, microbiographies of named women otherwise lost to history, are preceded by a pointed political justification.

It is not only in the purlieus of Covent-Garden that prostitutes are to be found. They flourish in courts, in senates, in halls of justice, in fleets and armies; nor is the sacred porch secure from the approach. Is the soft, the gentle minion of love, so great a prostitute, as him who, beneath a scarlet robe, and the dignity of lordships, conceals a mind fraught with corruption? Is not the minister of state who sacrifices his country's honour to his private interest; the admiral whom venality teaches to avoid the reflects of an enemy; or the general, whom gold allures from the path of conquest, more guilty than her? These are the real prostitutes that defile streams of public virtue, and taint a nation's glory.

And today, in 2023, what has changed? Our government is now squalid and corrupt on a scale inconceivable in the eighteenth century.

The First Fleet of convicts deported to Australia sailed from England on 13 May 1787 and arrived at Botany Bay eight months later, on 18 January 1788. The Rwanda Deportation Scheme (announced 13 April 2022), is a policy whereby people identified as being illegal immigrants or asylum seekers will be deported to Rwanda.

Prison hulks were decommissioned ships extensively used in England as floating prisons in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, HMS Ceres was a prison hulk on the Thames at Woolwich from 1787 to 1797. In April 2023, the Government of the United Kingdom announced plans to use the Bibby Stockholm barge to house asylum seekers at Portland Port in Dorset.

The Beast & the Whore rule without controls

William Blake, Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson, Bishop of Landaff. (E 611)

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Sources and further reading

Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger.—“The Garment and the Man: Masculine Desire in ‘Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies,’ 1764–1793”.—Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol.11, no. 3 (2002), 357–394

David Erdman.—Blake: Prophet against Empire: a poets’ interpretation of the history of his own times.—3rd ed.—Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
    See page 291 for the extracts from Stedman’s Journal.

Janet Ing Freeman.—“Jack Harris and 'Honest Ranger': The Publication and Prosecution of Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies, 1760–95”.—The Library, 7th ser., vol. 13, (2012), 423–456.
    With a census of the surviving editions.

Harris's list of Covent-Garden ladies: or, man of pleasure's kalender, for the year, 1788. Containing the histories and some curious anecdotes of the most celebrated ladies now on the town, or in keeping, and also many of their keepers.—London : printed for H. Ranger, (formerly at No. 23, Fleet-Street,) at No. 9, Little Bridges-Street, near Drury-Lane Play-House Where may be had, The seperate Lists of many preceding Years, [1788]..—x,[1],14-146p. ; 12°.—ESTC Number T187027

Harris’s list of Covent-Garden ladies: or, man of pleasure’s calendar, for the year 1789. Containing the histories and some curious anecdotes of the most celebrated ladies now on the town, or in Keeping, and also many of their keepers.—Printed for H. Ranger, (formerly at No. 23, Fleet Street,) at No. 9, Little Bridges-Street, near Drury-Lane, Play-House. Where may be had, The separate Lists if many preceding Years, [1789].—[3],vi-x,133,[1]p. ; 12°.—ESTC Number T187063.

Harris's list of Covent-Garden ladies Or man of pleasure's kalender for the year 1793. Containing the histories and some curious anecdotes of the most celebrated ladies now on the town, or in keeping, and also many of their keepers.—London : printed for H. Ranger (formerly at No. 23. Fleet Street.) at No. 9 Little Bridges Street, near Drury Lane Play House. Where may be had The separate lists of many preceding Years, [1793].—[2],viii,124p.,plate ; 12°.—ESTC Number T187066.

Hallie Rubenhold.—The Covent Garden Ladies.—Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2005.

    Identifies Samuel Derrick (1724–1769) an Irish hack writer, as the original author of Harris's List.

Hallie Rubenhold.—Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies.—Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2005.

    Reprints the 1793 edition.

Angus Whitehead.—“'I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear': Reconstructing William and Catherine Blake's residence and studio at 17 South Molton Street, Oxford Street”.—The British Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 (2010/11), 62-75.

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