The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold – 5⭐

I’m going to be perfectly honest and say I knew absolutely nothing about the Harris List before I started this. I’d read Rubenhold’s, The Five: The Lives of Jack the Ripper’s Women, a few years ago, and it was outstanding, so I added this book to my list without reading the synopsis.

This was an eye opening read, I’m always interested in learning about 18th and 19th century London, it was a grim time in London’s history, and the gap between rich and poor really made it even more horrifying. Add to that the prevalent misogyny of the time and you have this hideous list.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published from 1760 to 1794, was an annual directory of prostitutes then working in Georgian London. A small pocketbook, it was printed and published in Covent Garden, and sold for two shillings and sixpence. A contemporary report of 1791 estimates its circulation at about 8,000 copies annually.

Each edition contains entries describing the physical appearance and sexual specialities of about 120–190 prostitutes who worked in and around Covent Garden. Through their erotic prose, the list’s entries review some of these women in lurid detail. While most compliment their subjects, some are critical of bad habits, and a few women are even treated as pariahs, perhaps having fallen out of favour with the list’s authors, who are never revealed.

So the very notion of someone creating a list like this is awful, most especially because of the children listed in it, but the fact is, it does exist and by it doing so it gives us a unique insight into this time period, and to the lives of those who lived in it.

I do think it’s important to recognise that this period of time was very much about doing whatever needed to be done in order to survive, so it’s probably unfair to paint Jack Harris (Covent Garden pimp) and Samuel Derrick (Grub Street hack) as villains, but well, they were. They were of course just trying to survive the times and that’s mostly accepted for the time, but sitting in 2025 and reading about these men, they were absolutely the bad guys. Samuel Derrick wasn’t as vile as Jack Harris but both were pretty terrible human beings. There were no stories of Derrick intentionally compromising women like Harris but I don’t doubt he caused the downfall of more than one woman during his lifetime.

Charlotte Hayes (brothel keeper) is less straight forward for me, and yes, the reason it’s less straight forward is because she was a woman, and not just a woman born into late 18th century London under the normal circumstances of the day, but born the daughter of a sex worker and brought up to be a sex worker. I’m not naïve enough to think that she was kind to her girls, I’m sure she was much like any madam of the day and just as cruel as what her mother was, but I find it harder to see her as a villain. Just like all the women and children who appeared on the Harris List, I see her as a survivor. She just played the game better than most, even better than some men and it’s hard not to give her some credit for that.

The problem of course is the circumstances of how a lot of these women and children became sex workers. A huge amount of it was out and out sex trafficking and the likes of Harris had a main role in how they ended up where they ended up, but what were the alternatives for these women and children? The truth is, a lot of the time, finding themselves in a house the likes of which Charlotte Hayes ran, was a best case scenario. They may have been beholden to their pimps and madams and forced to give away most of what they earned but they had at least some illusion of safety and were being looked after as well as can be expected in this period of time. That was a depressing sentence to type!

There were of course positive outcomes for a minority of these girls, some did find themselves wealthy benefactors who ‘rescued’ them from the life of sex work, but given how men of that time viewed women (not that it has changed a huge about with some kinds of men in 2025) I do wonder if they ever really got a happy ever after. I really hope that the majority of them did. Now I am being naïve.

As I said, grim!!

Like The Five, Rubenhold’s narrative around life in London during this period is compelling and wonderfully researched. She is a powerhouse in this space and I can’t wait to read more from her. She makes it interesting while also informing us on a very difficult subject, in what I thought was a very respectful way. I listened to the audiobook which had an updated prologue where she talks about how far we’ve come in how we talk about sex workers in just the 15 years between the original publication of this book in 2005, and the updated version in 2020.

One of the most shocking things in this book was the actual list itself though. No amount of prose could really prepare you for how these women and children were portrayed in the Harris List. What kept running through my head was horses. They were listed like they were horses. Although I suspect horses at that time might have been shown a bit more respect.

As loathsome as the idea of this list is though, there is no denying how important it is as a way of learning about how sex work was viewed during this time period and how the patriarchy was used to keep women and girls in a place that suited the men of the day. Rich men in particular. Men used them for sex and other men profited from them. Some did escape for a better life but it was at the behest of men, most did not. There was physical and emotional trauma that I don’t think can ever be quantified and it was all in the name of survival.

We have absolutely come a long way when it comes to women’s rights but the patriarchy is still upholding a lot of the same misogyny from this time period. We have advanced as a society a hell of a lot but it’s so important to remember that these things happened and this is how women were once treated. Is it likely that this kind of thing could happen again? Probably not, but I would never rule out the diminishment of women’s rights as a way to control women, and if that happened women become property again and who knows where that could lead.

Am I catastrophising? One hundred precent!

In this day and age can you blame me though?