All posts tagged: prostitution

Georgian Secrets

Click on the video below to hear Dan Cruickshank talking about his latest book, The Secrets of Georgian London. As Frances Wilson succinctly put it in her Times review: “Eighteenth-century London contained more prostitutes than anywhere else in Europe. In this fascinating account of sex and the Georgian city, Dan Cruickshank suggests that one woman in five was involved in some way with the sex industry.” There are many other jaw-dropping secrets of the Georgian underworld uncovered in this highly readable, but clearly meticulously researched book. Yet what stops it becoming a catalogue of humanity’s seemingly endless appetite for exploitation of its own kind is Cruickshank’s unmistakable sympathy for the women who became ensnared in the sex trade. For a lucky few, it could be a passport to a life of luxury, but for the vast majority the trajectory was the downwards one described in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress.

11. ‘Gonged on Missy’

‘You always suppose you’re the heroine in the story of your life; the day you discover you’re the monster, it’s apt to come as a surprise’ Dol McQueen, ‘flash-girl’, 1862 Chris Hannan‘s dazzlingly accomplished first novel, Missy , is published today in the UK (in the US, it comes out in June from FSG). I met Chris last week at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh to talk about making the transition from writing plays to writing novels, how he created the voice of a young American prostitute in a silver-rush boom-town, and how aspects of his own life fed into what seems at first the least autobiographical of first novels. The ‘missy’ of the title by the way is not a character in the book, but the liquid opium to which its narrator, Dol McQueen, is addicted. Dol McQueen is one of the “flash-girls” who forsake the fleshpots of San Francisco to ply their trade in Nevada’s Virginia City, where men are rumored to be newly rich and ripe for plucking. …