Harris’s List
Bawdy books and pamphlets had been around since the Restoration. Five issues of the ‘Wandering Whore’ had been published between 1660 and 1661, and ‘A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks & Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-Friends, Kind Women and Other of the Linnen-Lifting Tribe’ was published in 1691.
However ‘Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies’, an annual directory of prostitutes working in London published from 1757 to 1795, was a Georgian bestseller. A small guide book, it was printed and published each year at Christmas and sold for two shillings and sixpence. Incredibly, a report from 1791 estimates that Harris’s List sold at least 8,000 copies a year! It would appear that this little book was essential reading for gentlemen visiting London for pleasure.
Read the full article, from Historic UK.
The 1764 edition of “Harris’s List,” in the collection of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, has been digitized in its entirety and is available to browse here: https://hdl.handle.net/10079/digcoll/2783496
