Any sensitive souls shocked by recent allegations of peccadillos by the current mayor of London might like to consider the case of the 17th-century MP Sir Charles Sedley, who once attracted a crowd of more than a thousand when he appeared naked on the balcony of a notorious London brothel, "acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined", before dunking his honourable member in a glass of wine and then drinking the king's health. As with so many similar anecdotes collected by Catharine Arnold in her fascinating and colourful history of sexuality in London, our present-day public scandals seem rather tame by comparison.
Arnold has previously written two acclaimed volumes in the same series, Bedlam and Necropolis, digging up nuggets of forgotten history on how London has treated its mad and its dead respectively. City of Sin is given an extra frisson by the recent revelation that the author, now a respectable academic and Nottingham city councillor, once worked as an upmarket escort in the capital to ease financial difficulties after she graduated from Cambridge.
Post-Belle de Jour, this revelation seems far less spicy than it might once have done, but it does add an interesting dimension to Arnold's book, in that a history of London as locus for the pleasures of the flesh is largely a history of prostitution. Sex and commerce have been intimately entwined in the capital since the earliest accounts, and this thorough, chronological tour of London's demimonde from the Romans to the present shows that while fashions in public morals may come and go, human nature remains reassuringly predictable when it comes to sexual adventures.
Arnold has aimed for a balanced picture, but despite the few smart women who – as mistresses, prostitutes or madames – had the acumen to carve out a successful career and secure their own fortunes, it's hard to avoid the fact that the sex trade has been overwhelmingly one of exploitation, where young girls (and boys) are drawn in through desperation or false promises and cast aside when they become diseased or their looks tarnished. In the heyday of the 18th-century brothels in Covent Garden, enterprising bawds such as Mother Needham would send scouts to pick out country girls newly arrived on the stagecoach, hoping to find work as seamstresses or ladies' maids. The predictable fate of these girls is sharply illustrated in Hogarth's series A Harlot's Progress, in which the hapless Moll Hackabout, based on a real woman, is briefly elevated by her profession but dies prematurely, ravaged by the marks of syphilis.
Mother Needham seems to have been typically hard of both head and heart, charging her girls for clothes so that they entered her brothel already in debt, and throwing them out on the street when they were past their earning prime. The parallels with present-day trafficking seem depressingly clear, but Arnold leaves her readers to make the connection.
Though she refers to her own experience as a sex worker only obliquely, it obviously informs her wish to present the profession in a more positive light, and to make clear that not all women who work in the sex industry are oppressed victims; throughout history, from Nell Gwyn to Belle de Jour, there have been those who have taken what they wanted from it, remained in control and made a handsome profit. But this quite reasonable aim leads her, as she brings her history into the present day, to a curious ambivalence about the reality of trafficking. "Many commentators believe that there are also victims among the hard-working working girls," she writes, as if this belief is not necessarily supported by evidence.
She quotes an investigative report by the Guardian from October 2009 which claimed that the scale of sex trafficking had been vastly exaggerated by politicians and the media, and that a six-month-long nationwide police investigation had failed to convict a single person of forcing anyone into prostitution. This article (by Nick Davies) was countered at the time by a number of writers, including one former sex worker who had been trafficked, but Arnold makes no mention of these rebuttals, nor of the basic fact that firm statistical data for trafficked women and children in the UK is extremely difficult to ascertain, just as it is for, say, domestic violence. She does quote campaigner Niki Adams, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, as saying that there should be a greater focus on women who have gone into prostitution voluntarily, but only because they feel they have no other means of earning a living or supporting their children. This is a valid point, but Arnold chooses not to consider whether the likes of Belle de Jour (whom she describes as "glamorous") have helped to make prostitution seem a more acceptable choice for contemporary women, and whether this is really something to be celebrated.
City of Sin is not solely concerned with prostitution; in other chapters Arnold delves into the history of pornography, the changing faces of gay London, and the ways in which Londoners of more outlandish and exotic tastes have catered for their unusual desires over the centuries. She has gathered a wealth of artistic and literary references, some of which are reproduced as illustrations, adding to the impression that the reader has opened a cabinet of curiosities: often titillating, sometimes shocking, frequently entertaining. She writes for the most part with indulgent sympathy for our human foibles, and avoids judging the past by contemporary moral standards. Ultimately, the book is a lively affirmation of sexual desire in all its varieties. She ends with Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress", an exhortation to enjoy the bodies we have before their inevitable demise.
