You Could Look It Up (31 page)

Jack Harris (real name John Harrison), the “Pimp General of All England,” was a waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head tavern in Covent Garden, and although he held a respectable position as a justice of the peace, he was also a “procurer of lewd women for bawdy purposes.” Harris apparently lent this modified form of his name—willingly or not—to Samuel Derrick, an Irish poet who was apparently responsible for at least the early editions, perhaps with his mistress.
16
Together they produced an eminently practical guide to London’s strumpets, trulls, and doxies, along with useful information on their fees and the special services they would provide to those with sufficient funds.

There were sixteenth-century directories of prostitutes, such as the
Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia
(
Tariffs of Venetian Prostitutes
, 1535), and in the eighteenth century, English taverns typically kept handwritten lists of local prostitutes—just one of the services they provided to their customers. Prostitution was illegal, of course, but both the author and the users would have taken comfort in the fact that there was little organized law enforcement to do anything about it. And so the old guides were transformed into a new annual compendium on erotic gratification. The world depicted by
Harris’s List
is one of hypercharged masculine sexual desire. As critic Elizabeth Denlinger puts it in one of the best accounts of the book, “What do men want? … [
Harris’s List
says] that men want whores; that men want to read about whores; that men want to read about themselves successfully visiting whores.”
17

The earliest extant edition is from 1761, but an edition was advertised in April 1760, and there may have been a few before that. Annual publication was “timed to the Christmas season, when London was at its
most crowded.”
18
The 1761 edition contains 113 women in the main series, with 53 more tacked on in an appendix, and over the course of the
List
’s long history, the volumes were typically under 150 pages, covering somewhere between 120 and 190 prostitutes. It is possible that, at least in some of the later volumes, women paid to be included in the list—craigslist
avant la lettre
.
19

The book was supposedly published by one H. Ranger, operating near Temple Bar on Fleet Street. But
ranger
was a term at the time for a womanizer, and the name is almost certainly a pseudonym. The early books seem to have actually been produced by a disreputable publisher named Joseph Burd. The prostitutes’ names were technically concealed, but one need not have been a profound cryptographer to determine that “Miss L–w–s” is Miss Lewis, or “Mrs. H–m–lt–n” is Mrs. Hamilton. For each, the reader got a description of her appearance, an account of her prices, and a résumé of her particular charms: one prostitute was known for her “kisses fierce and fervent”; another “will
grasp
the
pointed weapon
with genuine female fortitude.” Leering wordplay is common, sometimes verging on the pornographic. As Denlinger explains, the
descriptions “combined appeals to the imagination of the sedentary reader and directions to the male walker of the streets … names, addresses, and prices all point to their practical use, while the lush descriptions of women also function as soft-core pornography.”
20
Not all the entries, though, were complimentary, as this one from 1773 shows:

Mrs. F–wl–r. To be found at C–rt–r’s Bagnio, Bow-street.

“A Gorgon face, and serpent tongue.”

This lady excels any we have mentioned—in ugliness. Her person coarse, her features the same, pock-marked, rude and uncouth in her behaviour; her skin we cannot say any thing about, as we are no judge of painting; and, notwithstanding, she is always well dressed: she married the son of a butcher in Bedford-street, whom she inveigled, and would have sent to the gallows, but, to his parents comfort, his death saved them from much sorrow.

She possesses every thing, in our opinion, that is disgustful; drinks, takes snuff, and swears like a trooper. She kept not long since a bawdy-house, and from that laudable profession turned out again. She is about 36, and the sooner we put an end to her character the better, as it is disagreeable to write, and we are sure must be so to read any more about her.

Sales of the book were brisk. One visitor to London said
Harris’s List
sold eight thousand copies a year, though that seems unlikely. Even so, several volumes seem to have gone into second editions, and advertisements point out that copies sometimes sold so quickly as to become scarce. Of the thirty-six or so editions from 1760 to 1795, only seven appear in the standard bibliography of the period, and ten more have been tracked down in private collections.
21
This means roughly half the presumed editions are not known to exist anywhere, and most of the others are extremely scarce: a single copy survives of the 1761 edition, two of 1764, two of 1765, one of 1766, and none from 1767 through 1770.

Harris’s List
came to an ignominious ending in spring 1794, when the publishers were busted for releasing a certain “wicked, nasty, filthy,
bawdy, and obscene” title.
22
They were victims of a new commitment to virtue. George III had issued a proclamation in 1787 “for the encouragement of piety and virtue,” and the authorities responded by cracking down on both prostitution and pornography. In 1795, one of the
List
’s publishers was sent to Newgate prison for a year and ordered to post £150 security for three years.

Sex manuals gained a new prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the late nineteenth century, human sexuality began to be the subject of scientific rather than strictly moralistic inquiry. One of the most important results was
Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie
(1886), by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. It was one of the first modern, scientific surveys of sexual practice, though Krafft-Ebing still worried about appealing to the wrong crowd. “In order that unqualified persons should not become readers,” he wrote, “the author saw himself compelled to choose a title understood only by the learned, and also, where possible, to express himself in
terminis techinicis
. It seemed necessary also to give particularly revolting portions in Latin rather than in German.”
23

By the middle of the twentieth century, sex research was beginning to attract attention among the larger public. Books like
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, broke new ground by bringing a feminist concern with women’s health to the encyclopedia format. It was part of a movement in the 1970s that brought sex advice to the respectable middle-class world, above all with Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking
(1972). Comfort was an amazingly versatile writer. His first book,
The Silver River
, an account of his South Atlantic travels, appeared before he was eighteen, and three years later he published his first novel,
No Such Liberty
, while he was a student at Cambridge University. He got his bachelor’s degree in 1943 and his M.A. in 1945, before earning a Ph.D. at the University of London in 1949. A year after taking his doctorate he published the anarchist tract
Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State
, as well as his first book on the subject for which he would be remembered,
Sexual Behaviour in Society
. From
there it was on to the Royal College of Physicians and London Hospital, where he qualified in medicine and specialized in gerontology. That was the subject of a learned book,
The Biology of Senescence
, 1956, a subject he revisited for a popular audience in 1964 in
The Process of Aging
.

In
The Joy of Sex
, the author’s name is rendered more respectable by the author’s credentials—“Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D.”—on the cover, a modern version of the attribution to the eminently respectable Aristotle. Comfort’s title echoed
The Joy of Cooking
, one of the most popular American cookbooks since its first publication in 1936. And the subtitle, with its promise of
cordon bleu
–style sex, no doubt cashed in on the craze for gourmet cooking that had swept America starting with Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
(1961). Newly sophisticated palates, no longer content with tuna casseroles and Spam sandwiches, now wanted
foie de veau à la moutarde
and
filets de poisson à la Bretonne
. Comfort, or perhaps his publisher’s marketing department, was shrewd in promising a similarly sophisticated set of recipes for
l’amour
. With its scandalously frank discussion of sex—including positions other than missionary, and even venturing into swinging and spanking—it has been credited with sparking the sexual revolution. But in the long perspective, we can see that what appeared so new on its publication was part of a tradition that goes back centuries.

CHAPTER
12 ½

THE BOYS' CLUB

The writers discussed in this book range from harmless drudges to mighty emperors, from retiring scholars to revolutionary provocateurs. The reference shelf holds the works of child prodigies and wizened sages, profound linguists and mathematical geniuses. And yet one group is very poorly represented among the editors of reference books: women.

Men, of course, have been much more visible in public life through most of history, and any list of great public achievements is going to be disproportionately male. But the exclusion of women is rarely as complete as it is in reference publishing. It is not hard to come up with great women poets, novelists, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, and artists from antiquity to the present. But female lexicographers or encyclopedists are in exceedingly short supply. Women must have been active among the compilers of information—wives and sisters of the named editors probably did much of the real work in books credited to men—but, if so, they have left few traces.

Though women have been hard to find on mastheads, they have long been imagined as part of a target audience. Robert Cawdrey's
Table Alphabeticall
(1604) was notoriously “gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons”; Henry Cockeram's
English Dictionarie
(1623) was pitched at “ladies and gentlewomen” as well as foreigners; and Thomas Blount's
Glossographia
“is chiefly intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-knowing Men.”
1
The British School-Master; or, The English Spelling-Book
included in its second edition (1722) a “vocabulary of most sorts of provisions, apparel, household furniture, &c. Very useful for all ladies, housekeepers, &c. who are defective in spelling.” But even these books that claimed to enlighten
women gave them shoddy treatment between their covers. The first edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
(1769–71), for instance, devoted all of one line to the entry “WOMAN, the female of man. See H
OMO
,” and the
Encyclopédie
was just as dismissive. The first edition of Nathan Bailey's
Dictionarium Britannicum
(1730) did not even offer a definition, just an etymology (and an inaccurate one at that): “W
O
'
MAN
[wiman, prob. of wamb and man,
Sax.
].” The
Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise
(1694) likewise defined
femme
as “La femelle de l'homme”—the female of man—and then offered some instructive sentences containing the word: “God took woman from Adam's side,” “women are naturally timid,” “that man is addicted to wine and women.”