http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...ia-in-hamlet-and-moving-on-from-a7644551.html
A man seeking the services of a prostitute in mid-18th-century London could consult a booklet that was a kind of sexual TripAdvisor of its day – Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. In an age when it's estimated that one in five women in the capital worked in some form of prostitution, the pseudonymous Harris (thought to be a Grub Street hack called Samuel Derrick) believed he was providing quality control, a discerning guide to...
“Vaginas”, cuts in Jessica Brown Findlay, the actress who plays Charlotte, a “kept” courtesan in ITV's new costume drama about the booming sex trade of the period, Harlots. “Vaginas... hah... yes! Harris's List was incredibly popular and you'd find it in all manner of houses. It's really interesting the reviews, how incredibly brutal some of them are. We like to think we're developed in how we talk about things... you know, the internet goes mental over a nipple... you should read this book; it's insane.”
A generously budgeted co-production between ITV and American streaming service Hulu, Harlots brings to life (in fictional form) some of the women advertised in Harris's List. The series is pretty much an all-female affair, written by playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini (Jane Eyre, Tamara Drew), directed by Coky Giedroyc (What Remains, Penny Dreadful), and starring Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville as rival brothel-keepers, Margaret Wells and Lydia Quigley. Brown Findlay plays the fashionable and beautiful Charlotte, Margaret's eldest daughter and the live-in courtesan of baronet Sir George Howard (played by Hugh Skinner, Prince William in Channel 4's The Windsors and general go-to actor for gormless toffs).
“Some men of a certain class with money would have a wife to have children with and a mistress to play with”, continues Brown Findlay. “And the two would be separate. If you signed a contract to exclusively belong to someone, if anything happened to the man you would be protected by law. You would get money if they died, have property and be safe. So it’s very much within Charlotte’s interest to sign this contract. But being an absolute legend and stubborn cow, she doesn’t sign it. That’s her brilliance and the thing that drives her mother insane.”
Given the subject matter and hard-headed approach to prostitution (it's a job, and a job with better pay and prospects than most that were available to women at the time), Harlots might at first glance seem like a Georgian version of ITV2's Billie Piper series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, but - thanks to the writing, cast and some painstaking historical research – it feels somehow different, less glossily exploitative. “Don't get distracted by the pretty dresses”, agrees Brown Findlay. “One in five women in London were involved in the sex industry at this time. That statistic seems quite shocking, but when you consider other options open to women, it’s not so shocking. The age of consent was also 12. Which is a child.
“If you were married your body was considered the man’s property, along with your actual property. So anything could be done to you because you were the property of your husband. That’s not the world the harlots live in. Their property is theirs. It’s their body. And they decide what happens to it, to a certain extent”.
Prostitution as empowerment – it's the sort of line that Billie Piper (perhaps with less historical justification) might have uttered in The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. An additional angle in Harlots is provided by the hypocrisy of the age.
“London at the time was going through such a huge economic boom, and it was in some ways an incredibly liberal place”, says Brown Findlay. “And yet the protection and laws weren't there, and it was such a hypocritical world. The men who used these houses wrote the laws that made them illegal, and these women are having to learn the complexities of that while living and surviving. Every time you looked into the subject there was more and more to unravel. There's nothing clear cut.”
Not that Harlots is po-faced, and while Moira Buffini states that prostitution is “the coal-face of gender politics and that’s where we wanted to put our female gaze... it’s a costume drama with its teeth sunk firmly in the modern world”, she also delights in the humour of the women and the slang of the time, terms like “perty heavers” and “an easy keeper” (an undemanding regular). “Some of the slang for genitalia and sex is just amazing”, says Brown Findlay. “I totally want to bring it back.” Article continues....
A man seeking the services of a prostitute in mid-18th-century London could consult a booklet that was a kind of sexual TripAdvisor of its day – Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. In an age when it's estimated that one in five women in the capital worked in some form of prostitution, the pseudonymous Harris (thought to be a Grub Street hack called Samuel Derrick) believed he was providing quality control, a discerning guide to...
“Vaginas”, cuts in Jessica Brown Findlay, the actress who plays Charlotte, a “kept” courtesan in ITV's new costume drama about the booming sex trade of the period, Harlots. “Vaginas... hah... yes! Harris's List was incredibly popular and you'd find it in all manner of houses. It's really interesting the reviews, how incredibly brutal some of them are. We like to think we're developed in how we talk about things... you know, the internet goes mental over a nipple... you should read this book; it's insane.”
A generously budgeted co-production between ITV and American streaming service Hulu, Harlots brings to life (in fictional form) some of the women advertised in Harris's List. The series is pretty much an all-female affair, written by playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini (Jane Eyre, Tamara Drew), directed by Coky Giedroyc (What Remains, Penny Dreadful), and starring Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville as rival brothel-keepers, Margaret Wells and Lydia Quigley. Brown Findlay plays the fashionable and beautiful Charlotte, Margaret's eldest daughter and the live-in courtesan of baronet Sir George Howard (played by Hugh Skinner, Prince William in Channel 4's The Windsors and general go-to actor for gormless toffs).
“Some men of a certain class with money would have a wife to have children with and a mistress to play with”, continues Brown Findlay. “And the two would be separate. If you signed a contract to exclusively belong to someone, if anything happened to the man you would be protected by law. You would get money if they died, have property and be safe. So it’s very much within Charlotte’s interest to sign this contract. But being an absolute legend and stubborn cow, she doesn’t sign it. That’s her brilliance and the thing that drives her mother insane.”
Given the subject matter and hard-headed approach to prostitution (it's a job, and a job with better pay and prospects than most that were available to women at the time), Harlots might at first glance seem like a Georgian version of ITV2's Billie Piper series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, but - thanks to the writing, cast and some painstaking historical research – it feels somehow different, less glossily exploitative. “Don't get distracted by the pretty dresses”, agrees Brown Findlay. “One in five women in London were involved in the sex industry at this time. That statistic seems quite shocking, but when you consider other options open to women, it’s not so shocking. The age of consent was also 12. Which is a child.
“If you were married your body was considered the man’s property, along with your actual property. So anything could be done to you because you were the property of your husband. That’s not the world the harlots live in. Their property is theirs. It’s their body. And they decide what happens to it, to a certain extent”.
Prostitution as empowerment – it's the sort of line that Billie Piper (perhaps with less historical justification) might have uttered in The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. An additional angle in Harlots is provided by the hypocrisy of the age.
“London at the time was going through such a huge economic boom, and it was in some ways an incredibly liberal place”, says Brown Findlay. “And yet the protection and laws weren't there, and it was such a hypocritical world. The men who used these houses wrote the laws that made them illegal, and these women are having to learn the complexities of that while living and surviving. Every time you looked into the subject there was more and more to unravel. There's nothing clear cut.”
Not that Harlots is po-faced, and while Moira Buffini states that prostitution is “the coal-face of gender politics and that’s where we wanted to put our female gaze... it’s a costume drama with its teeth sunk firmly in the modern world”, she also delights in the humour of the women and the slang of the time, terms like “perty heavers” and “an easy keeper” (an undemanding regular). “Some of the slang for genitalia and sex is just amazing”, says Brown Findlay. “I totally want to bring it back.” Article continues....
