Books like The Covent Garden Ladies — picked by fans

Ned Ward was a tavern keeper in the early 1700s, and this little-known book offers an extraordinary time capsule. It allows the reader to travel back some three hundred years to the grimy streets of London that feel at once alien and familiar.

The lions and other exotic animals in the Tower of London, the freshly-domed St Paul’s Cathedral, the filth and noise, the danger and the stink. All of it is here, not to mention the fabulous dialect of the time, offering the most wonderful dictionary of terms for sex workers, thieves, lawyers, and every trade imaginable. All history fans should read this book.

I first visited St Paul’s Cathedral as a schoolboy, climbing nervously through the stone corridors, then the precipitous metal gangways and staircases up, up, up to the whispering gallery and the summit of the outer dome beyond. It was a thrilling experience I have never forgotten. Little did I realise then that my dream of becoming a published novelist would come true and, beyond all my wildest dreams, I would bring St Paul’s to life in my own stories.

This book gripped me from the start, revealing the extraordinary engineering required to build the cathedral while the old structure was dismantled. I didn’t realise how many clever tricks were used to make the building look as grand as it does today. The false domes, the use of chains in the stonework, the false facades, and so much corner cutting bring the project to completion within a stringent and often begrudging… show more.

I needed to take my research from the Old Bailey archives and bring it to life, but the detail was disparate and piecemeal. I found myself struggling to get a clear window into Mother Clap’s molly house and other molly haunts.

Rictor Norton’s book was exactly what I needed. Thoroughly researched and clearly laid out, it offers the reader a chance to delve into London’s molly culture, exploring molly haunts and gaining a sense of their language and social mores.

I still had a lot of work to do, bringing the mollies to life as fully-rounded fictional characters. Norton’s book is a stickler for fact and eschews romantic supposition, but without a doubt, his book gives the Georgian London time traveler a vital key not just to the lives of the mollies but to the everyday lives of all working Londoners in all their grimy glory.

I hate reading historical fiction when it seems perfectly obvious that the author has no idea where they are. They don’t know the place names, they don’t know the roads, and they haven’t the foggiest sense of how people actually got from one part of the city to another. It is surprisingly common for novels set in London to take the reader on absurdly circuitous routes, simply because the author hasn’t bothered to look at a map.

This is particularly irksome and unforgivable in London’s case because so many of the streets and alleyways are still in existence. For my part, writing Thomas True was an excuse to wander around London with my John Rocque map tucked under my arm, timing various routes and working out precisely how Gabriel and Thomas would have journeyed through the bewilderingly busy city to Mother Clap’s Alsatia Old London Bridge, the Exchange, and Whitechapel.… show more.

On the other side of the coin, there is this behemoth of a book. I’d be lying if I said that its sheer size and tightly-packed text weren’t slightly off-putting, but I consider Cruickshank’s formidable work a must-have for any novelist writing in the Georgian era. Impeccably researched and showing a wide range of social history from the lives of ordinary layman to the wealthy and powerful, it's a truly fantastic resource, and if you’re looking to familiarise yourself with the 'dirty underbelly' of eighteenth-century London (a whole world away from shiny Bridgerton-esque ballrooms and stately homes) then this is absolutely the book for you.

This is another book written by a journalist. The stories in it are about the working class and destitute life in London at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only do they portray intimate relationships, prostitution, crime, and alcohol abuse, but they also give a sense of the life stories of the people who lived in these communities.

After not being able to find a publisher in the early 1900s, Josie Washburn self-published her memoir. In The Underworld Sewer, Josie not only describes her life as a prostitute and madam, but she also debunks the notion at the time that women became prostitutes to “satisfy their own unnatural lusts.” Josie wanted to educate the public about the true horrors and plight of the unfortunate women who had to resort to prostitution to survive and, ultimately, to motivate the public to effect change. Her memoir is as much a scathing commentary on society’s double standards as it is an account of her life as a demi-mondaine.

Like Anne Butler, Ms. Rosen used credible sources to explain the “whys and hows” of frontier prostitution, prostitutes’ roles in society, and the culture that kept them in their place. Her book includes government studies conducted with the women themselves regarding their careers. Statistics on the ladies’ health and social diseases are included here too.

In this first book in English about the history of sexual commerce in Peru during the state regulation of brothels, Drinot tells a multilayered story of the complex interactions among sex workers, clients, the police, the government, feminists, and physicians. With a remarkable diversity of archival sources, Drinot explores topics that are frequently disregarded in the history of prostitution like the meanings of masculinity and the interaction between race and venereal diseases that, in the case of Lima, resulted in the stigmatization of Chinese migrants and indigenous men as infectious agents.

Novellas are a perfect place to start for poets who are interested in writing longer, more narrative work. They’re slim, lyrical, and less daunting. I read this novella in college & haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It takes place in what I can only refer to as a “Sleeping Brothel” where elderly men pay to sleep beside young women. The story is haunting, but it doesn’t take cheap horror shots. Instead, it delves into the complexity of loneliness, the shared vulnerability of sleep, and the human need for comfort.