This is a huge, compendious grab-bag of information about the seedier side of Georgian London. You could say that it lacks discipline and has no real narrative thread, but it's nevertheless full of bizarre and fascinating details on almost every page about courtesans, streetwalkers, moral crusaders, Hell-Fire Clubs, disreputable actresses, pornographic pamphlets, run-down coffee houses, bagnios, bluestockings and badly-behaved baronets.
Dan Cruickshank is really an architectural historian. He came to this story through studying the buildings of London, many of which were put up during a speculative building boom in the eighteenth century, the capital for which – Cruickshank came to realise – was generated in large part by the sex industry, which was a colossal economic driver in Georgian London. London was then the prostitution capital of the world, with one in five women, by some counts, working in the sex industry on at least an occasional basis. Cruickshank is suitably suspicious of these figures, but however you massage the numbers it's clear that the money in circulation was significant.
The average cost of an assignation was about two guineas. Given that the annual salary of a maid was around five guineas, you can see the appeal. In a world where opportunities for women were crushingly restricted, it's perhaps no wonder that such a huge alternative economy flourished, though your prospects were decidedly variable. Some women made vast sums of money and retired with the funds to buy their own cafes, or married prominent politicians and landowners; others landed on the street, lost their looks, contracted a roster of unpleasant venereal diseases, or ended their days in a debtors' prison.
Cruickshank leaps from one topic to the next with infectious, if confusing, enthusiasm, and the profusion of between-chapter ‘interludes’, ‘postludes’, and three appendices which might as well have been regular chapters, are all an indication of the fact that the book has no particular cumulative argument to make. Depending on your own interests, some parts of the story will be more interesting than others (personally, I found the history of the Magdalen House and Lock Hospital exhausting), but you never have to wait long before he's back on something else that catches your eye. There is a truly gargantuan bibliography at the back, as well as an excellent index which may allow impatient readers to conclude that the whole thing is best used, perhaps, as an enjoyably scandalous encyclopaedia.