Georgian London was the epicenter of urban pleasure culture. Harlots leveraged their assets, rakes indulged in licentious sex, and brothels, molly-houses, taverns and bawdy houses were scattered all over the city. Behind all this reckless abandon lay a milieu of misery. Between 1756 and 1760, the Foundling Hospital of London admitted 15,000 infants. This amounts to 10% of all the births in London for those years. This week’s episode addresses the trope of seduction, the realities of prostitution, and the ways that rapidly rising illegitimacy ratios stimulated child abandonment in eighteenth-century London.
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