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Pox Britannica | Catherine Nicholson

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Satan’s Harvest Home , an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet found, throughout “this good Protestant kingdom” and especially in the capital city of London: brothels bustling, coffeehouses, taverns, and gin shops overflowing, homosexuality on the rise, and the streets filled with a “vast Body of Courtezans , which stands ready, on small Purchase, to obey the Laws of Nature, and gratify the Lust of every drunken Rake-hell.” The unhappy results were, likewise, everywhere to be discerned: livelihoods, marriages, and reputations lost; illegitimate children gotten.…

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