The Quigleys ruthlessly maximize earnings by keeping their whores forever in debt, a sharecropping arrangement by which there is never quite enough money for them to stop turning tricks (an idea also powerfully explored in Season 3 of American Crime). All the while, Lydia and her buffoonish son Charles (Douggie McMeekin) keep a close eye on them. Her girls speak French, play musical instruments, and screw judges and their peers for money. That begins right about the time Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville) enters the scene. So yes, there is plenty of cheerful raunchiness and eye candy, but don’t let that distract from Harlots real agenda, which is to provide dark commentary on the state of women in today's world.
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On the other hand, Mum sold Charlotte’s virginity off to the highest bidder, and she's pondering doing the same with Lucy in order to upgrade her brothel to nicer quarters on Greek Street. Holland before he expires.”Įlizabeth is kinder to her two daughters, the sassy Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and more sensitive Lucy (Eloise Smyth). “I’ve got an officer out there with such a hard prickstand he can hardly walk!” she yells at Emily Lacey, her best worker.
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She runs her whorehouse with a light hand on the tiller, but she isn’t afraid to crack the whip, as when she comes upon Lucy and the girls in the back room, idly debating their Harris’ List reviews. Presiding over things is Elizabeth Wells, played by the marvelous Samantha Morton (whom you may recall me raving about in Longford). It’s what a youth hostel might look like if everyone dressed in Merchant Ivory costumes and kept their bedroom doors open. The Russell Street brothel where these girls work is a bit downmarket. And in the beginning, as the scene above suggests, it carries on in good, randy fun, with lots of bare bottoms and rocking and moaning. At first it looks like a kind of live-action version of Harris’ List. Of course, Harlots is, first and foremost, a show about sex. Once seen entirely from a male point of view, the commodification and classification of female flesh is here viewed from the perspective of the women put on offer, and in some cases the women putting them on offer. Harlots is what happened when Buffini and co-creator Alison Newman looked at this 250-year-old history through different eyes. Harris’ List was, in the words of Harlots co-creator Moira Buffini, “A Time Out guide to whores from the 1760s onwards.” It’s a sign of how massive and competitive the sex business was in Georgian England that such a guide sold a quarter-million copies and was updated yearly for decades.Īt its heyday in the late 18th century, as many as 50,000 women were involved in the sex trade in London, serving customers at all price points, before Parliament somewhat reluctantly put a stop to it. “When flagellation is required, she acquits herself entirely to the satisfaction of the cull.” “Nancy Birch,” she continues, as the camera cuts to a masked dominatrix cracking a whip down the hall. “The very thing in winter for those who love a fat, jolly girl.” “Miss Fanny Lambert,” Lucy reads gaily, as a plump redheaded listens thoughtfully to her writeup. With girlish delight, she proceeds to regale the prostitutes with what London’s leading sex-review guide thinks of each of them. In the opening minutes of Harlots, the 2017 historical drama from Britain’s ITV, Lucy Wells (played by Eloise Smyth) comes charging into the family brothel waving the new edition of Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies.
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