ABSTRACT
When brought into dual focus, Harris’s List (pub. 1793) and John Badcock’s The London Guide (pub. 1818) – which provide the addresses of London prostitutes – show how popular guides to England's capital brought together the Romantic era’s obsessions with cartography and walking tours and its fascination with transgressive women. Indeed, literature of the Romantic period allows us to identify and calibrate the gendered geosurveillance – surveillance of geographical activities – of women in city spaces. To this end, this chapter considers recent research by Jeremy Crampton (2010) into geosurveillance in terms of social regulation in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century handbooks to London, such as Harris’s List and ‘stranger’s guides’ to the city. As we will see, fictional accounts of London’s ‘low life’, notably Pierce Egan’s Life in London (pub. 1822), were influenced by these indexes, and correspondingly invited readers to keep track of the city’s ‘risky’ female bodies. In a similar way, I will suggest, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (pub. 1821) is preoccupied with mapping women – particularly the young prostitute Ann, who successfully evades the narrator – but the text hints at strategies urban women deployed aimed at resisting such mapping.
