ABSTRACT
On 22 March 1758, Jonas Hanway stood up at a meeting of the Society for Encouraging Arts, Manufactures and Commerce to propose a prize for the best plan for a charity house or houses to address the problem of prostitution: one for women who were in danger of becoming prostitutes, the second for “Common Prostitutes as are inclined to forsake their Evil Course of Life, and become Virtuous and useful Members of the Community.”1 The history of this competition and its outcome, I suggest, offers ample evidence that the sentimental rhetoric which surrounded the Magdalen House is neither negligible nor skin-deep, but rather a fundamental aspect of the institution. And it is the peculiarly sentimental character of this institution, I will argue in this chapter, which renders impossible any unproblematic co-option of the charity either as the end point of the mercantilist Enlightenment tradition which generated the population charities, or as a proto-evangelical institution which merits Compston’s characterisation as “the mother Penitentiary of our Empire.”2 Rather, as I have suggested, the foundation of the London Magdalen House represents the high-watermark of the polite moral-sense sentimental tradition, offering the possibility of reconciliation between two sides of one of the most aggravated embodiments of the conict between commerce and morality: virtue and prostitution.
