Sexual diseases were, of course, rife. Gainsborough, we learn, was so fond of indulging himself "to the hilt" that gonorrhoea nearly killed him. Can we bear to believe it? Charming Gainsborough of the Fotherington-Thomas landscapes and portraits of lapdogs and their ladies?
For those thus afflicted, Covent Garden market had its remedies. Not just watercress, nettles and hedge mustard, but more unorthodox cures such as snails, leeches and vipers.
Gatrell talks of Hogarth's "farts-and-bums" exuberance and he too delights in ribaldry. He tells us that a Jonathan Cockup was the victim of a man hanged in 1730 and that a Toss-off Dick was hanged in 1745.
His aim is to have us reject "our sugared notions of polite 18th-century life" and, boy, does he do it. You'll never look at a Gainsborough landscape the same way again.
Lucy Inglis's take on Georgian London is sedate by contrast. Gatrell, you imagine, would have been at home in the Rose Tavern scene of Hogarth's Rake's Progress or tearing through the town with the "Mohocks", an 18th-century Bullingdon Club whose number would get roaringly drunk, beat up watchmen and kidnap women before rolling them down Snow Hill in barrels. Inglis, you suspect, would give them all double detention.
Her book, which began life as a popular blog GeorgianLondon.com, is briskly enjoyable. Inglis is the history teacher you would like to have had at school. Her canvas is wider than Gatrell's Covent Garden and the book is divided into chapters by area: the City, Westminster and St James's, Mayfair, Marylebone, Southwark and so on.
She is particularly good on the changing shape of the city. Bethnal Green and Hackney, she reminds us, were meadows until developers got their hands on them and the University College London site was a farm run by two spinster sisters who used to seize the clothes of the boys who trespassed on their land to bathe. She takes pleasure in lost street names — Sodomite's Walk, Perilous Pond — and the Puddle Dock and Oystergate wharves. (Gatrell has several Pissing Alleys and a street full of cookshops called "Porridge Island".)
Inglis is good on the gin craze and the mania for a strange Turkish drink sold on every street called coffee and another called "Tee". If the book has a fault, it is occasionally a little breathless and gushing, but it is impossible to read her description of the well-upholstered, forty-something bawd Mrs Dodd, who will give you a night's entertainment and a cup of tea in the morning for "one pound one", and not smile.
Just as charming is A London Year, a thumping compendium of diary entries on London, one or more for every day of the year. There are contributions from John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, Fanny Burney, Virginia Woolf and Alan Bennett — more than 200 writers in all.
