![]() The costumes are eye-popping and define the characters: Margaret Wells and her girls make a loud statement of personality with chest-bursting bodices and bright, peacocky dresses in contrast to Lydia Quigley’s elegant, high-end girls, who present a more refined vision, powdered and pastel-coloured, with many bows, frills and pearls. Harlots’ other distinctive feature is its bold style, a mixture of strikingly contemporary and just as strikingly authentic visual storytelling. Marney is a sedan chair carrier who makes a tidy profit on the side, patronised by wealthy female clients. Lastly, Harlots gives a nod to the male side of the oldest profession by introducing a male prostitute character: Charlotte’s love interest, Daniel Marney (Rory Fleck Byrne). The syphilis-ridden Mary Cooper, who rampages through Episode Two, only to die and have a song dedicated to her, is also based on Lucy Cooper, who was likewise famously celebrated with songs. According to Harris’s List, Burroughs used ‘more birch rods in a week than Westminster schools in a twelvemonth’. Other colourful characters include the ironically-named BDMS mistress Nancy Birch (Kate Fleetwood), who is based on a ‘Ms Nancy Burroughs’. ![]() Charlotte’s mother, Elizabeth Ward, was also a London bawd, just like Margaret Wells, who did actually auction Charlotte’s virginity. She is, in fact, described in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List as ‘very pleasing and…as desirable as ever’. Charlotte Wells is based on Charlotte Hays, a real and highly successful courtesan. Indeed, in an excellent comedic interpretation of what must have happened at the time, the first episode of the series opens with Margaret Wells’ ladies excitedly reading their reviews and descriptions in Harris’s List, a contemporary guide to the pleasures London has to offer. The series was inspired by historian Hallie Rubenhold’s book about prostitution in Georgian London, The Covent Garden Ladies, and uses Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies to create characters shaped by the descriptions of real-life individuals. If anything, they represent a variety of lived experiences, whether good, bad or morally ambiguous.Īt the same time, part of the real charm of Harlots is its variety of larger-than-life characters. Nor are they tragic and depressing morality tales of the hardships of fallen women. One thing, however, is clear: the depictions of the actual business of selling sex are in no way passionate or titillating. The two storylines interact against the backdrop of court sessions, night-time raids on brothels, religious zealots, high-end fashionable gambling parties, kidnapping, jail and murder. Lucy Wells (Eloise Smyth), the youngest, is on the verge of becoming her mother’s greatest business transaction, as her virginity is about to be sold to the highest bidder. Charlotte Wells (Jessica Brown Findlay), the eldest, is a mistress of a wealthy nobleman and has integrated into high society and created a name for herself as the ‘finest whore in London’. At the heart of this conflict is also Margaret Wells’ relationship with her two daughters. The primary conflict on which Harlots centres is between the villainous and well-connected owner of an upscale brothel, Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville), and Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton), who has clawed her way up from poverty to build her own (rather less classy) brothel and now dares to dream big. With all this to offer and more, the series has been well-received, being described as ‘delightful’ by Variety, and ‘great fun’ and a ‘bodice romp’ by The Guardian. The series focuses on the competition between two eighteenth-century London brothels and their leading madams, with the help and hindrance of a cast of wonderfully vivid characters and the promise of equal male and female nudity on screen. One in five women is making a living selling sex.’ This is both the opening statement and the premise of Hulu’s new TV series Harlots, created by Alison Newman and Moira Biffini, together with an almost exclusively female production team.
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