Regency Prostitution - Brighton

Brighton, too, was a popular place for prostitutes. By 1796 the sixth edition of The New Brighton Guide could advertise the seaside town as a place ‘where the sinews of morality are so happily relaxed, that a bawd and a baroness may snore in the same tenement’11. Jane Austen expressed her ‘dread’ of having to go to Brighton when she wrote to Cassandra in 1799 – perhaps she once again imagined a fat woman getting her drunk on small beer. Prostitutes numbered 300 there, exclusive of those at the army camp, at the time Jane Austen imagined Lydia Bennet going there. Lydia is likely to have gazed with fascination at these ‘women of the town’, ‘members of the Cyprian Corps’, ‘impures of the ton’, ‘whores’, ‘strumpets’, ‘light o’ loves’, ‘wantons’, ‘demi-reps’, ‘demi-mondaines’, ‘jades’, ‘hussies’, ‘tarts’, ‘sluts’, ‘scarlet women’, ‘jezebels’, ‘lemans’, ‘paramours’, ‘doxies’, ‘floozies’, ‘molls’, ‘fallen women’, ‘trollopes’, ‘cocottes’, ‘bawds’ and ‘harlots’. Maria Bertram went to Brighton on her honeymoon, escorted by her sister Julia. As both were to elope later in Mansfield Park, the place clearly corrupted their morals. It wasn’t too good for Lydia Bennet’s either!