Exploring the seduction narrative and fallen women in 18th

century English literature

In late 1749, author John Cleland and his publishers were arrested following the publication of
the second volume of Cleland’s pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Cleland
was hauled before court, charged with corrupting the king’s subjects. The Church had, in
particular, objected to the work on the grounds that the novel’s main character, Fanny Hill,
never receives any sort of punishment or retribution for her flagrant behaviour. Fanny is
actually rewarded with a happy ending, in the form of marriage to her true love, and never once
repents or reflects sadly on her sexual conduct and dazzling career as a courtesan. Mike Rendell
perhaps describes it best, arguing that the novel is a classic example of having your cake and
eating it, rather than the moral reflections on virtue and penitence that Georgian England was
so used to1. Cleland himself now potentially faced a spell in prison and a hefty fine, so instead
chose to renounce the novel and have it withdrawn. It became an underground and frequently
pirated novel, and was not published in an unexpurgated form in the UK until the 1970s. This
is perhaps testament to the uniqueness of the story and the conclusions it comes to, as well as
the way in which it subverted and played havoc with accepted ideas about female virtue, female
desire and the ever-popular and entrenched seduction narrative so favoured in 18th century
English literature and in the collective consciousness of Georgian England.

What, then, was this seduction narrative that Cleland had so scandalously eschewed? Where
did this trope spring from? How did it manifest itself in 18th century English literature and what
did it attempt say about men and women? Did it evolve, even become progressive, as the
century continued? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, how did it reflect and impact
reality, particularly in the lives of actual “fallen” and unvirtuous women? Indeed, whilst the
literature analysed in this essay will be overwhelmingly fictional, the stories that this literature
told seemed to strike a chord with those who interacted with it and would have a knock-on
effect in the real world. One of the most striking examples of the seduction narrative having a
real-world impact is on that of The Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes,
an institution founded in 1758 seemingly to offer a better life to women who found themselves
floundering in London’s sex industry. It was strict in its acceptance of any woman who had not
lost her virtue through male deception and touted this concept in its own propaganda, such as

1
Mike Rendell, In Bed with the Georgians: Sex, Scandal and Satire in the 18 th Century, (Pen & Sword History,
2016), pp. 63
in the tale of one Emily, apparently the first girl to be admitted to the hospital and who describes
own seduction narrative in detail in The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-
house2. So committed to the seduction narrative as a determining factor in what made a fallen
woman worthy of help was the Magdalen House, that by the 1780s, it had almost entirely given
up on accepting actual sex workers, whose lives and experience didn’t seem to be as linear as
the favoured narrative, and had decided to stick solely to admitting middle class or otherwise
genteelly raised white women (black women were barred entirely in 1783) who had been
seduced through deception, were repentant and had managed to resist a fall into sex work up
until this point3. This example in particular reflects how the favoured literary seduction
narrative had become entrenched, so much so that it was now used to justify sympathising, or
not sympathising, with women in need. But whilst this all appears, at least on the surface, to
suggest the seduction narrative sprang from a fear of real-life consequences, statistics relating
to the lives of 18th century sex workers and experiences of these women as recorded in their
own words suggest a different story, one almost entirely devoid of the excessive misery so
intrinsic to the seduction narrative that attempted to explain their lives for them. Sophia
Baddeley’s memoirs, recorded by her life-long companion, Eliza Steele, tell of a woman of
passion who wished to thrive in her profession without shame. Peg Plunkett’s autobiography
follows the journey of a poor young Irish woman to wealth and celebrity as a brothel madam,
and the scandalous memoirs of Harriette Wilson, though perhaps slightly fictionalised on
Wilson’s part, reflect her canny knack for business, men and living well. Even in the case of
the general population of sex workers, whose voices we do not hear or see in the archives, the
reality is that most did not sink into decay and despair; most left the industry after finding a
man to marry or keep them permanently, and if they didn’t leave, they, according to Elizabeth
Denlinger, were more self-confident and entrepreneurial in their approach to their profession4.
Now that the actual experiences of sex workers and of women who were considered fallen and
unvirtuous by the standards of Georgian England are becoming of more interest to historians,
the myth of the seduction narrative, so passionately espoused in 18th century English literature,

2 Anonymous, The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House as Supposed to be Related by
Themselves in Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth-Century ed. by Laura J. Rosenthal
(Broadview Press, 2008), pp. 155

3
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: The History of the First Sexual Revolution, (Penguin Books, 2012),
pp. 275-80
4
Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, The Garment and the Man: Masculine Desire in Harris’ List of Covent Garden
Ladies, 1764-1793 in Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 3 (University of Texas Press: July, 2002), pp.
363-65
is quickly coming to light and by comparing what such seduction narratives tried to say about
the female experience with what that female experience actually might have been, one can
perceive how the narrative’s agenda was hindered by its faults and its misrepresentation of the
experiences of most women in working in the sex industry in 18th century England.

The seduction narrative had its origins in late 17th century England, when the view of how and
why women lost their virtue and oft ended up in the sex industry as a consequence was not
sympathetic towards women’s plight. Sex workers were responsible for whatever trouble that
befell them because of the choices they had made, and thus, they were inherently sinful. Sex
workers simply reflected the extremes of female sexuality: women were naturally sexually
voracious and would go to any lengths to sate their passions. John Dunton’s 1696/97 discussion
of London’s sex industry, aptly named The Night-Walker, made much of this idea, claiming to
have spoken directly with many of the sex workers who peddled their trade in London’s streets
just at the turn of the 18th century and questioned them on their motives for such a profession.
The consensus, in Dunton’s view, was this: sex workers ended up where they were because, as
naturally sexually loose, they had no mind for their virtue, no modesty and no sense of shame
for their massive sexual appetites. The dominance of this view led to a new emphasis on
reforming sinners and the veracity of these reformation societies is, as Faramerz Dabhoiwala
points out5, what led to the rise of the tenets that formed the basis of the seduction narrative
that 18th century literature would so favour. A sense of outrage at the intrusiveness of the
reformation societies in people’s lives combined with changing ideas about the differences
between the sexes led to sex workers increasingly coming to be seen as victims of their
circumstances and, more specifically, as victims of the predatory male. Now, women (white,
pretty, middle class women, specifically) were seen as inherently virtuous and constantly at
risk of losing that virtue at the hands of deceptive and libidinous men. Early 18th century
literature and plays reflected this change in belief about fallen women, female virtue and sex
workers. The London Merchant by George Lillo, adapted from an earlier folktale of a
respectable apprentice turned criminal by his sex worker mistress, was instantly successful
when it was staged in 1731, not least for the changes made to the character of the sex worker
mistress in question. In earlier tales, she was avaricious and immoral but in Lillo’s adaptation,
she proclaims that sex workers are ‘but slaves to men6’ and entirely blames predatory men for

5
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, pp. 154
6
George Lillo, The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in
Drury Lane by His Majesty’s Servants, Act 1, Scene 2 (London, 1776), Eighteenth Century Collections Online,
her fall from virtue into poverty and degradation. And it was not just in a fictional setting that
this newly emerging attitude was becoming entrenched. Joshua Brogden, a justice’s clerk, and
the famous Henry Fielding, a magistrate, reflected on the root cause of the increasing number
of sex workers living in England’s underworld, both concluding that the blame needed to be
laid solely at the feet of their male seducers, who had used them ill7. This was the fear of what
the seduction narrative stood for at its height, and those fears were compounded by the added
threat of the looming figure of the London bawd, deceiving unsuspecting girls lately arrived
from the country and passing them into the clutches of rakes and libertines. This trope was
frequently utilised in the seduction narrative of this era: most famously, Hogarth illustrated it
perfectly in his ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ panel paintings and prints of 1731/32, and even John
Cleland included it in Fanny Hill’s tale. Country girls, or rather, the idea of country girls,
represented the best of virtuous womanhood in the 18th century English mind. They were
genteelly born, modest, pretty, naïve and innocent, and they made for the perfect fallen woman.
Wentworth Dillon said it best8, when he described country girls as ‘rich by nature,’ possessing
of ‘modest cloaths no wanton eyes invite,’ and with a soul that preserved ‘her nature white.’
This poem was later included in The Histories of Some of the Penitents of the Magdalen-House
and thus emphasising that this was the type of woman deserving worthy of sympathy, worthy
of forgiveness and worthy of help if she sought it.

It was around this time, and under these influences, that the novelist, Samuel Richardson,
would create his most popular novels that were demonstrative and so encapsulating of the
seduction narrative in its fullest form. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, was
arguably Richardson’s ode to the fruits of female virtue. It is in fact, as the subtitle suggests, a
tale of the advantages of keeping one’s female virtue intact. Pamela, the virtuous, humbly but
genteelly born heroine of the novel, is, by all accounts, sexually harassed by her gentleman-
employer, Mr. B, and swoons at his attentions, but manages to hold him off from any physical
assault, even when he imprisons her with a bawd, and in the end, Mr. B is inspired by Pamela’s
constant goodness and taciturn virtue, and learns by her example. He reforms himself from a
rake to modest and god-fearing, and Pamela is rewarded for her exemplary behaviour in the

accessed 7th December 2018,

<http://find.galegroup.com.liverpool.idm.oclc.org/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroup
Name=livuni&tabID=T001&docId=CW3307652786&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&d
ocLevel=FASCIMILE>.
7
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, pp. 156
8
Anonymous, The Histories of Some of the Penitents, pp. 155
face of Mr. B’s pestering, with marriage. It was an instant success: its epistolary structure
allowed for a deeper exploration of the main character’s inner thoughts, and subsequently,
Pamela became real to Richardson’s readers. Indeed, this was something that Richardson
himself realised when he first began writing the book simply as a moral conduct book aimed
at young women specifically, but decided to embark on an epistolary novel instead, seeing its
potential for being more relevant and more accessible for readers and their lives. He was a
deeply religious man who had long been obsessed with the idea of the fallen women and the
loss of female virtue even before he wrote the book: he boasted that he had never even ‘been
in the company of a lewd woman9’ but was still preoccupied with how to deal with women
who had fallen from grace and were truly penitent for it. Pamela was Richardson’s stark
warning to young women on the dangers of giving into the temptations of rakish men and
unfortunately, he lays the responsibility for curbing bad male behaviour solely at the feet of
women, but this did not affect the novel’s popularity. It was more than a success, it was a
sensation. Enlightenment thinkers on the Continent, like Rousseau and Diderot, lauded it as a
masterpiece of literature and were inspired by Richardson’s work in their own fiction. Diderot,
in fact, listed Richardson alongside the greats of the ancient world, believing that Richardson
understood humanity just as much as they had10. And back in England, Richardson’s majority
middle class readers lapped up the novel, for the very fact that they saw themselves in its
characters, particularly in Pamela Andrews, and wholeheartedly believed in the binary of the
predatory male and modest, virginal country girl entirely at his mercy. Pamela’s impact on the
reality of the seduction narrative in the lives of a certain kind of woman was such that it
influenced new ideas about how best to help deserving women fallen into the sex industry at
the hands of a dishonest seducer, ideas that would soon lead to the opening of the Magdalen
Hospital, which, for the next century, was so dominant in deciding which ‘fallen’ women were
worthy or not. Even Richardson’s harshest critics, like Henry Fielding in particular, would
emulate the same themes in their own literary responses. Dabhoiwala argues that Fielding’s
fiction, whilst trying to rebel against what Fielding perceived to be Richardson’s rigid prudery,
still implies the same things about sexual difference, about female virtue and female sexuality,
and about predatory males11 (subverting this idea, in particular, in The History of Tom Jones,
a Foundling, where the most predatory character is the loose-living Lady Bellaston, a woman;

9
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, pp. 245
10
Claire Inez O’Connor, The Women in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, (Boston University, 1939), accessed
on 7th December, 2018, pp. 3, http://open.bu.edu
11
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, pp. 175-76
the humour of this comes from the sheer unnaturalness of it all). The seduction narrative, as so
emphasised by Richardson’s literature in the mid-18th century, was in full sway. Even so,
despite the indisputable success and influence of Pamela, Richardson was not satisfied. Some
critics had questioned whether Pamela could be truly virtuous if she finally allowed herself to
marry a man who had started out so abhorrently12, and Richardson himself decided to hammer
home the real danger of the predatory male to his readers in his other great novel, Clarissa, or
The History of a Young Lady, published in 1748. Clarissa’s themes were similar to Pamela,
but its tone and its plot were darker, and its message was, arguably, more starkly overt. Clarissa
Harlowe, its heroine, is as virtuous, as modest and as virginal as Pamela Andrews, though
certainly Pamela’s social superior, and she holds out against the horrific libertine, Mr Lovelace,
and his constant attempts to seduce her, at least until she can reform him completely through
religious and moral teaching. Richardson wants to remind us, though, that most men are
naturally sexually voracious and cannot be changed and thus, Clarissa’s endeavours are
unsuccessful and in frustration and impatience, Lovelace rapes her. She blames herself,
struggles with coming to terms with her loss of virtue and (by her reckoning) new status as
worthless and used, and dies from the mental strain. Clarissa was a success, but the characters
were arguably less beloved than the characters in Pamela, perhaps because they were couched
in such overt metaphor. Yet, it was still impactful to readers in its presentation of the seduction
narrative and the danger of its supposed reality in their own lives. Richardson died in 1761, but
his influence on both the literary world and the imagination on the collective mind of Georgian
England with regards to the experiences of men and women was still very much perceptible,
particularly in the work of ascendant female writers who would dominate late 18th and early
19th century England and attempt to place women, firmly and finally, into the conversations
generated by popular novels.

In particular, Richardson’s favoured narrative would, quite surprisingly (for it is hardly

progressive, at least by our standards and expectations of what revolutionary thought and early
feminism would be), have a profound influence on what late 18th century proto-feminist writers
would eventually say about the seduction narrative for themselves. With the outbreak of the
French Revolution in 1789 and the changes it had ushered in in France, female observers in
England, in particular, were keen to give their own commentary on the ideas now borne out of
revolution. Female writers more sympathetic to the Jacobin cause raised their quills in defence

12
Claire Inez O’Connor, The Women in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, pp. 21
of the rights of women. Thus, one may be inclined to assume that the seduction narrative
evolved, even became progressive, as the 18th century drew to its close, especially when it was
in the hands of women traditionally assumed to be revolutionary in their mindset, but this is
not so: the dominance of the seduction narrative that Richardson had so strongly emphasised
in Pamela, Clarissa and much of his other work, could be seen reflected in the writing of even
the most radical of early feminists. Even the sentiments of John Dunton in his late 17th century
writings on the sex industry were echoed in proto-feminist work. Mary Wollstonecraft, in
particular, would demonstrate her ardent belief in the tropes and gender binary of the seduction
narrative through her obsession with the concept of the virginal, middle class woman constantly
under threat from the immorality and sexual veracity of men. In Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the
Wrongs of Woman, unfinished but published posthumously in 1798 as a tentative sequel to
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft’s female characters are
constantly under assault from man’s immorality. It is her middle-class and upper-class female
characters that take centre stage, but the lower class and virginal Jemima, raped by her master
and reluctantly ending up in the sex industry to hide her shame, echoes many of Pamela’s ideas
about the typical route of the seduction narrative, about virtue & virginity, and about which
women are deserving of society’s sympathy when it comes to their lost virtue. Jemima is
suitably ashamed about her life story and indeed, Wollstonecraft herself often wrote of her
disgust with England’s sex workers who did not seem to display any shame about their
profession13. Wollstonecraft saw the shameless sex worker as inherently unwomanly because
the shameless sex worker did not grieve for the loss of her chastity; she was particularly
unimpressed with lower class women who displayed these traits but the main cause of her
disgust was that these women, no matter which rung on the social ladder they came from, had
sacrificed their own chastity and now scorned ‘virgin bashfulness14,’ women’s greatest asset,
in favour of behaviour that was, in Wollstonecraft’s mind, almost exclusively a male trait.
Katherine Binhammer, writing on the seduction narrative as interpreted by proto-feminist
female writers of the late 18th century, believes that the kind of melodramatic interpretation of
the seduction narrative displayed by Wollstonecraft was symptomatic of the writing of a lot of
English women with Jacobin sympathies at this time, especially as it was couched in societal

13
Enya Evans, Tensions in Tolerance: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Liberal Tradition, (University of Portsmouth,
2017), pp. 23
14
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women ed. by Phillip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro,
(Hackett Publishing Company, 2013), pp. 52
and political metaphor due to the climate of the time15. Indeed, in the writings and novels of
Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries with shared political beliefs, such as Elizabeth Inchbald,
Amelia Opie, the binary of the predatory male and the virginal female victim was intensified.
In proto-feminist seduction narratives, women, especially middle-class women, had to be
chaste, but simultaneously aware of the sexual temptations in the world around them. Women
losing their virtue had devastating consequences in the proto-feminist mind; it was the road to
sex work and/or to death. Binhammer argues that this view of female sexuality and belief in
the innate reality of the seduction narrative as defined in 18th century literature, was far from
progressive in the same way that many of these proto-feminist writers other views were
progressive and liberal-minded, and actually influenced a static view of female sexuality
(specifically middle-class female sexuality) that was pervasive well into the late Victorian
era16. Binhammer even goes so far as to argue that female sexuality as defined in the seduction
narratives and discourses on womanhood in late 18th century proto-feminist literature directly
informed what would become the Victorian era’s idea of proper femininity as manifested in
‘the Angel in the House’ trope17. For the next century, and arguably beyond, proper women
were defined as completely asexual beings (but constantly alert to threats to their chastity in
the world around them), sex workers were either shameless and dirty or, if they were suitably
repentant and ashamed, the unwilling victims of deceptive male libertines, and men, in their
turn, were naturally lecherous. It was in the 1800s that the sex industry came to be seen as
symbolic of Britain as a godless society and this arguably had its roots in the picture painted
of ‘fallen’ women in the seduction narrative so favoured by proto-feminist novelists who had
in their turn been influenced by the similar writings of Richardson and his circle.

For many people living in 18th century England, then, the seduction narrative was more than
simply a plotline utilised in literature for dramatic or moral effect. It had a real-world impact,
and what it had to say about the sexual differences between men and women was palpable.
Even for 18th and early 19th century novelists, who were certainly well-acquainted with using
melodrama in their work for entertainment’s sake, displayed an actual belief in the seduction
narrative in their personal lives and their more personal writings. But when compared to the
lives and experiences of actual fallen women, as defined by long 18th century standards, does

15
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800,’ (Cambridge University Press, 2009),
pp. 138
16
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative, pp. 138
17
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative, pp. 139
the seduction narrative have any relevance? Indeed, dismissing the seduction narrative as
mainly myth is not to dismiss the idea of a sexual double-standard in this period. Men certainly
did take advantage of the fact they had more leeway when it came to their sexuality, and there
were certainly a number of women working in the sex industry, in London specifically, who
had turned to it after being seduced by a male superior or after being deceived by a bawd, as
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies often touted this fact as titillation in its various annual
guides from the late 1750s onwards18. But generally, the seduction narrative simplifies and
speaks over the actual experiences of real sex workers living and working in Georgian England.
There were more factors at play regarding why these women ended up occupying the so-called
demi-monde, in brothels, or working the streets, there was more to their lives than endless
suffering and despair, and if they did suffer, it sprang from more than some kind of divine
punishment for their unnatural sexual behaviour. Higher class courtesans, like Sophia Baddeley
and Harriette Wilson, left behind memoirs of their own experiences and the most common
motifs of the seduction narrative are nowhere to be found. Sophia Baddeley in particular, seems
to have defined her involvement in the sex industry as a way to indulge her pleasure and desire
for independence, once telling her companion, Eliza Steele, that she cared very little for the
judgement of society and that her body belonged to her alone and she would ‘do with it as [she]
please[d]19.’ Harriette Wilson echoed similar sentiments in her own memoirs, writing that she
had already decided to seek a life of independence and glamorous living as a young girl20.
Perhaps it was easier for these women to seek pleasure because they were middle class in birth
and the circles they moved in were on the upper echelons of society, but even lower-class sex
workers who lived humbler lives had their own reasons for entering the industry that did not
spring from exploitation, deception or shaky morality. Peg Plunkett, a lower-class Irish brothel
madam, writes in her own memoirs that she turned to the sex industry after her family fell on
hard times21 and her memoirs, generally, suggest Peg’s choices in life were based on financial
ambitions; she would rise in the ranks of Dublin and London society on the back of this, coming
to own a chain of brothels. Whilst these women who left their own memoirs and were extremely
successful in their endeavours cannot speak for the experiences of all women in the sex industry
at this time, the reasoning behind their entering the sex industry are reflected in the rest of the
industry. Poverty and wealth inequality were some of the main reasons women entered the sex

18
Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, The Garment and the Man, pp. 365
19
Katie Hickman, Courtesans, (Harper Perennial, 2003), pp. 65
20
Katie Hickman, Courtesans, pp, 150
21
Julie Peakman, Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, (Quercus, 2015), pp. 6
industry (Dan Cruickshank suggests that a lot of sex workers in London were in the industry
on top of other financial endeavours22); sex work offered them a chance to make more money
than they may typically earn in the drudgery of the small selection of jobs women were
permitted to take up in this era. Arguably, whilst some women did find the nature of their job
distasteful, most of them did not simply lie down and die, as the seduction narrative suggests,
but instead, became business-minded. The seduction narrative fails to recognise that women
had to find a solution to the wealth inequality they faced, failed to recognise their bodily
autonomy and placed far too much importance on virtuous appearances and modes of conduct
in reflecting the moral character of a woman. Women’s actual experiences tell us far more than
the ideology of literature of the period.

In conclusion, deconstructing and following the seduction narrative’s progress throughout the
century can illuminate how exactly people’s beliefs about sexuality and gender were changing
and evolving. It shows us how prejudice against and misunderstanding of female sexuality and
women who lived by that sexuality transcended the decades and evolving political boundaries.
Indeed, the seduction narrative became so real as a potential danger in Georgian England that
it influenced legal definitions of sex work and institutions that claimed to offer, at least on the
surface, help to fallen women. Furthermore, by comparing the ideology espoused by the
seduction narrative against the words and experiences of women who actually lived and
breathed in the sex industry, one can evaluate where exactly the seduction narrative went
wrong, as well as what kind of women it left out and whether this was deliberate or not. Lastly,
by studying the 18th century seduction narrative and comparing it to reality, we can see our
own times reflected too. After all, anti-sex work activists in the present day often attempt to
speak for all sex workers, assuming they have all been through traumatic experiences and are
only in the industry because of sexual exploitation. These assumptions influence laws aimed
at the modern-day sex worker, that not only harm them, but also fail to evaluate more common
reasons women enter the sex industry, such as wealth inequality and lack of autonomy in a
patriarchal society. This certainly echoes the 18th century’s attitudes towards women and sex
workers, and their fascination with constant assaults against femininity and virtue, that was so
well illustrated in their literature, from Richardson to Wollstonecraft.

(4380 words in total, not including footnotes, titles and bibliography)

22
Dan Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, (Windmill Books, 2009), pp. 40
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