London's Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London's Georgian Age by Dan Cruickshank

Author:Dan Cruickshank [Cruickshank, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Great Britain, History, Social History, Social Science
ISBN: 0312658982
Google: wdOiNVveUoQC
Amazon: B0049MPVR2
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-11-23T03:00:00+00:00

Act Three

The Taste of Sin

Twelve

Vice Takes Centre Stage

John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera

Prostitution shaped London’s economy and physical appearance, but its influence was more pervasive than that. It extended as far as the visual arts, literature, and even into such apparently esoteric areas as aesthetics, antiquarianism and the study of the ancient and primitive worlds. In fact, it transformed the social attitudes and taste of an entire age. And as attitudes and taste changed, they in turn influenced the general perception of prostitution.

If there is a single event that epitomises this transformation it is the first performance of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in January 1728. The Beggar’s Opera was a phenomenon. It marked a complete stylistic break from the Italian-style operas that had been so popular up until then, substituting simple ballads in English for highly wrought arias in a language most of the audience would not have understood. Its subject matter could not have been more different, either. Italian opera was not rooted in a world that any of its audience would actually have experienced – it was exotic and heroic, drawing heavily from history and legend. The Beggar’s Opera, by contrast, was unashamedly topical and unheroic. It offered a shrewd critique of the morality of the age, exposing and attacking the political corruption, greed and bullying behaviour of the upper echelons of society, with a plot centred upon London’s underworld and a castlist of harlots and robbers. This low-life setting was offered as a metaphor for the immoral worlds of politics and exploitative business, with the Whig administration of Sir Robert Walpole being a particular target. The opera asked a simple question. Who is the more corrupt: the powerful man who uses and abuses his position with impunity so as to indulge his own lusts and greed, or the poor man and the harlot, victims of circumstance, who are forced into crime or immorality in order to stay alive – and almost invariably punished by death?

The opera – a huge and instant success – turned the world upside down. It made the sex industry and low-life in general romantic. It transformed outlaws into, if not exactly paradigms of morality, utterly compelling anti-heroes, and it suggested that the apparently respectable but self-seeking ruling classes who lived as though they were above the law were the real villains and hypocritical corruptors of society.

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