Volume 2

Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters.

Date:
[1819?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Portraits and lives of remarkable and eccentric characters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    205/332 (page 159)
    MOLL KING. Covent-garden has been particularized for more than a century past as the scene of midnight riot and debauchery, and it is only within the last twenty years that it has been rendered tolerably decent, as the front windows of the bagnios under the Piazza were filled from seven at night until four or five o’clock in the morning, with courte¬ zans of every description, who, in the most impu¬ dent manner, invited the passengers from the theatres into houses where they were accommo¬ dated with suppers and lodging, and frequently at the risk of all they possessed in the world. The most notorious of these brothel-keepers was Moll King, celebrated by Hogarth in his prints of the Times of the Day; and, in the Weekly Miscellany for June 9, 1739, appears the following paragraph : “ Monday, Mrs. Mary King, of Covent-garden, was brought up to the King’s -bench Bar at Westminster, and received