Charles Hitchen

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Let us take ourselves back to a very exciting time: we’re talking London, at the turn of the 18th century. The city is the largest in Europe, and growing - it’s passed the half a million mark and by the end of the century will have doubled. Crime was rife, and getting worse. The law was administered by a pay-to-play criminal justice system: and today's subject, Charles Hitchen, got rich playing both sides while touring through London's infamous "molly houses," back rooms of taverns or gin houses, where queer men could meet, cruise, and even fuck. These developed a much richer culture, with their own slang, faux marriage rituals, and drag performances including a queen giving birth to a wheel of cheddar cheese.

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SOURCES:

Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: Jonathan Wild and the Emergence of Crime and Corruption as a Way of Life in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 1985)

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century (Verso, 2006)

Rictor Norton, The Georgian Underworld, https://rictornorton.co.uk/gu00.htm.

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