From hack to helping the upper class

Samuel Derrick was just about the last sort of person you'd expect to become Master of Ceremonies in 18th century Bath, organising the genteel recreations of the upper crust in the Georgian city. As Jonathan Rowe explains, Derrick's previous career had been spectacularly sleazy, including compiling a best-selling book of “reviews” of London's ladies of the night.

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ON 2 April 1769, a 45-year-old Irishman, a failed actor, poet, playwright, and journalistic hack was buried in Bath Abbey.

For the previous six years, he had been Master of Ceremonies at Bath, but he is best remembered as the original author of the early editions of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a directory of London sex workers published annually for nearly 40 years from 1756.

Dublin-born Samuel Derrick was a linen draper who moved to London at the age of 22 and tried his hand as a comic actor, but with little success.

At 27, he turned to hack writing, spending money on drink, gambling, clothes, and paying for sex, forming close friendships with many of the women. Described as short, red-haired, bombastic, vain but with a “vacant countenance”, he was physically unattractive but charming and chivalrous.

He often wore expensive coats over dirty shirts. A contemporary wrote: “He required no small quantity of perfume to predominate over some odours that were not of the most fragrant kind.”

Derrick was befriended by Samuel Johnson, who employed him as a literary assistant on The Critical Review (1756-63). Johnson's friend James Boswell later described Derrick as “a little blackguard pimping dog”.

In the 1750s, Derrick began an affair with Charlotte Hayes, who became one of the most famous brothel keepers in Georgian London. Calling her high-class brothel (said to be the first in London) a “nunnery”, she kept a carriage and liveried servants and taught her “girls” manners and social graces.

Charlotte also began a relationship with Derrick's friend Robert “Beau” Tracy of Stanway House and Coscombe, Gloucestershire. Tracy was handsome, rich, a complete narcissist, and kept Charlotte in the lap of luxury until his death in 1756. Charlotte then took up with professional gambler and racehorse owner Dennis O'Kelly, who became her common-law husband.