By day, London's Georgian jelly shops served elegant desserts to respectable customers. By night, some became notorious meeting places for prostitutes, pimps and clients
In the light of day, a Georgian-era jelly shop would look perfectly respectable. A shopper might step in from the crowded London street, sit down with a glass of delicately flavoured jelly, and enjoy one of the capital’s fashionable new treats. The jelly might be clear and jewel-like, scented with fruit, wine or flowers, and served in a long, elegant glass. It was refined, modern and entirely suitable for polite company.
After dark, however, the same shop could become something entirely different. In the streets around Covent Garden, some jelly shops became intimately associated with illicit sex: places where sex workers met clients, pimps displayed women, and men took a restorative jelly before or after visiting a brothel.
Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Peter Ross explains he was initially surprised by just how fashionable jelly became in the 18th century.
“I was very amused by this; by the idea of jellies, because when I was growing up, jelly was something you had at a children’s party in a little paper bowl – a fruit jelly.”
The Georgian version was far more sophisticated, part of a culture of elaborate dining intended to display wealth, taste and refinement. Aristocratic and affluent households competed to produce impressive tables filled with substantial and decorative dishes designed to delight the tastebuds and catch the eye, including jellies.
“If you went to a Georgian-era grand banquet or a big meal at a rich person’s house, you might be served jelly. It might be dramatically moulded.”
Unlike modern packet jelly, these dishes required time, skill and expensive ingredients. Cooks had to make the setting agent themselves through a slow and labour-intensive process.
- Read more | The power of the Georgian underclass
“Gelatine could be used, which comes from boiling down various bones or from the swim bladders of certain fish,” Ross says. “It could also be made by boiling down a calf’s foot.” This extracted collagen from animal tissue, producing a clear gelatine that could be set into elaborate moulds.
“What you end up with is a flavourless jelly, so don’t imagine these things tasted savoury.”
Instead, cooks added fashionable flavourings.
“Today it’s often flavoured with fruit. The Georgians mostly flavoured it with fruit too, but you could make jelly with almost any flavour – wine-flavoured jelly, for example.”
Wine jellies, citrus jellies and jellies scented with spices or flowers all appeared on fashionable Georgian tables. They could be beautiful, delicate and expensive indicators of status – and, perhaps secondarily, a dessert.
From banquets to the high street
As 18th-century Britain became wealthier, luxuries once confined to elite households increasingly filtered into urban consumer culture.
London was central to this transformation. Its growing population supported specialist retailers of every kind: coffee houses, pastry cooks, confectioners, print sellers, toy shops and pleasure gardens. Shopping and eating out became part of the experience of city life. Jelly followed this same path.
“Gradually, during the Georgian period, jelly became so popular that jelly houses and jelly shops appeared,” Ross explains.
These shops didn’t usually serve the monumental moulded jellies of aristocratic banquets. Instead, they offered individual portions to customers who wanted a fashionable refreshment.
“During the day, you could go and have a little jelly in a jelly glass. You can still track down Georgian jelly glasses,” Ross notes. “If you imagine a long, bell-shaped sherry glass, that’s the sort of thing it was.”
For respectable customers, a jelly shop was therefore a place to enjoy an increasingly trendy sweet while shopping, socialising or strolling through London.
But many of these shops were located in and around Covent Garden, one of the most vibrant – and notorious – districts in the capital.
Covent Garden after dark
Today, Covent Garden is associated with theatres, cafés, street performers and tourists. In the 18th century, it was already a major entertainment district, but one with a much rougher edge.
The nearby Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden Theatre drew large evening crowds. Taverns, gambling venues and pleasure gardens kept the area busy late into the night, traversed by a diverse catalogue of actors, aristocrats, labourers, pickpockets, servants, tourists and sex workers.
Indeed, Covent Garden was London’s most famous red-light district.
Prostitution was highly visible there, and publications such as Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies turned the area’s sexual economy into print, offering descriptions of women, their appearances, personalities and prices for prospective clients.
Against that backdrop, some jelly shops acquired a distinct, nocturnal identity.
As Ross explains, “at night, they became places where sex workers would take their clients, pimps would parade their prostitutes, and people would go for a jelly before visiting a brothel.”
“They’re very different things to different people. During the day they’re one kind of place, and in the evening they become something completely different.”
“Therefore, many people who considered themselves respectable would never be seen dead in a jelly shop at night in Covent Garden,” Ross explains. “If they were a woman, they’d be thought of as a sex worker. If they were a man, they’d be thought of as a pimp or a client.”
“During the day, though, people didn’t think anything of it. Women could go with their husbands to a respectable jelly shop quite safely, but in the evening it had a completely different reputation.”
Jelly as Georgian Viagra?
The obvious question is why jelly became associated with sex in the first place. Part of the answer lies in 18th-century medical thinking.
“There were reasons why Georgians thought jelly was an aphrodisiac,” Ross explains. “They even thought of it as a prototype Viagra. There’s a diarist who writes that he had a jelly before going off with a prostitute – or after he’d been with one.”
18th century medicine was still strongly influenced by ideas inherited from antiquity, especially from the Greek physician Galen.
Although anatomy and observation had advanced significantly, many physicians continued to understand health through the body’s humours and qualities. Illness could be explained through imbalances: hot and cold, wet and dry, smooth and sharp.
“Their medicine was still based on the humours,” Ross says. “They thought, for instance, that sexual diseases were caused by an excess of sharpness within the body.”
If illness came from sharpness, the cure required its opposite.
“To counteract that sharpness, you needed something smooth, like a soup or a jelly.”
Jelly’s slippery texture seemed to suggest soothing, softening and healing properties. Some even thought it might protect against venereal disease.
“There was also the idea of signatures,” Ross explains, “that God had created things in the world that indicated what they could be used to treat.”
Known as the doctrine of signatures, this theory held that God had placed clues in nature to reveal the medicinal uses of plants, minerals and animal products.
- Read more | You probably eat these foods every day, so why did the ancient Romans think they were disgusting poison?
“If a flower was shaped like a liver, then if you boiled it down into a medicine, it would help your liver.”
Similar reasoning could be applied to jelly. Some jellies were made from hartshorn – the antlers of male deer – or even from elephant ivory.
Because antlers and tusks were hard, strong and associated with masculine power, they were believed capable of transferring those qualities to the human body.
“So if you were making something from something hard, then it might help make something else hard. That's why it was associated with the effects of something like Viagra.”
“It seems bizarre to us today, but they genuinely believed it.”
Peter Ross was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra