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At one performance in the New Theatre in London's Haymarket, the crowd waited impatiently for the promised act, which was to produce a man out of a bottle. When the act – and the man – failed to appear, someone threw a lighted candle on to the stage. Most of the audience left in a panic; the ones who stayed demolished the theatre. Even without a riot, theatre audiences were noisy and rumbustious, and would heckle, whistle and hiss if they didn't like the performance.
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Sex was on public view in a way that would have been unthinkable before or after the Georgians. Bawdy songs and pornographic prints were easily available, and there was a huge volume of erotic literature that was widely read. The pornographic novel Fanny Hill was an enormous bestseller, earning its publisher £10,000. Newspapers openly advertised sexual services, and a man seeking a prostitute could buy directories such as The Whoremonger's Guide to London. Most of this 'sex in print' was aimed at men, of course, but Georgians also assumed that women possessed sexual appetites and had a right to have them satisfied.
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All things were not equal, though, between men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, denounced marriage as 'legalised prostitution' and, like many of the French revolutionaries, argued that free love would end the sexual double standard.
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