Like a nineteenth-century Zagat’s for brothels, Prostitution Exposed appended reviews to its list of addresses and names, and later guides followed suit. The seven brothel guide titles that survive in archives today contain a total of 297 reviews, with 213 (72 percent) offering praise that highlights the gentility and respectability of these houses of prostitution and the women who worked in them. Sixty-five of the 213 positive brothel descriptions (about 30 percent of the total) used the terms “quiet,” “orderly,” “private,” “genteel,” and/or “respectable” to describe the merits of various houses. Most other positive reviews made similar, class-based judgments using similar language. They reflected middle-class social values in their promises, for instance, that a house was “free from vulgarity,” possessed a “good reputation,” or treated men with respect and decorum. In 1839, the fine house run by Julia Brown was noted for its unsurpassed “good order,” a direct rebuttal to the judgment implicit in the nineteenth-century legal term for a brothel, a “disorderly house.” As I will discuss shortly, prostitutes and brothel keepers (in first-class houses, exclusively women until at least mid-century) were also praised for their good breeding, “agreeable” temperaments, and well-mannered behavior.
Historians have offered various explanations for the curious emphasis on gentility and respectability in these guides and the absence of explicitly sexual language. The tone and content of American brothel guides, especially when compared with the bawdiness of English ones, led historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle to call them “priggishly American: pragmatic, straightforward, empirical, and objective.” Other historians have regarded this apparent priggishness as a thinly veiled mockery of urban moral reformers and a critique of middle-class men’s hypocrisy. American brothel guides’ constant reassurances about gentility can certainly be read this way, and they may even represent an effort to camouflage the true purpose of these guides. My study offers additional ways of reading this evidence: as authors’ anticipation that their readers were class-conscious men who would be concerned about the dangers involved in brothel-going, about the possibility of social discomfort in these unfamiliar settings, and about whether they could visit brothels without compromising their own sense of themselves as respectable gentlemen.