Prostitute Cooties

For many years prostitution and the English theater went together like peanut butter and jelly.  Actresses and whores were considered to be one and the same and prostitutes would line up in the theaters like our modern-day mollies line the boulevards.  However when celebrity skank*, Mary "Perdita" Robinson decided to get her own box seat at the theater it ruffled the feathers of a certain gentleman who decided to attack her publicly and anonymously through the Morning Post.  What an ungentleman-like manner. 

I know no rank of prostitution that can either lessen the crime or disgrace it; and, however profligate the age may be, I believe that the greatest libertine of our sex would revolt at the idea of handing a wife, sister, or daughter, in to a box where they were certain of being surrounded by public prostitutes. 

The managers owe it to the public, they owe it to themselves, to preserve the side-boxes for the modest and reputable part of the other sex; or at least, it is their duty to refuse them to actresses, swindlers, wantons in high keeping, who have the presumption to ask for them

Based on what we know of the London residents who patronized the theater, and box seats, I have a feeling if the managers enacted this request the playhouses would be quite empty!

*which was the general consensus by the public at the time due to her public affair with the Prince of Wales as well as having her name attached to numerous other affluent men.