The Rake's Rendez-Vous; or the Midnight revels wherein are delineated the various humours of Tom King's Coffee House in Covent Garden

by George Bickham the younger
ca. 1735

British Museum 1868,0808.3578

This engraving shows the interior of the Kings' Coffee House, looking toward the bar and, through the open door, Covent Garden Market with its central pillar. On the far left a man reads a letter inscribed "To M^rs Yeats." "Y—es" in the poem "The Rake's Progress; or, The Humours of Drury Lane" (1735) is the name of the "Darling of his [the Rake's] Heart." Another man nearby throws the contents of his glass in a woman's face. Seated next to her is a woman ignoring the commotion and smoking a long tobacco pipe (identified as the prostitute Sally Salisbury in pencil under the verses). A third woman vomits. At her feet are two dogs mating. Pinned to the wall behind them is a print showing a woman working at an anvil, and the words "dump dump dump H. C." A black woman known as "Black Betty" passes by with a jug and glass. At the far left is a partial view of an older woman pointing upwards, perhaps a more flattering portrait of Moll King in the same headdress she wears in the well-known portrait of her by George Bickham. In the centre stands a young handsome man (identified in pencil as "A celebrated Highwayman Jn Maclane or Turpin?"); another stands close behind him and clutches the top of his arm. Standing beside these two, a man holds the upper tip of his cane to his nose and suggestively touches the hilt of his sword (he is identified in pencil as "Mr Apreece," who John Timbs describes in Club Life of London: "a tall thin man in rich dress, was [Moll's] constant customer"). A framed artwork behind them, titled "The Curious Doctor," depicts a quack sniffing at the exposed buttocks of a woman on her hands and knees, and a monk laughing behind them. At front right, a woman, possibly aware of filth through which she might be dragging her skirts, holds them up above the floor. Or, she may be shielding the activities of the couple behind her on the far right from view: a woman with a fan is seated beside a drunken man wearing the collar of a clergyman or lawyer, her skirt apparently hiked up over his lap. On the table in front of him is a slice of fruit suggestive of a woman's genitalia; an open spigot above pouring gin over his head seems to allude to his state of arousal. This part of the scene seems likely to be a deliberate allusion to the clergyman and harlot in the funeral scene in Plate 6 of Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress, 1732 (the man is identified in pencil as "Hogarths Parson").

The verses below the image read:

What Wild Disorder from ill Conduct flows
This Night-Piece, like a faithful Mirror shows.
Hear drunken Templars, Rakes, & Men of Taste:
Their Constitutions & their Substance waste
Here lustful Strumpets, with their Bosoms bare
Mix with y^e Motly Throng, drink, smoke, & swear.
Destruction lurks in their Contagious Breath,
Their Eyes are Basilisks, their Jokes are Death.