Covent Garden

Georgian London named a venereal disease after a single square.

Covent Garden was the center of the capital's sex trade in the eighteenth century, and the slang dictionaries of the period fill up with jokes built on its name. An ague is properly a fever with chills, so the phrase is a euphemism twice over.

London's sex trade had its own printed annual directory for nearly forty years.

Covent Garden was the center of London prostitution once the piazza had lost its fashionable residents, and its trade was catalogued in Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, published annually from 1757 to 1795 with names, addresses and prices. Slang gave the district a mock convent: the abbess ran the house and the nuns worked in it. A Covent Garden ague meant venereal disease.

The joke of calling a prostitute a nun is older than the phrase by centuries.

English slang had used nun, abbess and nunnery for the sex trade since at least Shakespeare's time, and eighteenth-century London simply attached the district where the trade concentrated. Covent Garden had been laid out by Inigo Jones in the 1630s as an aristocratic square, and the tenants moved out as the market and the brothels moved in. Farmer and Henley were still recording the phrase in the nineteenth century.