Within the last two decades illegitimacy has been a major source of inquiry among scholars interested in the broader patterns of family formation and sexuality in past societies. The rise of illegitimacy in the eighteenth century, corresponding with the rise of pre-nuptial pregnancies, has prompted historians to speculate whether there was a major shift in attitudes and courtship customs with the onset of industrialization or urbanisation. The notion that there was such a shift has been advanced in its most flamboyant form by Edward Shorter, who has argued that the rising illegitimacy ratios in Europe denoted a fundamental rupture of the prudential and economically-motivated marriage customs of peasant societies in favour of a growing search for fulfillment and romance. As women flocked to the city, they left the older familial controls and values behind them in favour of a new, expressive sexuality.1 Illegitimacy recorded the casualties of such a quest, especially in eras of rapid transition when the new attitudes were precariously rooted in society. Historians have reacted to Shorter's sexual revolution in a number of different ways. Some have doubted whether illegitimacy ratios (the proportion of illegitimate per 100 births) could permit such a grand interpretation, largely because they could be seriously affected by changes in nuptiality and fertility. Others have contended that the crude figures masked the uneven temporalities of illegitimacy and its particular geographical and social distribution. The work of Peter Laslett, for instance, has highlighted the unusually high levels of illegitimacy in some rural rather than urban areas; and while seeing the long term trends in bastardy as crudely related to changes in fertility, it has emphasized the importance of bastard-prone societies in any explanatory equation.2 Such genera? tional continuities necessarily throw doubt about the magnitude and severity of the change in attitudes during the eighteenth century and its plausible relation to industrial and urban development. Even those who have accepted the link between rising illegitimacy and economic change have felt unhappy about Shorter's sweeping statements. Most stress the continuing and often precarious quest for stable conjugal relationships rather than any new-found liberation.3 As a contribution to this debate I propose to examine the social context of illegitimacy in eighteenth-century London. As the leading port, capital and consumption center of an aristocratic, capitalist order, London attracted a continual influx of young migrants to work in its service industries and rich variety of trades. Moreover, London has sometimes been seen as a powerful solvent of tradition mores and a promoter ofthe very values, individualism, social mobility, conducive to Shorter's sexual revolution.4 In fact it is no accident that Shorter