Rare. There are five separate impressions in the BM and examples at Yale, Harvard and Tufts.
A striking portrait of the notorious coffee-house keeper Moll King with an example of low-life “cant” language below the image.
A formidable-looking King is show staring directly at the viewer while she pours a drink into a small glass. Moll King (1696-1747) was the proprietor of King’s Coffee House an infamous meeting point for prostitutes and thieves in London’s Covent Garden. Moll ran the establishment along with her husband Tom King who had been educated at Eton and Cambridge and so brought upper-class acquaintances to the coffee house. The flash dialogue beneath the portrait is taken from The Life and Character of Moll King (published in the year that Moll died and very rare) and is supposedly a conversation between Moll and one of her customers, Harry Moythen:
Harry: To pay, Moll, for I must Hike.
Moll: Did you call me, Master?
Harry: Ay, to pay in a Whiff
“For over twenty years King’s was the most notorious and successful meeting-place in Covent Garden. William Hogarth depicted Moll’s coffee house in his Morning; her building and sign are clearly visible, and a fight is going on inside. Ronald Paulson points out that Hogarth places it to the other side of the square from its actual location so that it partially obscures Inigo Jones’s St Paul’s and forms the juxtaposition he wanted. Henry Fielding refers to it in Pasquin, and the prologue to his Covent Garden Tragedy asks **‘What rake is ignorant of King’s Coffee House?’”** (ODNB)
“Throughout her career, King was prosecuted for keeping a disorderly house. The Life and Character of Moll King says she was indicted nearly twenty times but very rarely convicted. For example, in May 1736 she was censured for allowing the men who disrupted a mass to get drunk at her house, and in November 1737 she was fined for keeping a ‘Disorderly House at which sexual offences were committed’ (Burford, 58). She was in king’s bench prison briefly in June 1739 for refusing to pay a £200 fine for beating a young man in her coffee house; she insisted she was keeping order and said ‘if she was to pay Two Hundred Pounds to all the insolent Boys she had thrash’d for their Impudence, the Bank of England would be unable to furnish her with the Cash’ (Life and Character, 15).”
