Sir John Gonson

John Gonson served for decades as a justice of the peace and chairman of the Westminster Quarter Sessions. He became prominent in campaigns against brothels, prostitution, gambling and unlicensed drinking, working within the moral-reform movement that sought to use prosecution and public discipline to reshape London life.

Gonson personified the use of magistrates, informers and organised moral reform to police sexuality, drink and urban disorder in early eighteenth-century Westminster. Sir John Gonson died in London, England.

In Antonia Hodgson’s The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins, When Hawkins’s reforming neighbour Joseph Burden is killed, the investigation brings court politics together with the policing of vice led by magistrate Sir John Gonson.