London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (27 page)

`Bloody Sunday' and the `West End riots' of 1886 spread unease throughout Victorian society but they did not really threaten the hegemony of the ruling elites. Socialists such as Hyndman and Burns could posture all they liked, but England was not ready for revolution. This was not France, which had seen popular uprisings in 1830, 1848 and 1871 and had a much more politicized population in its capital and a more developed revolutionary spirit. After `Bloody Sunday' radicals adopted different, less physical, tactics, perhaps aware that the capital had grown less tolerant of violent demonstrations which, as we have seen, were viewed as the manipulation of `rough elements' by power seeking mountebanks. When the authorities attempted to suppress freedoms the press would howl. But revolution? That was quite another thing. Instead efforts to deal with the social problems of inadequate and insufficient housing, unemployment (a word that was first included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1888) and poverty were continued.121 The threat of `outcast London' was less a cry for revolution and more a plea for help. Socialists now began to develop the trade union movement as a platform for social and economic reform. 112 Other politicians recognized the need for `something to be done' and Winston Churchill was to repeat these concerns 22 years later when he alleged that the `greatest danger to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European continent' but at home in the `unnatural gap between rich and poor' and the `constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment. Here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her We might observe that politicians are quite adept at highlighting the problems that face society, but are much less able to effect lasting change.

These then were the conditions under which the Ripper's victims all lived and worked. Whitechapel was a desperate place to inhabit in the nineteenth century and despite the attempts of reformers to improve the area it remained a district stained by poverty, neglected and overcrowded well into the twentieth century. In this part of the capital many of its inhabitants were simply driven by the need to survive. In doing so one section of this society turned to prostitution and this became another `great social evil' for middle-class reformers to concern themselves with. This is the focus of the following chapter.

6

City of Dreadful Delights:

Vice, Prostitution and Victorian Society

One of the first things that anyone reads about the Ripper murders is that all of the victims were prostitutes, or `unfortunates' as contemporaries preferred to describe them. However, it is probably more accurate to say that all of the women killed by the Whitechapel murderer had been selling themselves for sex on the streets shortly before they met their death, and their individual paths to this desperate measure will be considered later. The Victorians' relationship with prostitution - indeed with sex and sexuality - has been the subject of intense historical enquiry since Steven Marcus published his `startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian life' in 1964.1 Since then there has been a growing body of work that has debunked the prevailing belief that the Victorian age was entirely suffused with prudery, including the notion that they covered up their table legs to protect the innocent.2 However, it is certainly true that the Victorians were very concerned with the problem of prostitution and throughout the nineteenth century attitudes towards sex and sexually transmitted diseases informed debates about the sex trade and those who worked in it.3 In this chapter we will meet some of the key speakers in this ongoing discussion and consider some of the ways in which Victorian society sought to deal with the social problems occasioned by prostitution. We will also look at the ways in which reformers sought to deal with prostitution and, in particular, with child prostitution and so-called `white slavery' (which we term `people trafficking' in the twenty-first century).

As Sigsworth and Wyke have written, [it] `is difficult to resist the impression that prostitution resolved itself into a physical expression of the class structure of Victorian society. So while the clients were drawn from the ranks of working-, middle- and upper-class men, the suppliers were exclusively working class women and girls.' It was suggested that upper-class gentlemen from the West End were preying on the daughters of the working classes in the East. The Pall Mall Gazette, under the zealous direction of its now familiar campaigning editor, William Stead, actively promoted the `decadent aristocrat' thesis to explain the murders in 1888.' That he was able to do so can be explained by the phenomenon of `slumming' that saw middle- and upper-class Londoners regularly travelling to the rougher parts of the capital to experience the excitement of working-class nightlife and to observe the poor in their natural habitats. They went because such areas were, as Seth Kovan notes, `anarchic, distant outposts of empire peopled by violent and primitive races'. They were, he continues, both `prosaically dull and dangerously carnivalesque'.6 Slumming fed a vicarious interest in the world of the `other' in the same way that reading about the adventures of explorers and missionaries, or viewing the exhibitions at the British Museum or in innumerable travelling sideshows fired the imaginations of nineteenth-century Britons. While `Darkest Africa' might have been far beyond the horizons (and pockets) of most Victorians, the East End was, as Kovan points out, merely a short and relatively inexpensive journey by hansom cab, omnibus or the new underground railway. Thus, Whitechapel and its environs attracted all sorts of visitors in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of whom came - as we have seen in the previous chapter- with the higher purpose of trying to help improve the living conditions of the people that dwelt there. Others, like Henry Mayhew and Frederick Greenwood, came to investigate and comment upon what they saw. Still others came to play and gawp and satisfy their lusts.

CONTEMPORARY DESCRIPTIONS OF PROSTITUTION IN LONDON

Henry Mayhew dedicated the first 100 pages of his study of London's labouring poor to the problem of prostitution in London, which was penned by his colleague, Bracebridge Hemyng.' Prostitution was rife in Victorian London. Hemyng conceded that the real numbers of women engaged in the trade was almost impossible to determine but that there could be anywhere between 8,000 to 80,000 or more operating in the late 1850s. Many of these were to be found in the East End but areas such as Haymarket, Charing Cross, Regent Street and the West End more generally were frequently referred to as locations for prostitution. The French writer Guy de Maupassant wrote a short story in the late nineteenth century entitled A Night in Whitechapel in which two friends are shocked by an encounter with a young woman outside a local pub:

Under the softening influence of alcohol we looked at the vague smile on those lips hiding the teeth of a child, without considering the youthful beauty of the latter. We saw nothing but her fixed and almost idiotic smile, which no longer contrasted with the dull expression of her face, but, on the contrary, strengthened it. For in spite of her teeth, to us it was the smile of an old woman, and as for myself, I was really pleased at my acuteness when I inferred that this grandmother with such pale lips had the teeth of a young girl. Still, thanks to the softening influence of alcohol, I was not angry with her for this artifice. I even thought it particularly praiseworthy, since, after all, the poor creature thus conscientiously pursued her calling, which was to seduce men. For there was no possible doubt that this grandmother was nothing more nor less than a prostitute.

This passage reflects the debilitating effects of alcohol and poverty that characterized the lives of many street prostitutes in the capital. Hemyng had divided prostitutes into three classes: `those women who are kept by men of independent means; secondly, those women who live in apartments, and maintain themselves by the produce of their vagrant armours; and thirdly, those who dwell in brothels" His neat division must have blurred the reality: some women would have fallen between these positions and many women turned to prostitution as a desperate attempt to feed themselves or their family when other forms of employment had dried up or alcoholism had rendered them unfit to pursue any other calling. Hemyng found that brothels even contained married women, such as the French woman he met in Haymarket, who `loved her husband, but he was unable to find any respectable employment, and were she not to supply him with the necessary funds for their household expenditure they would sink into a state of destitution, and anything, she added, was better than that'9

Prostitutes in Whitechapel worked the streets for paltry returns. They feature in Hemyng's survey as `Those who live in low lodging houses. Typically they would earn a few pennies for servicing their clients, often exactly the sum they needed to pay for that night's rent or `doss' That they drank to relieve the tedium and grim reality of their lives is hardly surprising. Like modern-day sex workers (many of whom are addicted to hard drugs such as heroin or crack cocaine) nineteenth-century prostitutes were commonly dependent upon alcohol. This allowed many observers to dismiss them as part of the `residuum, that broad unwashed mass of humanity that blighted the streets of the capital. The ability to categorize prostitutes as somehow the antithesis of respectable womanhood further coloured attitudes towards them. As we shall see these attitudes changed across the century but arguably continue to resurface in modern strategies to deal with the problem. According to Hemyng since most of the lodging houses were owned and run by immigrant Jews many women had few qualms about avoiding the rent whenever possible. Known as `bunters' some managed to live a fly-by-night existence flitting from room to room without paying their debts. One (with the delightful sobriquet of `Chousing Bett') told Hemyng that she `never paid any rent, hadn't done it for years, and never meant to' and then she continued, revealing the latent anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Britain, `They was mostly Christkillers, and chousing a Jew was no sin; leastways, none as she cared about committing"'

Reading Hemyng's account of his visits to prostitutes and his conversation with them one is struck by the way in which he is seemingly intent on describing these women as coming from a world quite apart from his own and presumably that of his readership. There is also the possibility that his subjects are aware of his desire for danger, authenticity and difference. Sitting in a public house with `Chousing Bett, `Swindling Sal' and discussing the talents of `Lushing Loo' we are bound to wonder if these women are having a joke at the po-faced journalist's expense. We learn that these street prostitutes can earn £8 or £10 a week but that £4 or £5 was more likely; how much of this was true or involved an element of property crime as well is much harder to establish. Clearly whatever these women earned, much of it went in rent (unless they were successful at `bunting') or on drink. Lushing Loo, when she did appear, promptly spent the half crown Hemyng gave her on a 'drain of plane' (gin) until she was `perfectly drunk' and started to sing. When asked her history she again revealed that she was quite aware of this form of reformist enquiry: `Oh, I'm a seduced milliner ... anything you like, before going on to tell her interrogator a fairly typical tale of a descent from a respectable upbringing from which she ran away for a soldier, a broken heart, desperation, prostitution, drink and now merely a wish to die. The story may be melodramatic, it may be either true, false or a compilation of half-truths: whatever it is, it probably serves as a blueprint for many of London's `unfortunates' in the second half of the century."

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION AND ITS TOLERATION IN BRITAIN

Prostitution has had a long history of toleration in Britain and while there were several attempts to control and suppress the trade throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it has never actually been made illegal. It was tolerated because it supposedly protected the innocent young women of the middle and upper classes from the rapacious desires of young and older males. `Sexual desire in men was considered to be overpowering whereas in women it was passive and controllable' writes Paula Bartley."Z By the middle of the nineteenth century prostitutes were being `catalogued with the detritus of society; they were "dissolute"; "fallen", "wretched"; the "Great Social Evil" of a society that was eager to stress its morality and progress' .13 In many respects prostitution was tolerated so long as it was not too overt, too brash, too sexually threatening. In eighteenth-century London streetwalkers who harassed passersby on the Strand or in St Paul's churchyard would find themselves rounded up by the watch or City constables and dragged before the magistracy to be reprimanded, fined or sent to the Bridewell House of Correction. Those who kept a lower profile or worked in one of the capital's more exclusive high-class brothels escaped such unwanted attention.14

The Victorian middle classes feared that prostitution would pollute respectable society, wrecking marriages, breaking-up the family home and destroying the very fabric of the nation. While at one level it was conceded that young men needed an outlet for their `natural' lusts it was also recognized that prostitution carried the twin threat of moral and physical disease. The early Victorian period was no less blighted by venereal disease than had been the supposedly more libertine Hanoverian age that preceded it. Medical science still offered very little by way of a cure for syphilis and at least one member of the Royal Family was believed to have contracted the often-fatal condition. By the second half of the nineteenth century there had been some decline in incidents of syphilis but the emergent medical profession still pressed for measures to control its As we have seen in relation to housing policy the Victorian period cannot be seen as one of creeping and inevitable state intervention. Early attempts at public health policy floundered as the Board of Health was wound up in 1858, some four years after its key proponent, Edwin Chadwick, had himself been ousted from office." The newly created, and much less prominent, Medical Office was headed by John Simon who adopted a much less interventionist approach to public health while at the same time being fully committed, as Chadwick was, to the importance of raising standards of health in Britain and its Empire. The other important development of 1858 was the Medical Act of that year which went a long way to legitimizing the position of scientific medicine in the public consciousness. The 1858 act enshrined in law the `statutory definition of a medical practitioner' along with a register and a general medical council to police it." The medical profession had arrived and this newfound legitimacy was to manifest itself in a determined assault on prostitution and the curse of venereal diseases.