London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (28 page)

The Crimean War had exposed the problem of sexually transmitted diseases within Britain's armed forces. Politicians and military leaders along with moral crusaders and medical practitioners bemoaned the state of the `thin red line' that protected the wealth and power of the Empire. The dual theme of public health and public morality was in evidence here, as indeed it was to remain throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. That soldiers and sailors consorted with prostitutes was considered to be inevitable. After all few servicemen were married or were allowed to have their wives with them on campaign or in barracks. `Lushing Loo' herself had been with a number of soldiers and regaled Bracebridge Hemyng with this charming ditty that neatly sums up the problem of venereal disease and, in this case at least, petty crime:

The response to these problems was to create legislation that would target the perceived polluters of the military machine: the street prostitutes operating in the barrack towns and naval ports of Britain. The Contagious Diseases Act (CDA) of 1864 (along with amendments and extensions to the acts in 1866 and 1869) affected 18 protected districts that contained major garrison stations and threw a 10-mile cordon around them. The acts enabled the arrest and compulsory medical examination, by a military surgeon, of any woman suspected by plainclothed police of being a 'common prostitute"' If the woman was found to be diseased she could face detainment and treatment in a 'lock hospital' for up to a year. The act enshrined the `double standard' of Victorian gender politics and concentrated all its attack on disease upon the body of the working-class prostitute rather than on the actions of her clients. The examination was particularly invasive and this, along with the acceptance of prostitution that the acts implied, led to a strong response from Victorian feminists and social moralists against what they saw as an attack on women and the state regulation of vice.20

From the 1870s onwards Josephine Butler organized an active campaign for the repeal of the CDA, welcoming on board interested parties from across the political and social spectrum. Butler met with fierce opposition but by 1883 had managed to persuade a significant number of MPs to back her cause.21 Butler had formed the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which was able to recruit prominent female voices, such as Florence Nightingale, to argue that the CDA not only represented an attack on female civil liberties but also `implicated the state in sanctioning male vice: 22 This latter imputation was a crucial one; prostitution was not illegal as we have already established but the idea that in some way the state should accept it as a legitimate activity was anathema to many Victorians. The CDA were repealed in 1886 and must be considered to be a failure of state intervention in public health. The acts, in targeting garrison towns, completely ignored the fact that most prostitutes operated in London. Any attempt to extend the acts to the capital would have failed as medical experts estimated that in order to treat all the infected streetwalkers in London the authorities would have to double the number of hospital beds then available. The cost of administering the CDA in London was thus prohibitive. Any soldier or sailor wishing to use a prostitute was more than capable of taking one of the many trains to London or other towns and cities not covered by the legislation. The cordon sanitaire, as it was, was therefore largely ineffectual.

Historians have debated the underlying reasons behind the introduction of the CDA as well as considering the repeal campaign within the context of evolving feminism in the nineteenth century. Clearly the authorities were concerned with the health and effectiveness of the armed forces - a concern that continued to inform debates about morality and sexual health throughout the century. These debates were also closely linked to concerns about the state of the working classes more generally. Naturally these areas are hard to separate: it was working-class men that filled the ranks of the armed forces, and working-class men that worked the mines, manufactories and other industries that fuelled industrial growth and underpinned the power and wealth of Empire. In 1885 the Rev J. M. Wilson addressed a public meeting in London calling for a campaign of social purity `for the good of your nation and your country' He was speaking in the aftermath of national concerns about the Empire, the defeat of General Gordon, the threat of nationalism in Ireland and socialism at home as well as rising feminism that challenged the status quo of Victorian patriarchy.23 These concerns resurfaced at the turn of the century as proponents of eugenics looked at the degraded specimens that were called upon to defend the Empire in southern Africa. Thus we can view the CDA as part of a series of measures aimed at controlling the behaviour and health of the working classes. In particular the CDA were an attempt to impose middle-class values and respectability on working-class women and to remove from them one of their opportunities to earn an income that was not controlled by male society. As Jeffrey Weeks has written: `Repressive public sanctions [such as the CDA] would make the move into prostitution a different kind of choice than when it could constitute a temporary and relatively anonymous stage in a woman's life' 24 Hemyng was aware of this when he surveyed the returns of prostitutes arrested by the Metropolitan Police between 1850 and 1860. Of the nearly 42,000 women (all `disorderly' it should be noted - as was stated earlier it was rowdy drunken behaviour that got one arrested not prostitution per se) many gave respectable occupations before the magistracy. Now it may be that they did so in the hope of more lenient treatment or to help fulfill a contemporary discourse of `fallen womanhood, but it is also indicative of the vulnerability of working-class women to the fluctuations of the lifecycle and the job market. So while it is possible that working-class women enjoyed a life of prostitution, at least as far as it allowed them some degree of freedom, however degraded, it was but one option available to them, and perhaps one that was viewed differently within working-class communities than it was by middle-class commentators who never needed to descend to that level of personal sacrifice.

The testimonies of individual East End women who turned to prostitution are sadly lost to us (if they ever existed at all) and we are reliant on sifting through the words of those who, like Henry Mayhew, Bracebridge Hemyng and Josephine Butler, wrote about the women they met or `rescued' from the streets. The Women's Library on Old Castle Street, Whitechapel, houses the collected letters of Butler and the archive of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the CDA, as well as records of the National Vigilance Association and the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene; but within these there is little that brings us to a closer understanding of the working girls of East London. These women do appear in the registers of the Thames Police Court where magistrates such as Lushington regularly fined, imprisoned or reprimanded them for being drunk and using'obscene Women rarely appear charged as prostitutes or for prostitution for this was not a crime in itself. We can but presume that many of the women brought in for drunkenness were streetwalkers, arrested for causing a nuisance and for being disrespectful to police officers who tried to move them on. Julia Lefair (a French immigrant perhaps or maybe `Lefair' was simply an elegant nom de plume?) appears on more than one occasion for drunk and disorderly behaviour. Lefair gave her age as 28 or 29 and is one of the very few women between June and December 1888 who is referred to as a 'prostitute'. Ellen Mansfield (27) was sentenced to 14 days hard labour for `soliciting prostitution' in August of that year while Lefair herself was discharged without further sanction.26

We know that Catherine Eddowes had been arrested for being drunk and incapable on the night she was murdered but had been let out of police custody when she had sobered up. This must have been, as it had been in the eighteenth century, a fairly regular way of dealing with inebriated streetwalkers (and others). The police must have known that many of these women would simply have been reprimanded and released by the magistrates and so a short spell in the cells was sufficient punishment for the majority of them. Those who were obstreperous might well expect more severe treatment, especially if they resisted attempts to move them on and assaulted the constable (verbally or physically) in the process. Elizabeth Stride, who met her death on the same night as Eddowes, had been prosecuted at Thames Police Court on 8 August 1888 (the night after Martha Tabram was brutally murdered in Gunthorpe Street) for being drunk and using obscene language; she was fined 5s or offered five days' imprisonment - she paid the fine. There are occasional examples of offenders being prosecuted for their direct involvement in the sex trade. Elizabeth Parker and Isabel Smith, both women in their early twenties, were charged with keeping brothels. Parker was fined £10 and Smith (alias Hayes) received a slightly higher sanction of £15: the `madams' both paid up.

As Jeffrey Weeks has noted, the CDA allowed the Victorian police `an easy opportunity for general surveillance of poor neighbourhoods' outside of the capital and the enforcement of legislation to penalize vagrancy and drunkenness effectively meant that the police did not need specific laws to combat prostitution within London itself. The prosecutions of Elizabeth Parker and Isabel Smith in 1888 may also reflect the implementation of legislation passed in 1885 to suppress brothels." The clampdown on indoor prostitution had the unwanted (but surely not unforeseen) effect of pushing women onto the streets and into the arms, not only of `bullies' (or in modern terms, `pimps') but also in the path of the Ripper. The year 1885 had also seen the Rev Wilson demand a return to social purity' as we saw earlier. That year had been dominated by the expose of child prostitution in the capital by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, and this story, like that of the CDA, is worth repeating because it tells us something about attitudes towards sex and sexuality in the late Victorian period.

THE `MAIDEN TRIBUTE' AND THE TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

On 4 July 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette issued a warning to its readership:

We say quite frankly to-day that all those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are passed in the London Inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days. The story of an actual pilgrimage into a real hell is not pleasant reading, and is not meant to be. It is, however, an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, `abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived. But it is true, and its publication is necessary.28

This wonderful journalistic device helped ensure that over the next few days the paper enjoyed unprecedented sales and its editor, the renewed attention that he and his cause desired. Stead wanted to hurry along legislation that had stalled in parliament to raise the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had been opposed in the House of Lords by those peers who felt it was an unnecessary and unwelcome interference into the private sphere. Stead believed otherwise and was determined to bring the matter before the court of public opinion. At the heart of the debate lay the thorny subject of child prostitution, which Stead saw as a terrible indictment of late Victorian society. In brief he alleged that in London young virgins were being bought and sold and placed in brothels for the sexual gratification of those with the money to pay for them. He used the language of Greek mythology to invoke the `Maiden Tribute' that saw annual sacrifices made of young Athenian girls and boys to appease the Minotaur of Crete. With colourful language and a clear understanding of the dramatic, Stead declared that in modern London many more young girls were being sacrificed to `minister to the passions of the rich'. He attacked the `dissolute rich' that both preyed on these `maidens' and refused to enact the legislation that would stop it. He called upon the democratic process to right this wrong, even declaring that `unless the levying of the maiden-tribute in London is shorn of its worst abuses - at present, as I shall show, flourishing unchecked - resentment, which might be appeased by reform, may hereafter be the virus of a social revolution. It is the one explosive which is strong enough to wreck the Throne'.29 The inference here was that since certain members of the Royal Family were known to enjoy the seedier side of London entertainments they might well have indulged in this particular activity.

William Stead was not the first person to raise the subject of child prostitution; the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had arisen from a campaign begun some five years previously. Alfred Dyer had published a pamphlet in 1880 decrying The European Slave Trade in English Girls in which he showed how girls as young as 13 were taken to the Continent, often under false pretences, to work as prostitutes. Once there they were virtual or actual prisoners of the brothel keepers and hired `bullies, frequently ex-convicts, are at hand to frustrate any attempt at their Dyer agitated for reform of the law that allowed this situation to exist. The Home Office despatched its own barrister, Thomas Snagge, to investigate Dyer's allegations. Snagge found that the problem was quite as bad as Dyer claimed with the discovery that 33 British girls and women had been taken to Continental brothels between the years 1879 to 1880.31 Dyer's campaign, which drew strong vocal support from Josephine Butler and others, eventually forced the establishment of a House of Lords select committee. Snagge was able to show that traffickers were able to exploit the relative ease in obtaining false birth certificates that claimed girls as young as 15 were actually 21 (and so not subject to Continental restrictions on the age of prostitutes) but also that under English law it was not a crime to push a 13-year-old girl into the trade. The committee framed the legislation that was eventually to become law in 1885, in part because of the efforts of Stead and his supporters. Gladstone's administration had other issues (trouble in the Sudan and agitation for the extension of the franchise at home for example) and dragged its feet over passing the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Thus, while not the instigator of the campaign, Stead's intervention in July 1885 was crucial to its eventual success.