London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (29 page)

Stead set about the process of exposing the trade by finding his very own maiden to sacrifice. He drew on the help of a former procuress and brothel madam, Rebecca Jarrett, who was willing to help Stead find a young girl fit for his purposes. In June 1885 Jarrett went to Charles Street in the poorer part of Marylebone and told the occupant, Nancy Broughton, that she `wanted a girl for a place'. This in itself was not suspicious; many young girls went into domestic service in London. However, four or five girls were rejected for being `too big or too old' before 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong applied.32 On Derby Day, 3 June, Armstrong left Charles Street in the company of Jarrett - distinctive for her limp and the cane she used as support - and seemingly disappeared. Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper reported that Eliza had been taken to a 'French accoucheuse' (a midwife), presumably to determine whether she was a virgin or not.33 Eliza had been taken to a house in Poland Street where she was undressed and given chloroform (which she said had no affect) before Stead came into her room as if he was a client. Eliza was not otherwise harmed by Stead or anyone else but he showed a rather callous attitude towards the girl. After she had been examined and drugged she was taken off to Paris to be cared for by the Salvation Army while Stead wrote up the experiment for the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Stead's intention was to demonstrate that he could easily buy a child for the purposes of sexual exploitation. However, when the story broke the girl's mother, Mrs Armstrong, claimed that she knew nothing of the actual destination of her daughter, instead believing that was going off to be a domestic servant. This was crucial because if Jarrett and Stead had taken Eliza (or `Lily' as she was to be known in Stead's articles) against her mother's wishes then they had broken the law. Mrs Armstrong was understandably keen to refute neighbourhood gossip and brickbats that she had sold her daughter into sexual slavery. The result was a very public trial of Jarrett and Stead for `unlawfully taking Eliza Armstrong aged 13, out of the possession and against the will of her father'.34 In fact it took two trials to finally determine guilt or innocence and in November 1885 Stead himself made the closing statement in his defence:

I believe everyone in court knows perfectly well that the reason I did all these things was in order, by private enterprise and private adventure, to achieve a great public good. Last May, when we began this work, the battle appeared to be going against us all round - the battle for womanhood, the battle for purity, the battle for the protection of young girls. The Criminal Law Amendment Act, which had been introduced as urgent in 1883, was hung up, having been watered down before it was hung up. Everything appeared to be lost, but there is great virtue in individual resolve, and at that time I and my few helpers descended into the thick of the fray. We succeeded in one month in driving back the host of the enemy and in planting the standard of purity, virtue and chastity within the lines that had been held by our insulting foe.

Jarrett and Stead were found guilty while others involved were acquitted. Stead was awarded first-class prisoner status and saw out his three months in Holloway Prison, retaining his uniform after his release and forever wearing it on the anniversary of his conviction. Jarrett suffered much more and was effectively abandoned by Stead who felt she had let him down both in court and in the less than particular way she had arranged for Eliza Armstrong to be `bought'. The Times regarded the sentences as appropriate `warnings to fanatics of all kinds' adding that `the zealot bows to the law, but is not the less a zealot' 35 It clearly had little time for Stead's campaigning style of journalism. The Standard was even more scathing:

The mere recital of the abominations prompted and carried through by the principal defendant almost suggests a doubt whether anything short of monomania can have led to the idea that such a sacrifice of all that was right and true and virtuous in the lives of so many people was really demanded as the price to be paid for a victory over vice.36

This was a view not shared by the Daily Chronicle. While it accepted that Stead was a fanatic, and that he had certainly broken the law through his actions, it at least credited Stead with acting from the best of intentions in noting that he `sought to accomplish a great good in the interest of society' 17

So what are we to make of the scandal of the `Maiden Tribute' and the expose of child prostitution in Victorian Britain and elsewhere? Arguably the most significant effect of Stead's newspaper campaign was in the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885. This piece of legislation raised the age of consent for girls to 16 but also set in place measures to protect young women and girls from exploitation in the sex industry. Persons procuring women under the age of 21 for prostitution within Britain or the Empire were liable for a prison sentence of up to two years and if the girl was under 13 the sentence could be extended to `penal servitude for life'.3R It also highlighted the issue of the exploitation of working-class girls by members of the aristocracy and elite. This echoed the treatment of working women by the CDA and resurfaced in the attacks on gentlemen in the wake of the Ripper murders. Middle-class moralizers such as Stead were quick to point to the poor example that many pleasure seeking `toffs' were setting to the working classes they ruled. The `Maiden Tribute' therefore offers us another glimpse into the ongoing class war between the middle and upper echelons of late Victorian society.

It also illustrates once more the gulf in understanding of working-class lives and culture by the more comfortable middling sorts. Stead's campaign built upon Dyer's less sensational one but both operate from the principle that young women were the `sexually innocent, passive victims of individual evil men' rather than a consequence of a deeply unequal capitalist society.39 This followed from the traditional view that saw prostitution as individual failings of character rather than an effect of society itself. Therefore philanthropy directed at prostitutes in the nineteenth century grew out of the prison reform movement, which spent time inside gaols talking to inmates about their path to crime. Prisons were seen as corrupting institutions and `fallen' women were viewed as redeemable but this was made more difficult if they were exposed to other criminals. Thus reformers argued that separate institutions should be created to help such women escape from prostitution. In Magdalene asylums prostitutes were subjected to a disciplined regime of moral education and industrious training to instil middle-class standards of femininity. Josephine Butler rescued working girls from the streets of Liverpool and attempted to re-educate them as `respectable' members of society. Similarly Ellice Hopkins helped establish a number of Ladies' Associations for the Care and Protection of Young Girls across the country. These had the aim of preventing young women from falling into prostitution.

Stead's campaign, building as it had on Dyer's original expose of the traffic in British girls, should not obscure the fact that earlier in the century the trade had also operated in the opposite direction. Bracebridge Hemyng's survey of London prostitutes had revealed that along with the export of poor unfortunate English girls, unscrupulous Europeans (one assumes that the English were not involved ...) regularly brought young women from the Continent to work as prostitutes in London. Again it would appear that women from Belgium (this was the subject of a complaint to the magistracy at Marylebone Police Court but other nations may well, in Hemyng's opinion, have been involved) were `imported' into Britain under false pretences and then effectively imprisoned in brothels. In Hemyng's rather colourful language these Continental mesdames were `made to fetter themselves to the trepanner, and they, in their simple-mindedness, consider their deed binding, and look upon themselves, until the delusion is dispelled [by whom one is bound to ask], as thoroughly in the power of their keepers"'

Mary Kelly, often considered to be the Ripper's final victim, had herself been trafficked to the Continent but had made her escape and return to Britain. Whether her experience was typical or, in managing to remove herself from an overseas brothel, she showed an exceptional presence of mind, we will never know. Mary did avoid sex slavery abroad but the fate that she exchanged it for she could never have imagined. Hemyng recounts the story of a London whore whom he does not name who he met in a refuge but who had shared Mary's experience. At 16, and with her parents in financial difficulty, she had advertised herself for a position in service. Her advertisement attracted the attention of a French woman who preferred English servant girls and was offering a high wage. However, when she reached France it soon became clear that her mistress had other, much less respectable intentions towards her. Luckily she was saved by one of the clients of the brothel, a young Englishman who effected her escape with the assistance of the English consul and the deployment of the young man's personal wealth. Unfortunately when she arrived back in England no one was prepared to believe her story and as a result she `found it difficult to do anything respectable, and at last had recourse to prostitution; - so difficult is it to come back to the right path when we have once strayed from it'.41 Do we believe this tale of exploitation or should we view it as another attempt by the subject of Hemyng's investigation to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear? People trafficking was a reality in the nineteenth century just as it remains a reality today. Many of its victims are deluded, seduced, greedy or simply desperate to escape the situation they find themselves in. As with much of the related history of the Whitechapel murders it is sobering to think that so little has really changed in 120 years.

REVISING THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PROSTITUTION

There are different ways to view prostitution in the late Victorian period. Judith Walkowitz's seminal study of prostitution effectively challenges the view of prostitutes as mere passive victims of male lust. Instead she sees them as independent and assertive. They also seem, when interviewed by reformers in prisons such as Millbank (where Rebecca Jarrett was left to rue her involvement with journalism), to have had higher expectations of life than other workingclass women. `Living in a society where status was demonstrated by material possessions' Walkowitz contends, `women sold themselves in order to gain the accoutrements that would afford them "self-respect"'." In this analysis we see the prostitute as a member of the urban working class, and this is particularly appropriate to the prostitutes of the East End. Walkowitz argues that the 'stereotyped sequence of girls seduced, pregnant, and abandoned to the streets fitted only a small minority of women who ultimately moved into prostitution'. The women working the streets of Whitechapel and its environs were often local girls, former domestic servants and had `lived outside the family - indeed, they would most likely have been half or full orphan. Before going onto the streets, they had already had sexual relations of a non-commercial sort with a man of their social class' 43 Prostitutes had much more control over their own trade, at least until the late 1860s and 1870s, than many do today. Bullies certainly operated in the East End along the Ratcliffe Highway but many British prostitutes were able to work without being exploited by a pimp or gang master. There was also a form of unity among the `fallen sisterhood' that bound prostitutes together in times of hardship. They sat outside of `respectable' society but it is much less clear that they were outcast: again this seems to be a rather middle-class view of respectability. Working people realized that prostitution was often a necessity and not a choice for some women.

In 1857 William Acton asked who are these `somebodies that nobody knows'?44 Hemyng had defined them by the class of men that used them (as `kept mistresses, demimondaines, low lodging house women, sailors and soldiers' women, park women and thieves' women'). But this was an oversimplification. Prostitutes were drawn, at least according to the contemporary reform organizations, from the vulnerable trades. About half were former servants, others were dressmakers, barmaids, flower girls - those working-class women that were exposed to poverty when times were hard. East End prostitutes like `Swindling Sal, who was interviewed by Hemyng, were perhaps exceptional in that they were very outgoing in their answers; most prostitutes were more `ambivalent and defensive about their occupation'45 Their decision to prostitute themselves was probably more circumstantial than deliberate. As Walkowitz has noted, the lifestyle of prostitution offered some advantages and `some women may have found the shorter hours and better pay of prostitution a temporary solution to their immediate difficulty'.46

The lack of male partner was often cited as the reason for women turning to the streets and this may well have been an important consideration. Observers also cited the very nature of Victorian cities as centres of vice because they offered too much freedom and anonymity. The overcrowding that typified cities such as London compounded the problem, forcing thousands to live in parlous conditions with the inevitable add-on problems of disease and pollution. This physical state of the poor figured prominently in the works of social observers and reformers.

In a middle class inspired tautology, immorality was associated with poverty, which simultaneously was associated with the working class. Prostitution, it was supposed, resulted from the generalised indecency of the working class as large families lived, ate, drank and slept together in one room, which made the cultivation of chastity impracticable."

Thus we return once again to the recurrent theme of middle-class morality and a desire to control the behaviour of their social inferiors. The Victorian period saw a shift in attitudes towards sex and sexuality but also towards children and childhood. The `Maiden Tribute' in some ways exemplifies this shift. As the notion of adolescence graduallybegan to establish itself in the Victorian consciousness the middle classes developed clear ideas about what was (and what was not) appropriate behaviour and pastimes for their own offspring. They then began to apply this viewpoint to the children of the working classes. However, the children of the working classes (as we saw in Chapter 5) inhabited an entirely different world to their rich compatriots. Working-class children aged 12 and above routinely worked and spent considerable amounts of time unsupervised. The independence that Walkowitz noted in East End prostitutes was a product of the freedom many young people enjoyed in the capital. This scared the middle classes who sought to control and restrict the work and leisure activities of working people, or at least to try and mould them into acting in ways which they themselves felt comfortable with. Throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian society saw wave upon wave of reforms designed to limit the ability of the `ordinary' man or woman to enjoy themselves: drinking, gambling, bare-knuckle boxing, dog fights, bullock hunting - all were curtailed or banned during this period.