Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
We have lost sight of the old-fashioned language in connexion [sic] with this matter … The term ‘Social Evil’, by a queer translation of the abstract into a concrete, has become a personality … The fact is that we have familiarized ourselves too much with the subject … We seem to have arrived at this point – that the most interesting class of womanhood is woman at her lowest degradation.
The career of these women is a brief one; their downward path a marked and inevitable one; and they know this well. They are almost never rescued; escape themselves they cannot.
If the prostitute had become, as the Saturday Review termed it, ‘the most interesting class of womanhood’ in Britain in the Victorian period, what did she look like? How, and by what means, did her contemporaries depict her? Such basic questions raise further issues: What was (and perhaps still is) the significance of representations of prostitution and what role did they play in the production of myths and cultural narratives, the regulation of behaviour and the shaping of social attitudes? Historians (and others) interested in Victorian social and cultural history, and in perceptions of prostitution particularly, cannot avoid such questions and they continue to invite further analysis even after decades of innovative scholarship.
Studying contemporary representations provides a way of reading prostitution: the analysis and study of images and texts as discursive forms sheds light on the process of constructing social meaning.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Prostitute's BodyRewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014