During his stay in Liverpool in 1847 the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson asked friends whether prostitution remained as ‘gross’ a problem as when he had first visited the town over a decade earlier, when ‘no boy could grow up safe’. He was told that it was no better or worse. As a major seaport, Liverpool had always attracted prostitutes. Thomas Troughton recalls the ‘unrestrained licentiousness’ of the town in 1773, bustling with ‘common prostitutes, parading the public streets, in all the fashionable elegances of dress, or conveyed in chairs and carriages to the public amusements’.

Police and prison statistics give a clue to the number of prostitutes in the nineteenth century, bearing in mind that not all of them were arrested. In 1837 the Head Constable identified 400 brothels, each housing an average of five women. There were also about 2,000 prostitutes living in lodging-houses, a total of over 4,000 women. Dr William Sanger estimated that in 1839 the sailors’ quarter alone supported about 2,900 prostitutes. Modern historians suspect this to be only a third of the actual number. Relative to its size, Liverpool was arguably Victorian England's ‘capital of prostitution’.

The geography of prostitution was widespread. Women loitered about the Sailors’ Home waiting for the men to be paid. Indeed, the entire waterfront district, from Lancelot's Hey through Castle Street, from Wapping to Park Lane and Paradise Street, right down to Parliament Street, was inhabited by prostitutes.