Exploring the Lives of Victorian England's Prostitutes

Exploring the Lives of Victorian England's Prostitutes PDF Author: Claire Richardson
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399044680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
“As dangerous as if she stood on the corner of the street exploding gunpowder.” This was the view of ‘Miles’, a correspondent in the Bedfordshire Mercury, writing about the dangerousness of prostitutes in 1874. They were considered a scourge by the Victorians; a menace to society and a threat to the moral and physical wellbeing of a nation. Carrying disease, committing crime, corrupting others; prostitutes were the most feared ‘social evil’. These women were the focus of controlling and invasive legislation, designed to clear the streets. They were imprisoned and removed from their friends and family. They were scorned and shamed and deemed worthless by much of society. The contemporary view of prostitution in the nineteenth century is colored by years of Ripperology, a grim fascination with the lives of a few mutilated women living in London. However, prostitutes were far more than caricatures of sinners or inevitable victims and lived in every other part of England too. Searching through the plethora of newspaper, census, police, and local history records it is now possible to uncover the lives of prostitutes in greater detail than ever before and discover the real women behind the stereotypes. Piecing together these women’s movements from cradle to grave and from one side of the country to another builds a rich picture of what it meant to be a prostitute, including the lives of prostitutes living in small towns, villages, and islands that have all been previously over-looked. This book explores the lives of the women who were omitted from the genteel history books of the past, aiming to identify what they looked like, what life was like for them, and who the important people in their lives were. It also looks in depth at the lives of a select few prostitutes, examining what drew them into prostitution and what happened to them afterwards. From Whitehaven to North Shields, from Peterborough to Bloomsbury (via Paris), these women led extraordinary, richly textured lives that are still relevant today, and that we can continue to learn so much from. The perfect introduction to Victorian prostitutes for family and local historians, genealogists, and students of the Victorian era.

Exploring the Lives of Victorian England's Prostitutes

Exploring the Lives of Victorian England's Prostitutes PDF Author: Claire Richardson
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399044680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
“As dangerous as if she stood on the corner of the street exploding gunpowder.” This was the view of ‘Miles’, a correspondent in the Bedfordshire Mercury, writing about the dangerousness of prostitutes in 1874. They were considered a scourge by the Victorians; a menace to society and a threat to the moral and physical wellbeing of a nation. Carrying disease, committing crime, corrupting others; prostitutes were the most feared ‘social evil’. These women were the focus of controlling and invasive legislation, designed to clear the streets. They were imprisoned and removed from their friends and family. They were scorned and shamed and deemed worthless by much of society. The contemporary view of prostitution in the nineteenth century is colored by years of Ripperology, a grim fascination with the lives of a few mutilated women living in London. However, prostitutes were far more than caricatures of sinners or inevitable victims and lived in every other part of England too. Searching through the plethora of newspaper, census, police, and local history records it is now possible to uncover the lives of prostitutes in greater detail than ever before and discover the real women behind the stereotypes. Piecing together these women’s movements from cradle to grave and from one side of the country to another builds a rich picture of what it meant to be a prostitute, including the lives of prostitutes living in small towns, villages, and islands that have all been previously over-looked. This book explores the lives of the women who were omitted from the genteel history books of the past, aiming to identify what they looked like, what life was like for them, and who the important people in their lives were. It also looks in depth at the lives of a select few prostitutes, examining what drew them into prostitution and what happened to them afterwards. From Whitehaven to North Shields, from Peterborough to Bloomsbury (via Paris), these women led extraordinary, richly textured lives that are still relevant today, and that we can continue to learn so much from. The perfect introduction to Victorian prostitutes for family and local historians, genealogists, and students of the Victorian era.

Prostitution

Prostitution PDF Author: Dr Paula Bartley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134610718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 is the first comprehensive overview of attempts to eradicate prostitution from English society, including discussion of early attempts at reform and prevention through to the campaigns of the social purists. Prostitution looks in depth at the various reform institutions which were set up to house prostitutes, analysing the motives of the reformers as well as daily life within these penitentiaries. This indispensable book reveals: * reformers' attitudes towards prostitutes and prostitution * daily life inside reform institutions * attempts at moral education * developments in moral health theories * influence of eugenics * attempts at suppressing prostitution.

Prostitution and Victorian Society

Prostitution and Victorian Society PDF Author: Judith R. Walkowitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521270649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England PDF Author: Pamela K. Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429676999
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880

Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 PDF Author: Lesley A. Hall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137292687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Sexual attitudes and behaviour have changed radically in Britain between the Victorian era and the twenty-first century. However, Lesley A. Hall reveals how slow and halting the processes of change have been, and how many continuities have persisted under a façade of modernity. Thoroughly revised, updated and expanded, the second edition of this established text: • explores a wide range of relevant topics including marriage, homosexuality, commercial sex, media representations, censorship, sexually transmitted diseases and sex education • features an entirely new last chapter which brings the narrative right up to the present day • provides fresh insights by bringing together further original research and recent scholarship in the area. Lively and authoritative, this is an essential volume for anyone studying the history of sexual culture in Britain during a period of rapid social change.

Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England PDF Author: Ian Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1782253696
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

The Victorian City

The Victorian City PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466835451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.

Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain

Sex and Sexuality in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Violet Fenn
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526756692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
“Dull this book is not, and it gives an insight into the many scandals not spoken about in polite Victorian drawing rooms.” —Glasgow & West of Scotland Family History Society Peek beneath the bedsheets of nineteenth-century Britain in this affectionate, informative and fascinating look at sex and sexuality during the reign of Queen Victoria. It examines the prevailing attitudes towards male and female sexual behavior, and the ways in which these attitudes were often determined by those in positions of power and authority. It also explores our ancestors’ ingenious, surprising, bizarre and often entertaining solutions to the challenges associated with maintaining a healthy sex life. Did the people in Victorian times live up to their stereotypes when it came to sexual behavior? This book will answer this question, as well as looking at fashion, food, science, art, medicine, magic, literature, love, politics, faith and superstition through a new lens, leaving the reader uplifted and with a new regard for the ingenuity and character of our great-great-grandparents. “I would say this book gives you the information on relationships, genders and very much behavior that doesn’t usually come across in history books. Therefore this is an excellent book indeed, certainly one that more people should be aware of and learn from.” —UK Historian “The writing is joyous and it is clear the author enjoys her subject and is fairly knowledgeable on things Victorian.” —Rosie Writes “Fenn’s writing is so readable and it’s clear this is a book written by a historian who loves her subject and is very knowledgeable about the research being carried out by other historians.” —Jessticulates

Between Women

Between Women PDF Author: Sharon Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

City of Dreadful Delight

City of Dreadful Delight PDF Author: Judith R. Walkowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608101X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.