Author: Grace Eckley
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462838111
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Get Book Here
Book Description
Maiden Tribute: A Life of W. T. Stead This journalist who communicated with his Senior Partner instantaneously, whose ecumenical advance beyond his epoch still startles his readers, throughout his life retained his Whitmanesque individualism and rugged speech. W. T. Stead frequently scoffed at the Anglican Sunday prayers that instructed God how to direct the affairs of the world. If God did not comply, it was not for want of pious instruction. Anglicans were wanting, and most of his late Victorian-Edwardian world was Anglican. W. T. Stead (1849-1912) was a Nonconforrmist with and without the capital n. Had he been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth, it meant only that God needed his help to make the world silver. He never ceased to believe the world could be made silver, for mankind in general was anonymously, even though sluggishly, contributing to the infinite ascending spiral traced by the finger of God between the universe and the ideal. Clearly, the position of women in the 1870s was far from the ideal, remote from the privileges selfishly guarded by men. Taking a cue from his mother who campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Actswhich punished women but not men for transmitting syphilishe determined to bring women nearer the honors of Mary the Mother and Mary the Magdalen, for these two women stand out against the gloom of the past radiant as the angels of God, and yet the true ideals of the womanhood of the world. Such appeared implausible. Everywhere he saw in the streets wretched ruins of humanity, women stamped and crushed into devils by society . . . . And the children nursed in debauchery, suckled in crime, predestined to a life of misery and shame! Mrs. Josephine Butler already knew that Britains leadership would not assist: in the grandest house of the kind in Paris, are to be seen portraits of all the great men who had frequented themdiplomatists, generals, and English Lords . . . . The brothel-keeper put a cross underneath the portrait at each visit, to mark the number of visits made to the house by these great men! Before he visited London, the export of English girls for State-regulated prostitution in Brussels imposed upon Stead a sense that he was destined to write an Uncle Toms Cabin on The Slavery of Europe. The burden is greater than I can bear. But if it is ultimately to be laid on my back, God will strengthen me for it. If I have to write it I shall have to plunge into the depths of the social hell, and that is impossible outside a great city. Even high-minded seekers of justice found the social hell a place they could not venture into. Initiating research for The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, Stead took counsel with civic powers Lord Carnarvon, John Morley, Arthur Balfour, Henry Labouchere among others, and Sir Charles Russell, who declined an invitation to see for himself because as leader of the English Bar he could not play the rle of a detective in a house of ill-fame. As the shocking series of four daily exposes neared its close, why others had not done Steads work was explained by Benjamin Scott, the City Chamberlain who had prompted Stead to take up the cause: We had not the ability or the opportunity that Stead possessed, and lacked the courage. Stead had begun the Maiden Tribute with a complaint against British society, that chivalry was dead and Christianity effete. Benjamin Waugh praised him after the fact: The spirit of both survives in you to-day. Stead accomplished his goal: passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, still in force today. Why the British sent him to jail for passing the first child protection law is graced with the word technicality. Branded both a saint and a filthy ex-convict, Stead continued to use his journalistic strength to achieve justice for citizens; in the 1890s he turned to internationalism. Lobbying for arbitration for settling international disputes, he crafted a memorial calling for li
Author: Pall Mall Gazette. Secret Commission
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Prostitution
Languages : en
Pages : 76
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: William Thomas Stead
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon is a book by William T. Stead. A sensational piece of investigative journalism that described the widespread child sex trade thriving in London during the late 1800's.
Author: Madge Unsworth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: William A. Cohen
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822318484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages - and never has its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness." "In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870-71, from Eliot's and Trollope's novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde's writing and his trials for homosexuality. Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Charles Terrot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Prostitution
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Judith R. Walkowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608101X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Get Book Here
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.
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812988647
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Get Book Here
Book Description
Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times • Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air • Chicago Tribune • Newsday • New York • AV Club • Publishers Weekly “Ranks with the best fiction published by any American writer during this short century.”—New York “A posthumous masterpiece.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The Boston Globe • New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Bloomberg The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come. Praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden “An instant classic.”—Newsday “Exceptional luminosity . . . hits a powerful vein.”—The New York Times Book Review “Grace and oblivion are inextricably yoked in these transcendent stories. . . . [Johnson’s] gift is to extract the beauty in all that brokenness.”—The Wall Street Journal “Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson. Nobody ever came close. . . . We’re just left with this miraculous book, these perfect stories, the last words from one of the world’s greatest writers.”—NPR
Author: Charles Terrot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Prostitution
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: William Thomas Stead
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781463647681
Category : Child prostitution
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette during July, 1885, the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon created a sensation in Victorian London with its shocking depiction of a rampant child sex trade thriving in the nation's capital. It related stories of girls as young as thirteen who had been inveigled into houses of ill repute by scheming abductresses, where they were pressured, manipulated, or even coerced into prostitution. There were rooms in London, the Gazette revealed, that had been specially padded to stifle their screams. In a zealous effort to demonstrate the horrifying ease with which these hapless young girls were being bought and sold by greedy flesh merchants, editor William T. Stead scandalized the public by successfully purchasing a thirteen year-old girl from her mother for the meager price of £5-a journalistic excess for which he served three months in prison. A controversial milestone in modern journalism, the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon generated sufficient public outrage to secure passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent in the United Kingdom from thirteen to sixteen.
