The sexual ambience of nineteenth-century London, despite the cliché of “the Victorian age” as one of upright family values, was no less lascivious than its eighteenth-century counterpart. In her London Journal Flora Tristan wrote in 1840 that “in London all classes are deeply corrupted. Vice comes to them early.” She had been shocked by an “orgy” in a tavern where English aristocrats and Members of Parliament disported themselves with drunken women until daybreak. In quite a different sphere Henry Mayhew noted of London street children that “their most remarkable characteristic … is their extraordinary licentiousness.” As a result of his observations he guessed that the age of puberty came much earlier than most people believed; he declined to give, however, “the details of filthiness and of all uncleanness.” Even in the areas where the more respectable working class lived, it was customary for couples as young as thirteen and fourteen to live and procreate without the need for marriage vows; there was a church in Bethnal Green, for example, where these “Cockney marriages” could be performed and where “you might be married for sevenpence if you were fourteen years old.” One curate of the East End recalled a Christmas morning when he “stood marrying blaspheming youths and girls to one another … ghastly mockery.” Here sexual profligacy is associated with a general irreligion or atheism which is another characteristic emblem of London life.
Yet the major concern of nineteenth-century urban observers lay with the extent and nature of prostitution. Surveys-by Mayhew, by Booth, by Acton and others-suggest that it became something of an obsession. There were books entitled Prostitution in London, or, more elaborately, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social amp; Sanitary Aspects. There were tables and statistics about where prostitutes were kept, lodged or resorted, with divisions and subdivisions: “Well-dressed living in Brothels,” “Well-dressed living in Private Lodgings,” “In Low Neighbourhoods,” “Introducing Houses” and “Accommodation Houses.” There were detailed observations on “Bent and Character of Mind,” “Manner of Passing Their Leisure Hours,” “Moral Defects” (spiritous liquor) and “Good Qualities” (strong sympathy for one another). Prostitution seems to have been the overwhelming consideration of Victorian social reformers, complementary to the efforts of other workers in matters of sanitation and housing; in that sense all were concerned with the inheritance of a thousand years of unchecked urban living, with a strong effort to cleanse or purify it.
The connection of sexuality and disease was also explicitly made. William Acton, in Prostitution in London, revealed that these “rouged and whitewashed creatures, with painted lips and eyebrows, and false hair, accustomed to haunt Langham Place, portions of the New Road, the Quadrant … the City Road, and the purlieus of the Lyceum” were on investigation more often than not found to be “a mass of syphilis.” The characteristic metaphor of waste or refuse was also adduced. “As a heap of rubbish will ferment, so surely will a number of unvirtuous women.” The prostitute then becomes a symbol of contagion, both moral and physical. Of the eighty thousand in London in the 1830s, it was said that eight thousand would die each year. In the London hospitals 2,700 cases of syphilis occurred each year “in children from eleven to sixteen years of age.” The actual number of female prostitutes was a subject of endless speculation and invention-seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand, or higher, and in the mid-nineteenth century it was computed that “£8,000,000 are expended annually on this vice in London alone.” In that sense prostitution itself becomes a token of London’s commercial rapacity, as well as of the fears attendant upon the overwhelming growth of both vice and the city itself.
The degradation of civilisation, in the very centre of London, can take many different forms. Some of them were recorded in Ryan’s Prostitution in London, published in 1839. “Maria Scoggins, aged fifteen, held a situation as a stay-maker. On her way to her father’s house in the evening she was decoyed to a brothel kept by Rosetta Davis, alias Abrahams, and turned upon the streets.” Another girl, aged fifteen “was actually sold by her stepmother to the keeper of one of these houses in the eastern part of London.” Unwary children of both sexes were merchandise. Leah Davis was an elderly female, the mother of thirteen daughters, “all either prostitutes or brothel-keepers.” The metaphor of youth being sacrificed is redolent of barbaric rituals at the altars of Troy or Gomorrah, while the image of girls “thrown,” “turned,” or “decoyed” upon the streets suggests a vision of a dark and labyrinthine city where innocence is quickly scented and destroyed. Three girls of fifteen were despatched to lure many youths together “so as to make their united payments considerable”; “they were admitted to the scene of depravity which the establishment unfolded … These houses were used as lodging houses for thieves, vagabonds, mendicants, and others of the lowest grade … it was well known that the most diabolical practices were constantly perpetrated within them … in the midst of a dense and ignorant population … Men, women and children, of all ages, were there associated for the vilest and basest purposes … spreading a moral miasma around.” This is a record of what was considered to be the shadow of pagan darkness not in the suburbs, or in well-localised stews, but in the very heart of the city.
But if one image of the London prostitute was of disease and contagion, embodying in striking form all the anxieties and fears which the city itself may provoke, the other was of isolation and alienation. De Quincey’s account of Ann, daughter of stony-hearted Oxford Street, is one of the first examples of that urban vision which sees in the plight of the young prostitute the very condition of living in the city; she had become a prey to all its merciless commercial forces as well as to its underlying indifference and forgetfulness.
Dostoevsky, when wandering down the Haymarket, noticed how “mothers brought their little daughters to make them ply the same trade.” He observed one girl “not older than six, all in rags, dirty, bare-foot and hollow cheeked; she had been severely beaten and her body, which showed through the rags, was covered with bruises … Nobody was paying any attention to her.” Here we have an image of suffering in London, amid the endlessly hurrying and passing crowd who would no more pause to consider a bruised child than a maimed dog. What struck Dostoevsky, who himself was used to terror and hopelessness in his own country, was “the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face … She kept on shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands and then suddenly clasped them together and pressed them to her little bare breast.” These are the sights and pictures of London. On another evening a woman dressed all in black passed him and hurriedly thrust a piece of paper in his hand. He looked at it and saw that it contained the Christian message “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” But how could anyone believe the precepts of the New Testament, when they had witnessed the pain and loneliness of a six-year-old girl? When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.