1888 by Peter Stubley

Author:Peter Stubley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780752489742
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Two years later William Logan, a former city missionary, called for the ‘suppression of this widespread vice and the reclamation of its miserable victims’. He told of girls as young as eight giving themselves up to prostitution and stated that six years was the average lifetime of their career. Logan called for these women to be banned from walking the streets, having already remarked that, ‘eight out of every ten are going about in a diseased condition … reflect for a moment upon its fearful consequences on virtuous unsuspecting wives and innocent children’. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 already allowed police to arrest prostitutes to check for venereal disease in an attempt to halt its spread through the armed forces, and there were calls for these checks to be extended outside the ports and garrison towns. There was also a vigorous campaign for them to be repealed, led by the feminist Josephine Butler, who saw the Acts as the unfair criminalisation of women rather than the men who paid for their services. The Acts were eventually repealed in 1886.107

That battle mirrored the debate over what should be done about these ‘fallen women’. Should they be removed from the streets and locked away out of sight, as the antithesis of the Victorian domestic ideal? Or should they be given help, food and lodging and encouraged to abandon their lives of sin? Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London varied from the low thousands to 80,000. In 1888 the police gave a figure of 5,678 (with an estimated 1,200 in Whitechapel) and reported that over the year a total of 2,797 had been arrested; 1,475 were convicted of ‘annoying male passengers for the purpose of prostitution’, while fifty-two were acquitted of the same charge. Of course, not all prostitutes were in their forties and living in squalor in the East End. At least six ‘types’ were listed in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. There were ‘kept mistresses and prima donnas’ living in private houses, funded by their lovers; the ‘board lodgers’ paying brothel madams for their accommodation; those that lived in the disreputable ‘low lodging houses’ for 4d a night; those who serviced sailors and soldiers; the partners of thieves; and prostitutes who looked for business in the parks after dark. Mayhew also included ‘cohabitant prostitutes’, whose partners could not afford to marry and ‘clandestine prostitutes’, such as maidservants. There was even:

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