When the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine visited London in the 1870s, he recalled the Haymarket and the Strand in the evening:
“You cannot walk a hundred yards without knocking into twenty streetwalkers: some of them ask you for a glass of gin; other says, 'It’s for my rent, mister'. The impression is not one of debauchery but of abject, miserable poverty. One is sickened and wounded by this deplorable procession in those monumental streets. It seemed as if I were watching a march past of dead women. Here is a festering sore, the real sore on the body of English society.”
Referred to as ‘the great social evil’, prostitution was an ever present fact of life in Victorian Britain, and was considered by the upper and middle classes to be a threat to society and morality as a whole. It was predominantly an urban phenomenon with large numbers congregating in the overcrowded cities. Ports and garrison towns were also magnets for prostitutes with a constant supply of customers among the soldiers and sailors.
The only official figures for the number of prostitutes were those supplied by the police. These were of women arrested for soliciting and of people prosecuted for keeping brothels; prostitution itself was not a crime. Many women, particularly those who were living in their own lodgings, never came to the attention of the police and therefore did not appear in any statistics. There were also plenty who only worked the streets occasionally in times of want.
In Manchester, the statistical returns for 1852 reveal that there were 681 prostitutes who were known to the police; there was little change twenty years later with 692 recorded. At around the same time, the Bishop of Manchester estimated that there were actually as many as 3000 unfortunate victims “owing to the demands which exist in the vicious and unbridled passion of men”. By contrast, estimated numbers of prostitutes in London varied wildly between 8,000 and 80,000.
In Victorian times, the sexual appetites of men and their use of prostitutes was considered the norm. Women, on the other hand, were expected to be chaste and passive, and to retain their virtue at all costs. Prostitutes were punished under the law for soliciting, and yet the men who used their services were not.
With this unspoken yet accepted requirement for prostitutes, it was difficult for anything to be done to solve the problems associated with prostitution. Streetwalkers remained a visible nuisance to the upper and middle classes, and certain city roads and parks were ‘no-go’ areas in the evenings. If a woman ventured out alone at that time of night, it would automatically be assumed that she was a prostitute.
One woman who fell foul of this assumption in 1887 was Elizabeth Cass, a seamstress who had only been in London for a few months. While out shopping one evening in Regent Street, she was arrested and charged with solicitation after a policeman mistakenly identified her as a known prostitute. Although she was acquitted the next morning because of a character reference from her employer, the magistrate advised her: “If you are a respectable girl, as you say you are, don’t walk in Regent Street at night, for if you do you will either be fined or sent to prison after the caution I have given you.”
‘The great social evil’ was discussed at length in newspapers and at meetings of religious groups and charities across the country. Prostitution was also a frequent theme in literature and art, for example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Found, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Efforts to deal with the problem were split into two camps: those who were concerned with improving the welfare of prostitutes by rescuing them and reforming their characters, such as The Reformatory and Refuge Union; and those who wanted to stamp out prostitution altogether, like The Society for the Repression of Vice. Both were driven by evangelical Christian principles.
To the Victorians, there were three main reasons a woman found herself working on the streets: seduction, poverty or general immorality. Seduction and poverty were not considered to be the fault of the prostitute, but immorality most certainly was.
Going into domestic service could be a dangerous time for a young, naïve girl. The seduction of a servant by the master or another male relative in the household was all too common, with the poor maid forced out onto the streets if she fell pregnant. Some girls in cities like London became prostitutes after being tricked into giving up their virginity by women whose sole objective was to obtain virgins for their rich male clients. This type of forced (often drugged) seduction was less common, but the end result was the same. The girl was ruined, and encouraged to continue on the path towards prostitution.
Unemployment, or the lack of work which paid a decent rate, meant that many widows and unmarried mothers with a family to feed were forced to earn a living on the streets as prostitutes. For some girls, like out-of-work servants, hop-pickers and flower-girls, prostitution was often a seasonal form of employment, especially in cities like London. Henry Mayhew believed the greatest cause of prostitution to be “the low rate of wages that the female industrial classes…receive, in return for the most arduous and wearisome of labour. Innumerable cases of prostitution through want, solely and absolutely, are constantly occurring.”
‘Fallen women’ was the label applied to those who had fallen from the ideal of passive womanhood and lost their purity or innocence by indulging in pre-marital sex. Religious charities believed that the slippery slope to prostitution beckoned for them unless they were saved and reformed.
Homes for ‘fallen women’ were set up in cities across Britain as a kind of halfway-house for prostitutes and those at risk of joining their ranks. The inmates were women who were keen to escape the oldest profession and find another way of life. The most successful homes were those that offered some kind of training for work, so that the women had a realistic chance of finding other employment.
Some of the institutions were very strict with the intention of punishing and reforming the women, while others adopted a more caring approach. One example was the Manchester Home for Fallen Women founded in late 1871 “as a temporary refuge into which fallen women could be received, and from which they might, after a few days or weeks’ trial, be drafted into other penitentiaries, or sent to other homes or to hospitals”. Inmates could not stay for longer than a month. During the first year, 87 women were admitted: 24 left of their own accord; 36 were sent to penitentiaries; 13 went into service; nine were sent to hospital; and five were still in the home. Of the 13 sent to service, three returned to their old lives, and 10 were doing well in their places.
Charles Dickens helped to set up a home for ‘fallen women’ with his friend, the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts. The house was called Urania Cottage and was specifically run to have a homely atmosphere with a garden, a piano and books to read. The goal was to return the women to society, with the chance of a new life in the Colonies.
Another high-profile supporter was four times Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had a strong interest in rescuing and reforming prostitutes in London. In 1848, he co-founded the Church Penitentiary Society Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women. Wanting to do more, Gladstone began ‘rescue’ work with the full support of his wife and recorded details of conversations with prostitutes in his diary.
Gladstone persuaded the women to enter the House of Mercy at Windsor for rehabilitation, organising transportation and arranging employment for them after their stay. However, success in reforming the prostitutes was extremely limited, largely because the discipline at the House of Mercy was so harsh. Jane Bywater stayed for a short time there. She wrote to Gladstone in 1854: “I have no doubt that you wished to do me some service, but I did not fancy being shut up in such a place as that for perhaps twelve months. I should have committed suicide.”
Some homes for ‘fallen women’ can be found on the census. Other institutions which list women as prostitutes include the stricter Magdalen penitentiaries; prisons and workhouses; lock hospitals, which treated venereal diseases; and lunatic asylums, (insanity was frequently the last stage of syphilis).
Perhaps surprisingly, some women were enumerated as prostitutes in their own homes. In 1881, in Allens Yard, Falmouth, six out of seven women in the street gave their occupation as ‘prostitute’. They were a mixture of widows, married women and unmarried girls with ages ranging from 27 to 42.
Prostitution could be a dangerous profession, not least because of the high risk of contracting a venereal disease such as syphilis or gonorrhoea. Hardened prostitutes and newcomers alike were subject to the cruel legislation known as the Contagious Diseases Acts, passed between 1864 and 1869. These laws were enforced in garrison towns and ports, designed to protect their male clients, and they embodied Victorian double standards.
Any woman suspected of prostitution could be arrested, forcibly examined for venereal disease and hospitalised until they were cured. Men who used prostitutes were not subject to any such checks, and if they were married, they brought venereal diseases such as syphilis into the home, and infected their unsuspecting wives. As such, the Acts were completely futile and Victorian social reformer Josephine Butler (1828-1906) led the campaign to bring about their repeal.
In 1871, she told the Commission on the Administration of the Contagious Diseases Acts: “I have received numberless women into my own house… My husband and I have taken them in as friends, patients when ill, and keeping them until they died. We have had sometimes five living together in our house until I could find situations for them…. I visited them in low parts of the town; I have gone to brothels occasionally, both at night and in the day time; I see them in the streets, and speak to them. I have gone to the workhouse and the Lock hospital. They get to know me, and then when they do, I seek them no longer but they seek me. [It] frequently happens that I do not succeed in placing them in situations which they are fit for, on account of their not having had industrial training.”
Josephine Butler founded the Ladies’ National Association to attack the classification of these women as ‘pure’ or ‘impure’. A key part of her campaign to bring about the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was to expose male double standards prevalent in society. In one of her public letters, she used the powerful words of a prostitute to drive home the message:
“It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die!”
Through Josephine Butler’s influence, other respectable women began to support prostitutes driven to the profession through poverty or no fault of their own. The Acts were finally repealed in 1886.
Inevitably, the work of charities to rescue ‘fallen women’ was just a drop in the ocean. By the end of the nineteenth century, with little improvement in the conditions of the poverty-stricken cities, prostitution remained “the real sore on the body of English society”.