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This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a compelling account, exposing the real lives of the capital's prostitutes, and also shedding light on London society as a whole, its policing systems and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. Drawing on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians, it provides a fascinating study for all those interested in Georgian society. 1. Introduction. 2. The Experience of Prostitution. 3. The Geography of Prostitution in London. 4. Prostitution and the Law. 5. Policing the Streets. 6. Policing Disorderly Houses. 7. Attitudes towards Prostitution. 8. Conclusion. Bibliography \"This is an excellent book which would repay the attention of all social and cultural historians, and will remain the standard work on eighteenth century prostitution for the foreseeable future.\" Albion

01 02 On the brightly-lit street corners of Piccadilly and in the dark alleyways of Stepney, in public parks and private flats, in nightclubs and cafes, prostitution was intertwined with London's society, culture, and landscape. As public and political attitudes toward commercial sex hardened, uneven and imperfect attempts to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens examines how laws, policies and attitudes toward prostitution were translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex navigated a climate of repression, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the metropolis. Laite puts forward the controversial argument that laws directed against prostitution tended to do more harm than good; they encouraged the growth of vice syndicates, promoted illicit real estate and came down the hardest upon the women who worked as prostitutes. By examining the administration of the law and its consequences and by uncovering the lives and experiences of prostitutes, this book offers a compelling new look at the history of commercial sex in modern London. 02 02 Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. This book examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the modern metropolis. 31 02 First scholarly study of prostitution, including the criminalization of prostitution, in London during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 13 02 JULIA LAITE Lecturer in Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She has published several articles on prostitution in Britain and is presently researching women's migration, sexual labour, and human trafficking in the twentieth century world. 19 02 First in-depth examination of prostitution in London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in Britain after 1914 Explores criminalization and the impact of the criminal justice system, as well as regulation Argues that criminalization increased the stigma and harm associated with prostitution Contributes to present-day debates about prohibition, regulation and decriminalization of the commercial sex industry 04 02 List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Criminalizing Commercial Sex Selling sex: Women, Work, and Prostitution Buying Sex: Men and the Marketplace The Crusade Begins: The Criminal Law Amendment Act and London's 'Brothels' Before the First World War Women in Public and Public Women: Controlling Street Prostitution 1887-1914 'Down on Whores' and 'Living on the Earnings': Violence, Vulnerability and the Law after 1885 White Slaves and Alien Prostitutes: Trafficking, Protection, and Punishment in the Early Twentieth Century Making War, Taking Fingerprints, and Challenging the Law: Policy Changes and Public Debates after 1914 Behind Closed Doors: Off-Street Commercial Sex in the Interwar Years Sex, War, and Syndication: Organized Prostitution and the Second World War The Shame of London: Prostitution and Panic in the Post-War Metropolis Risking the Dangers: Reconsidering Commercial Sex in 'Permissive Britain' Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible \"attraction of repulsion\" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own \"dirty\" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to \"love thy neighbor as thyself.\"

By analysing relevant statues alongside the literature of the time, Ian Ward investigates Victorian anxieties about the 'condition' of its women, concentrating in particular on four 'crimes': adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution.

In July 1868 the Daily Telegraph congratulated itself on providing the arena for a controversy marked by `good sense, liveliness, practical wisdom, and hearty humanity.' The controversy was over the choice -: 'Marriage or Celibacy?' - faced by middle-class youth trying to reconcile economic facts with moral values, social customs - and love. The arena was the correspondence page of a newspaper just establishing itself as the most successful London daily through its appeal to the middle-class reader. Public attention was first caught by a court report of a failed attempt to entrap a Belgian girl into prostitution. This induced blistering editorial comment and angry letters to the paper deploring ineffectual controls over the 'Great Social Evil.' The next development was unusual for the Victorian press: readers began to write extensive and richly varied comment on the root of the problem - young people did not have in possession or expectation enough money or the right qualifications for marriage. TheTelegraphinitiated a new form of popular journalism by filling its correspondence columns for almost a month with readers' letters under the heading 'Marriage or Celibacy?', which they supplemented with lengthy leading articles. John Robson places in contemporary context the central issues facing Victorian youth: What is a proper marriage? How to balance income and expenditure? What are the ideal qualities of young women and men? 'Emigration or starvation?' In examining these debates, he looks closely into methods of argument, connecting rhetorical techniques with public persuasion. The letters being a special kind of discourse, he shows how in the debates rhetorical and logical arguments are specifically designed to persuade the Telegraph's readers. Marriage or Celibacy?contributes to our knowledge of Victorian manners and mores, particularly among the lower middle-class, and is a telling episode to the history of popular journalism.

In the decades before the First World War (1880-1914), as thousands of Jews from Russia and Poland crowded into London’s East End, journalists, politicians, and anti-immigrant agitators introduced a vocabulary blending racial identity and criminality. ‘Jewish criminality’, embodied in the Jewish prostitute and trafficker, represented a ‘category in the making’. Looking back at this period not only affords an understanding of an early episode of the racialisation of crime, but insight into the response of a racialised population. The London-based Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW), founded in 1885 by members of Anglo-Jewry’s leading families, carried out an extensive anti-trafficking campaign. To understand why they chose to promote public awareness of Jewish involvement in the international sex trade despite the uses to which their efforts would be put by anti-Semites, it is necessary to see their outlook against the historical period in which they lived. The JAPGW countered the racialisation of crime using a conceptual vocabulary common to the era; their outlook reflected ethno-religious commitment, Victorian social convention, and faith in social science knowledge.

British laws which sought to control and prevent street prostitution in the early twentieth century all relied on the idea that a ‘common prostitute’ was a legally definable person, and, while prostitution itself was not an offence, that the action of street solicitation represented a special kind of public nuisance. This article explores some of the implications of this legal system, especially after prostitutes were added to the fingerprinting schedule of the London Metropolitan Police in 1917. Centred around one rare case-file concerning the mistaken identity of a street prostitute in 1920, the article explores the way in which women working as prostitutes experienced and negotiated the criminal justice system. In contrast to the historical attention given to the Contagious Diseases Acts, the solicitation laws are seriously under-examined. Yet these laws were put in place prior to the CD Acts, lasted long after their repeal, affected a far greater number of women, and were significantly more important to the police and the state in their control of prostitution than were the short-lived and geographically limited CD Acts. In the context of the CD Acts, historians have looked at the ways in which a prostitute identity was developed and assigned by medical discourse and medical registration. However, the far more common and long-lasting experience of prostitute women in Britain was governed by the solicitation laws and a legal, not medical, process of classification. Through Nellie Johnson's story, we can begin to explore the intricacies of a legal system of prostitution control peculiar to Britain at a crucial point in its development. This article argues that over the course of the early twentieth century, the criminalization of identity became the grounds upon which the entire system of street- prostitution control in England and Wales rested. The fingerprinting of prostitutes, and Nellie Johnson's personal experiences, fit into a larger story of modernization in early twentieth-century Britain and the early twentieth-century world. This period witnessed the development of particular, and technical, forms of identification which were applied to particular groups of people, an abstraction which turned the body itself into a text that had very real consequences for women like Nellie Johnson.

The article analyzes London's East End as a spectacle of urban tourism. It traces the changing perception of urban explorers and international travel writers from the end of the nineteenth century into the interwar period. Exploring the East End became a cultural practice in the metropolitan city that brought cultures into contact and negotiated their boundaries, generating an engagement with and a rethinking of difference and modernity. At times, surveying the East End challenged individuals' identities and their understanding of social and ethnic differences. The different Jewish visions of the East End reflected and partook within this larger process that came to challenge, but also to reformulate the representation of the slums. Moreover, the vitality of the East End permitted Jewish city strollers to inscribe a vital Jewish presence onto the fabric of European cultures. The engagement of these local and international Jewish travelers with the immigrant quarters marked an appeal to transnational geographies of belonging.

The societies for the reformation of manners, driven by volunteers' desires to eradicate immorality, operated in cities across England from the 1690s to the 1730s. This article uses a previously ignored source: the recognizance, to show that prostitutes' clients were targeted in their campaigns. Although the thousands of female prostitutes arrested have rightly absorbed historians' attention until now, their male clients also deserve notice. London's recognizances reveal that hundreds of elite and middling men were arrested for consorting with lewd women. This contradicts previous theories that the reformation of manners movement was an episode in policing the poor, and was concerned only with female sexuality. The evidence shows that prostitutes' clients were greatly disturbed by the campaigns, violently resisting arrest, attempting to bribe officials to spare them, or indulging in elaborate ruses to ensure that their whoring could remain undetected. These forms of opposition to the societies underscore the success of the moralists in infiltrating wealtheir men's sex lives. The arrests of these men expose a key period in the history of sexuality: the transition from seeing prostitutes as sexual predators to perceiving them as victims, and the growing expectations of the middling sort for chastity in men as well as women.

During the 1950s, the UK government's attempts to regulate homosexual practices led to the application of social science techniques to social surveillance of supposed male homosexuals. This led to a re-mapping, both physically and symbolically, of central London in terms of irregular sexualities.