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.
