ABSTRACT
TO READ MOST HISTORIES OF BRITAIN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, EVEN those which purport to be written by social historians, is to gain the impression that the Victorians procreated by some form of remote control. 1 One would rarely imagine that they were sexual animals or that their sexuality expressed itself, both in and out of marriage, with an abundance and catholicity of taste which causes one to wonder how they acquired a reputation for respectability and rectitude. That in their literature they were sedulous propagators of their own mythology; that the Victorian novel, for example, rarely has anything explicitly to do with sex; 2 that euphemisms concealed reality so that prostitution was “The Social Evil” and gonorrhea and syphilis were “The Contagious Diseases” or “The Social Diseases,” all help to explain the perpetuation of that reputation. What is less clear is why historians should until recently have failed to take into account the abundant evidence to the contrary. Prostitution and venereal disease were the subject of repeated Parliamentary inquiry. Those who wished to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 published at least 520 books and pamphlets on these topics, while those seeking to maintain and extend them generated a comparable flow. 3 Between 1870 and 1885, 17,367 petitions against the Acts bearing 2,606,429 signatures were presented to the House of Commons, and during the same period more than 900 public meetings were held by supporters of the repeal campaign, matched again by meetings held by their opponents. 4 Since these meetings were often very fully reported in the press, an additional flow of information was readily available for an even wider public. While the quantity of evidence may not be matched for the years preceding and following those when the Contagious Diseases Acts were at the center of public controversy, prostitution and its causes and particularly those effects which resulted in venereal disease were frequently dealt with in works which though primarily medical were by no means confined to a medical audience. Of these the best known is, of course, by William Acton. 5 Earlier works include Ryan, Tait, Talbot, and the important article in the Westminster Review in 1850. 6 Very important and reviewed extensively was De la Prostitution dans la Ville de Paris by A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet, designated as the “Newton of Harlotry.” 7 The first edition in 1836, however, dealt only with Parisian prostitution, the section on “La Prostitution en Angleterre” being added by Gustave-Antoine Richelot in 1857. At a more popular level, there was, a little later in 1861, the well-known section by Bracebridge Hemynge on London prostitution in volume IV of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. In addition, the amount of material directed at doctors through their professional journals far exceeded that published for a wider audience.
