ABSTRACT
In Victorian culture sexuality was the urgent concern of medicine, psychiatry, law, and public morals, invariably focused on the illegalities of the night involving the bodies of prostitutes, among whom painters commonly found their female models, including this one. William Holman Hunt “discovered” her when she was fifteen. The original, incorporating the look of a woman fully realizing her sexual sin, as Hunt had imagined it, was called The Awakened Conscience, and it proved too much to bear for the man who had bought the picture. John Ruskin, Hunt’s apologist for The Awakening Conscience, on art: “A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. The ideology of domesticity, which Fairbairn in effect urged on the workers, was the basis on which he hoped to secure his own financial position.
