ABSTRACT
In 1894, English journalist and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William T. Stead published his scathing volume, If Christ Came to Chicago!: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer. Stead, on a visit to Chicago to see the Columbian Exposition in 1893 grew more interested in the city itself than in its temporary pleasure park. Back home in Great Britain, Stead had already crafted a newspaper exposé condemning the realities of prostitution in London entitled Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). Historian Judith Walkowitz points out that in hoping to pen prostitution’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stead had instead written a tabloid work that heightened the public’s fear of sexual predators in Victorian London. Walkowitz terms Stead’s Maiden Tribute “one of the most successful pieces of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century.” Stead’s work helped activists change girls’ age of sexual consent from thirteen to sixteen years of age. Stead himself spent three months in prison for the purchase of a young girl (presumably for investigative purposes) in the course of writing Maiden Tribute. If Christ Came to Chicago brought out the scandalous underworld of the middle-American metropolis in the way Maiden Tribute did for London. Stead’s work sold seventy thousand copies before publication and two times as many volumes subsequently. The journalist spread his message of Chicago’s struggles further through well-attended speaking engagements.1
