ABSTRACT

As well as being required to play pantomime fairies, girls had an essential role in the melodramatic dramatisations of the city, playing the ragged urchin, the starving waif, the abandoned and the orphaned. The slum waif appearing as stage fairy, or the pre-pubescent actress in the role of vulnerable waif, was the pivotal figure around which Victorian fantasies of vulnerable innocence and endangered purity feverishly spun. A mix of hypocrisy and voyeurism permeated the moral climate, enabling Lewis Carroll to photograph middle-class children as half-naked urchins and both Gladstone and Dickens to stalk young prostitutes by night while assuring themselves that Christian charity and social reform were their motives.