This work represents the first local study of vice in Victorian Colchester. It is structured around eight tightly argued chapters which are supported by several short case-studies of individual prostitutes and disorderly public houses. The book addresses four key themes: the experiences and life cycles of Colchester's prostitutes; the relationship between the town of Colchester and the local army garrison; the policing and control of prostitution; and the attitudes and responses of male professionals and reformers. This work therefore adds a significant and neglected gender dimension to our existing understanding of Colchester's social history. The vast majority of the primary material comes from the Essex Standard, which the authors have surveyed to construct a database of some 337 women in Colchester who were involved in sex work in the period c. 1850–1900. This evidence shows that prostitutes tended to be young and unhealthy, and that they came late to marriage. Like Judith Walkowitz before them, Pearson and Rayner argue that impoverished women turned to prostitution in order to maintain a degree of economic independence, to stay out of the workhouse and to provide for their families. However, the authors also highlight two features which made the sex trade in Colchester distinctive. First, the practice of public soliciting was virtually unknown in Colchester as prostitutes preferred to operate from within the ‘shelter of the beerhouse’ (p. 41). Secondly, the geography of prostitution was diffused throughout the town rather than being confined to a single red-light district.

The authors rightly emphasize the establishment of a military garrison in 1856 as a key turning point in the social life and economy of Victorian Colchester. The textile trade was in terminal decline over the nineteenth century but the arrival of the garrison brought new opportunities (particularly for brewers and publicans). The addition of some 3,000 soldiers to the town's population, however, also created social problems, including, the authors argue, an ‘explosion of prostitution’ (p. 188). Pearson and Rayner use army medical figures to show that by the 1860s Colchester had become not only one of the largest but also one of the most disease-ridden garrisons in England. They demonstrate that the spread of venereal disease was linked to the large number of low public houses and brothels on and around Magdalen Street (just a short distance from where the soldiers were based). However, the ‘soft touch’ approach of Colchester's authorities also contributed to growth of the sex trade.

The second half of the book looks in more detail at the attitudes and responses of Colchester's professional class to prostitution. Pearson and Rayner identify two ‘campaigning parsons’ – Reverends Seaman and Brown – who tried to reform the town's ‘fallen women’ and to encourage local men to take greater responsibility for their own sexual conduct and eternal salvation. There was no unified campaign against vice, however. To the contrary, the authors convincingly argue that the respectable men of Colchester generally held a tolerant and laissez-faire attitude towards prostitution and its control. Most strikingly, Colchester's bench of magistrates showed considerable leniency towards both ‘unfortunate women’ and the keepers of disorderly public houses. Pearson and Rayner argue that this discretionary approach was based partly on paternalism and partly on economic calculation. Magistrates knew that closing down low public houses could damage the brewing trade while shutting brothels would throw otherwise ‘independent’ women into the workhouse. Greater efforts to control prostitution were only made when national legislation, in the form of the Contagious Diseases Act (1864) and the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), was imposed upon the borough authorities. Pearson and Rayner show that the impact of these laws on Colchester's sex trade was decidedly mixed. A lock hospital was in operation from 1869 to 1886 and the confinement and treatment of scores of prostitutes appears to have temporarily suppressed rates of VD among local troops (only for the statistics to creep up again once this institution was closed). The authors establish that a harsher attitude towards prostitution developed after the introduction of the 1885 Act when the town's authorities moved from tolerance and regulation to clamping down on brothels. This shift in policy, however, failed to stifle the sex trade and led instead to prostitutes operating from their own lodgings and to an increase in female vagrancy.

Overall, this is a highly original local study which uses a fairly narrow source base to great effect. One could criticize the authors for not taking full advantage of archival sources (such as military records, original court proceedings and poor law records) and there was also a missed opportunity to compare Colchester in a systematic way with other garrison towns affected by the Contagious Diseases Acts. However, Pearson and Rayner are to be commended for opening up the uncharted territory of gender relations in Victorian Colchester and for carefully positioning their local study in relation to other scholarly works on prostitution.