Victorian prostitution is a well-traveled area of research, but Nina Attwood maintains that much has been left unsaid in historians’ and literary scholars’ analyses of “the great social evil” in Britain’s nineteenth century. Too often, she argues, Victorian discourses about prostitution have been simplified and repeated without critical and close reading, and the truly complicated nature of Victorian attitudes toward commercial sex and the “fallen” woman have been often overlooked or elided. Attwood attempts to redress these issues by closely evaluating several different sources that delve into the questions surrounding prostitution in the mid-Victorian era. She has chosen these, she explains, to provide a mixture of sources that have been closely scrutinized by other scholars as well as those that have been mostly overlooked.
Her first task is to tackle the ubiquitous William Acton, whose editions of Prostitution Considered etc. (1857 and 1870) remain a staple for those sketching a picture of Victorian attitudes to commercial sex in its “moral and sanitary aspects.” Acton has been cited for his views on passive female sexuality, his support for medical inspection, and his surprising comments on how women could successfully exit prostitution. Attwood focuses on the subtle and multivalent interpretations of prostitution within the text, arguing that Acton’s “internal contradictions and inconsistencies” show that “the Victorian construction of the prostitute was far from stable” (20). The instability of representations comes out again in the second chapter, which explores the Report of the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts (1871). While sometimes seen as a manifestation of the “medico-moral alliance” (Mort, Dangerous Sexualities [2000]) that allowed the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD Acts) to be put in place, Attwood argues that this document actually “reveals a multiplicity of contrasting, and often directly conflicting, viewpoints on prostitution” (43). The natural companion to this document, the writings of Josephine Butler, is next to be closely examined. Attwood argues once again that conflict and contradiction are key features of the writings of Butler, in her representations of female passivity, agency, and victimization under the double standard of sexual morality.
The next chapter shifts the focus to examine a fictional representation of a (reformed) prostitute, Mercy Merrick, in Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen (1873). In analyzing this now lesser-known but contemporaneously popular novel (and later play), Attwood argues that Collins “upset the conventional narrative” of the fallen woman by presenting Mercy as self-aware, outspoken, and morally good. This provides the historian with “further evidence for the flexibility of Victorian attitudes to prostitution” (100). Attwood’s final task is to explore prostitution as represented in the notorious My Secret Life (1888), the purported diaries by “Walter,” whose pornographic ramblings have rarely been taken seriously by historians. As Attwood points out, My Secret Life was unique in its celebration of bought sex (rare even in pornography of the time) and upset many stereotypes found in more licit texts. Most interesting—and challenging to the conventional narrative—is Attwood’s convincing insight that within this account, “the act of prostitution did not make a woman a prostitute” (134). Whether lived or imagined, the “dissonant voice” that Walter lends his experiences provides an important perspective on Victorian attitudes toward active and commercialized female and male sexuality (143).
Attwood’s chief argument in the book, reiterated frequently, is that Victorian attitudes to prostitution were unstable, conflicting, changing, and contradictory, both between texts (and the social groups and people who created them) and within them. Although it is unclear why she limited herself in her title to “the prostitute’s body,” she does effectively demonstrate the diversity of opinions on prostitution in this era. However, in a book that aims to present a diversity of opinion, there are some vital perspectives lacking. Particularly, there remains—a fault in many other works on prostitution in this period—a real dearth of exploration of working-class attitudes toward prostitution. Despite her professed commitment to capturing “dissonant voices” and “alternative renderings,” this absence goes largely unrecognized, and “Victorian” remains in this book—as it so often does—a tacit synonym for the Victorian middle class. By contrast, there is reason to believe that the working classes probably produced still more diverse, dissonant, and alternative images of prostitution: not only were they the social group from which most prostitutes were drawn, but they were also the most active in nascent socialist movements that were beginning to articulate prostitution as a problem rooted in economic inequality and capitalism. This largely unexplored perspective would have greatly enriched the book’s arguments.
Attwood at times overstates the degree to which other scholars have argued for coherence in Victorian attitudes to prostitution. Within her analysis of the writings of Josephine Butler and her fellow campaigners, Attwood gives short shrift to previous scholars’ treatment of the interconnected and contradictory thought-world of nineteenth-century feminism. And yet, historians have frequently pointed to competing narratives about prostitution within what they insist was a far from monolithic campaign for sexual morality and the rights of women (see, e.g., Bland, Banishing the Beast [1992]; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society [1980]). In addition, Attwood is guilty of eliding some of these complications herself. Her claim, for instance, that Butler and the Ladies National Association were “not fighting for the rights of prostitutes but for women wrongly identified as prostitutes by the CD Acts” (80) is oversimplified, and there is ample evidence to suggest that Butler very much supported what she called the “constitutional rights” of confirmed prostitutes while also using the threat of false identification as a very useful campaign tool.
Conversely, I am not entirely convinced by the reading of Collins’s Mercy Merrick as entirely upsetting the “conventional narrative” of the fallen woman. Mercy’s “fall” was in no way her doing: she was kidnapped and forced to prostitute herself, a tale precisely in keeping with the narrative of “white slavery.” Even more than stories of women who were “seduced” through weak will or foolishness, Collins is able to sketch Mercy’s (brief) time in prostitution as one of determination to escape, and is able to redeem her in relatively traditional ways in her move from (passive) victimhood to (moral) agency. The real challenge to the narrative would have come, I would argue, had Mercy willingly chosen to “fall.”
These are points for further discussion as we continue to probe the depths of ideas about prostitution, and Attwood’s book makes an important contribution to ongoing scholarship that asserts that the Victorians—and their moral attitudes—were significantly more complex and diverse than previous histories have allowed. These explorations—especially when focused on the divergent and even contradictory attitudes toward prostitution—further serve to illuminate the continuities between the nineteenth century and our own complicated moral universe.
