Key Reading

• Clive Emsley, Crime and Society, 1750-1900, chapter 4

Further Reading

Further reading on sexual crime may be found here.

• C. Bacchi and J. Jose, 'Historicising Sexual Harrassment', Women's History Review, 3 (1994), pp. 263-70
• Lois Bibbings, Binding Men: Stories about Law and Violence in Victorian England
• A. Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845
• Harry Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century
• C. Conley, ‘Rape and Justice in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986)
• C. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent
• S. D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women
• S. D'Cruze, 'Sex, violence and local courts: working-class respectability in a mid-nineteenth-century Lancashire town', British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999)
• Deborah Gorham, 'The "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" re-examined : child prostitution and the idea of childhood in late Victorian England.' Victorian Studies, 21 (1978)
• Philip Howell, ‘A private Contagious Diseases Act: prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2000
• Louise A. Jackson, Child sexual abuse in Victorian England
• Morris Kaplan, 'Did "My Lord Gomorrah Smile? : homosexuality class and prostitution in the Cleveland Street Affair', in George Robb and Nancy Erber (eds), Disorder in the Court
• Philippa Levine, ‘A multitude of unchaste women: prostitution in the British empire’, Journal of Women’s History, 2004
• Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash, Cultures of Shame, especially chapter 6
• Roy Porter, ‘Rape: Does it Have a Historical Meaning?’, in S. Tomaselli and Roy Porter, Rape
• A. Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and its Effect on Prosecution for Rape in Eighteenth-Century London’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment
• R. Trumbach, 'Sex, Gender and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Englightenment London', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), pp. 186-203
• D. M. Turner, ‘Popular Marriage and the Law: Tales of Bigamy at the Eighteenth-Century Old Bailey’, London Journal, 30:1 (2005), pp. 6–21.
• Judy Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society
• Judy Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
• Bridget Walsh, Domestic Murder in Nineteenth Century England

Questions

• How were the figures of the prostitute/sodomite constructed in this period?
• Why did women become prostitutes?
• Did regulation create a geography of prostitution (including in the British empire)?
• What solutions did contemporaries have for the problem of vice in the nineteenth-century city and how successful were they?
• Did the 'Maiden tribute of modern Babylon' episode reveal more about the tabloid press than about child prostitution?
• Was domestic violence a fact of everyday life in Victorian England?
• What does a study of sexual crime reveal about class and gender in Victorian Britain?
• How did local communities react to sexual offenders?