Sexual Crime
How was both consensual sexual activity, including homosexuality, and acts of sexual violence (including rape) policed, charged, and punished in Victorian Britain?
CONTENT WARNING:
Sources for this seminar include discussion of homophobia, rape, sexual violence, and child abuse.
Optional intro material: TBC
Seminar preparation questions:
- 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?
Essential seminar reading:
Primary:
- W. T. Stead, 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', Pall Mall Gazette, 1885 [see also the main site for further information on Stead and his journalism]
- Remedies for the Wrongs of Woman (1844)
- The trials of Oscar Wilde (1895)
Secondary:
- C. Conley, ‘Rape and Justice in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986)
- Harry Cocks, 'Prosecuting the 'Unnatural Crime'', Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003), pp. 15-48.
Further reading:
Primary:
-
Bodleian Library Collection of Ballads (Browse on themes such as Prostitution or Rape)
- Frances Power Cobbe, 'Wife Torture in England', The Contemporary Review, 32 (Apr 1878), pp. 55-87
-
Cases from the Old Bailey Online
Secondary:
- 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, 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)
- 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
- 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.