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.