Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This lurid episode may be a cliché of a thousand Sunday supplement stories about the "white slave" trade, but it actually happened innumerable times in the vociferously moralistic setting of Victorian England. The nature, extent and eventual destruction of the white slave trade in England are described in detail in this modest monograph by a British novelist, Charles (The Neon Rainbow) Terrot. Between mild beige covers, in mild beige prose, he has told a story that makes the ghastliest passages of Dickens read like a parish calendar...
...could Britain, which had abolished slavery half a century earlier, permit it to continue in this form? For one reason, the subject was "too horrible to mention" in polite Victorian society, says Author Terrot. "The very horror of the crime," wrote a London editor, "was the chief seat of its persistence." After one reform bill was "talked out" of Parliament in the spring of 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette's W. T. (for William Thomas) Stead, a brilliant crusading journalist, published a four-part study entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon that stunned the nation and appalled...
...face by railroading Editor Stead to jail on a technicality, but after a few months the law was enforced and the white-slave operation smashed in England. In other parts of the world, particularly in Asia, it continues on a vast scale. How vast? The prudish horror of the Victorian era is matched by the let-a-commission-do-it approach of unshockable modern society. No statistics are available...
...Sage of Sex, by Arthur Calder-Marshall. The best biography yet of Victorian Sexologist Havelock Ellis suggests that his studies of the abnormal may have arisen because his own sexual behavior was both immature and exotic...
...pseudo-candid aside. In his literary essays, e.g., on Diderot, Whitman, Ibsen, he was an appreciator but no critic. As a thinker he belongs to the age of the New Woman, with its feminists, pacifists and socialists-pressed flowers in the book of ideas. Ellis' real enemy was Victorian prudery, and the real dragon he killed was Mrs. Grundy. As a freedom fighter he was doughty enough to call for the humane treatment of homosexuals when England was still seething with the trial of Oscar Wilde. His unshockability has become a sophisticated and sometimes cynical 20th century attitude...