Prostitution In Victorian England

When someone examines the case of Jack The Ripper, the victims are the most important part. The canonical five had one thing in common, the fact that they had all been involved in prostitution. When the press began to cover the killings and reported about the victims, what they wrote was consistent with the understanding of prostitution in the late-19th century. In order to understand beliefs that the Victorian people had about prostitution, on most understand the idea of the fallen women. Throughout this essay, I will, explain the idea of the fallen women, select parts of reports about the canonical five victims and explain how they are consistent with the understandings of prostitution during that time.

All of the reports of the victims,

portray them as fallen women. A fallen woman was described as a woman who lost her innocents. However when it comes to the 19th Century in England it was used to describe women who lost or gave up their chastity. Since a common belief during the Victorian Era was that a woman’s sexuality should only be exclusive to her marriage.

Victorian women of reputation did not consider intercourse pleasurable and felt that intercourse was a duty that they were obligated to do for their husbands. This was different from women who were prostitutes because they were considered women who enjoyed intercourse. This was not necessarily true. Biblical ties to the ideology of fallen women can be tied to the Book of Genesis. The story of when Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit and how she fell from the grace of God and became the original sinner. In Victorian London during the year 1841, there was an estimated 55,000 prostitutes in the Greater London area. A common belief was that if a women was abandoned by her community and then lost her job, that prostitution was one of the only ways to make money. Prostitution was a way of survival for woman that had no other way to support themselves. Statistics also show that women who came from poor families were more likely to become prostitutes rather than women who come from a middle or upper class family. With Victorian society, once she chose the profession of prostitution is was not allowed back in the respectable society. According to Mason Long

in this work Save The Girls "Fallen women owe their ruin to a variety of causes. A large number of them have a natural tendency to vice, which is born in them, being inherited from their ancestors. Such are, in thought and feeling, prostitutes from youth, and, at the first opportunity, become profligate, either openly or covertly. Many of them remain chase in body, owing simply to a lack of opportunity to indulge their natural propensities, but their minds are without purity, their passions and sentiments are coarse, and the sexual sin they crave is just as much theirs as though actually committed in deed, as it is in thought. These women, who are naturally impure, become prostitutes from choice” (Long, 1883).
During the Victorian era, both literature and art had romanticised the saving of fallen women.

A painting painted by Richard Redgrave in 1851 depicted a father casing out and disowning his daughter and legitimate child while the rest of her family is begging the father not too. This painting would make the observer feel sorry for the daughter and the child. It could also be a warning to other women around the age of the daughter in the painting that being immoral could lead to their own families casting them and their unwanted children on to the streets. Many other famous artists have portrayed fallen women in their art such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Frederic Watts. Besides art, literature also had an obsession with fallen women. Many authors had characters that were fallen women who were met with the same fates. These characters include Maggie Tulliver from George Eliot's Mill On The Floss, who drowns in a flood after she is suspected of sexual deviance. Another character is Nancy from Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist who is murdered by her lover. These are only two character from literature from the Victorian era that depicted with dying violent deaths after being or being considered fallen

women.
The first of the canonical five victims was Mary Ann Nichols who also went as Polly. Mary Ann Nichols was killed by Jack The Ripper on the 31st of August in 1888. She was found in Buck’s Row on Thomas Street. One press report from the 1st of September, 1888 from The Daily Telegraph says “Late in the day she was identified as a woman named Nicholls, who had led a loose and miserable life, and had at one time been an inmate of the Lambeth Workhouse” (Casebook.org, 2016). Another report from the same day from the Daily News stated that “She was a married woman, but had been living apart from her husband for some years.” Another report from the Evening Standard “A woman of the class known as "unfortunate" was murdered under circumstances of a most revolting character in Buck's row, Whitechapel road, yesterday morning”(Casebook.org, 2016). A Daily Mail Report from the 3rd of September, 1888 speaks of her comparison to two other victims of crimes from earlier in the year stating “All three women were of the same class, and each of them was so poor that robbery could have formed no motive for the crime” (Casebook.org, 2016). These reports all say that she was a woman who was of a lower standard which was a nice way of saying that she was using prostitution as a way to gain money. Since there wasn’t any other victims of Jack The Ripper yet, people wondered why these women were getting murdered. Other reports on Nichols, all talk about how she work and but emphasize that she was married but separated from her husband. Many reports shied away from calling the victims prostitutes directly. It also would cause her to possibly get less sympathy than say Annie Chapman who was a widow rather than apart from her husband.