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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Archive through January 05, 2001
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Suspects: Specific Suspects:
Contemporary Suspects [ 1888 - 1910 ]:
Tumblety, Francis:
Archive through January 05, 2001
Author: Geoff Marchese
Thursday, 21 October 1999 - 11:17 am |        | Does anyone have any information that Tumblety was in Nicaragua for a time and that similar murders to that of JTR were committed there? I took a Jack the Ripper walking tour when I was in London recently (I am from the US) and this was mentioned on the tour.
Geoff |
Author: Ashling
Thursday, 21 October 1999 - 05:46 pm | | Hi all ... and Welcome to all newcomers.
JOHN K: Adams & Gainey?!? ;-)
Take care,
Janice |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Friday, 22 October 1999 - 05:59 am | | Hi, all:
Mr. Kenrick, or course you mean Stewart P. Evans and Paul Gainey, who named Francis Tumblety as a plausible suspect in the Whitechapel murders following the mention of Dr. Tumblety as a suspect in the murders in Chief Inspector John George Littlechild's letter of 1913 to journalist George R. Sims.
In regard to Geoff Marchese's question about whether there is any information that Tumblety was in Nicaragua, where murders similar murders to those of Jack the Ripper were reportedly committed in Managua, Evans and Gainey quote British and American reports of these murders, but do not provide proof that Tumblety was in Nicaragua at the time. It is up to researchers to link Tumblety to murders in Managua and elsewhere in order to narrow down the possibility that Dr. T might be the Whitechapel murderer.
Chris George |
Author: Geoff Marchese
Friday, 22 October 1999 - 10:31 am | | Thanks for the response Chris.
Geoff |
Author: Jon
Friday, 19 November 1999 - 08:02 am | | G'morning people.....
I took this extract off the net for those who might be interested. I find it contains some points of interest.
All credit or otherwise goes to Mr Daniel F. Johnson.
Jon
Checkout the original at the site below:
http://www.new-brunswick.net/new-brunswick/ghoststory/ghost12.html
-------------------------------------------
Jack the Quack
Did Jack the Ripper visit Saint John
and was here that he claimed his first victim?
By Daniel F. Johnson
from The New Brunswick Reader
...... In the year 1888, citizens of London, England, particularly those of the poor district of Whitechapel, were terrorized by a villain whose ghastly deeds have notched his bloody name forever - Jack the Ripper.
......The Whitechapel community was reeling from severe economic recession. The stark reality of starvation forced women into the streets as prostitutes. Here they became vulnerable prey. As each victim fell beneath the Ripper's bloodied knife, the hideous mutilations of the bodies horrified the most seasoned investigators. When the British tabloids printed the gruesome photos, shock and fear turned to anger. Vigilante mobs roamed the streets while Scotland Yard desperately scoured for a man who disappeared into the shadows of the night.
......As suddenly as the murders began, they ended - but the identity of Jack the Ripper has remained one of the greatest mysteries of the nineteenth century.
......For a century later, these mysteries have given rise to unending speculation. Stewart Evans, a police officer with the Suffolk Constabulary and Paul Gainey, a press officer for the Suffolk Police, believe they now have the answer. Their investigation began with the recent discovery of a letter typed by a former inspector of Scotland Yard naming one Dr. Francis J. Tumblety as the prime suspect of the Ripper slayings. The police, unable to hold him on suspicion of the Whitechapel crimes, succeeded in getting him held for trial under a special law. The elusive Tumblety quickly raised bail, slipped through the tight police surveillance and escaped to France. He travelled to New York, followed closely by a team of detectives from Scotland Yard. In The Lodger: The Arrest & Escape of Jack The Ripper Evans and Gainey, present a well-argued case of how Tumblety fits the place, time and circumstances surrounding the slayings. Drawing from contemporary American newspapers, probate and judicial records, Evans and Gainey have reconstructed the life and times of the doctor in North America previous to and following his daring escape from England. Among the highlights of his fascinating career was Tumblety's arrest as a conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. As well, he was once ousted from a hotel in New York City. There were two persons evicted from the hotel that day, the other being Charles J. Guiteau, who three months later assassinated President James Garfield.
...... For a New Brunswick audience, the most astonishing aspect of Tumblety's career is that he lived in Saint John and may have claimed his first victim there.
......It was a late evening in October, 1995, when I received a telephone call from a friend who had heard that two Suffolk policemen purported to have uncovered the identity of Jack the Ripper - a Dr. Francis J. Tumblety. Six years ago, I published the story of a medical quack by the same name who had briefly visited Saint John before fleeing to the United States to escape manslaughter charges. According to my files, the doctor was subsequently involved in the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln. It was also reported in contemporary New York newspapers that Tumblety had been engaged as a surgeon of General McClelland's personal staff during the American Civil War. The last reference to Tumblety placed him in Brooklyn, New York, where he had raised the wrath of the Greenwood Cemetery officials in 1865. 1 had wondered what became of Dr. Francis Tumblety after that. Now, I was able to contact Constable Stewart Evans in Suffolk to compare our findings.
......That Dr. Francis Tumblety and Jack the Ripper were the same man seemed too incredible to be true. Obviously there was a twenty -eight-year gap between the time he visited Saint John and when the Ripper performed his gory deeds in Whitechapel. But given the small likelihood of two men sharing such a rare alias warranted further investigation. Ron Keith of Saint John was able to provide the documented proof. It was a letter acquired by his father, the late Gerald Keith, some years ago. On December 1, 1888, William Smith, the Deputy Minister of Marine in Ottawa wrote to his colleague James Barber of Saint John:
...... "My dear Barber.... Do you recollect Dr. Tumblety who came to St. John about 1860 and who used to ride on a beautiful white horse with a long tail, and a couple of grey hounds following after him? Do you recollect how he used to canter along like a circus man? And do you recollect that it was asserted that he killed old Portmore, the Carpenter who built the extension to my house and fleeced me to a large extent? Do you recollect how he suddenly left St. John, circus horse, hounds and all, and afterwards turned up at different places in the States and Canada? He was considered by Dr. Bayard and others an adventurer and Quack Doctor. He is the man who was arrested in London three weeks ago as the Whitechapel murderer. He had been living in Birmingham and used to come up to London on Saturday nights. The police have always had their eyes on him every place he went and finally the Birmingham Police telegraphed to the London Police that he had left for London, and on his arrival he was nabbed accordingly. He must now be 58 or 60 years of age as he left St. John about 1860. He was a tall handsome man and a beautiful rider. When I was in Eastport in 1860 detained by a storm, I met him there and spent part of the day with him. He was very agreeable and intelligent. I do not think he could be the Whitechapel fiend. He now spells his name Twomblety. I believe his original name was Mike Sullivan."
......FRANCIS J. TUMBLETY (also Tumilty or Tumuelty) was born in Ireland about the year 1833. He accompanied his family to North America in the early 1840s, residing with an older brother, Lawrence, who first appears at Rochester, New York in the year 1844. They were joined a few years later by his sister's family, the Fitzsimons. According to The Lodger, Edward Haywood, a former acquaintance once told an interviewer:
......"I remember him [Frank Tumilty] very well when he used to run about the canal in Rochester, a dirty, awkward, ignorant, uncared for, good-for-nothing boy. He was utterly devoid of education. He lived with his brother, who was my uncle's gardener. The only training he ever had for the medical profession was a little drug store at the back of the Arcade, which was kept by Doctor Lispenard, who carried on a medical business of a disreputable kind."
......In 1851, or shortly thereafter, Tumblety departed Rochester, but re-surfaced about two years later. According to the unpublished chronology, Stewart Evans places him in London, Canada West (now Ontario) in the year 1853. This is supported by the testimonial advertisement which appeared in the Daily Spectator & Journal of Commerce of Hamilton, Canada West, in May 1856, undoubtedly placed by Tumblety himself, but purportedly signed by the editor of the London Atlas, who gives " . . . testimony as to the very great measure of success which has attended your labours here as a medical practitioner during the few months you have resided among us ... and the high reputation which you brought with you from Rochester."
...... As early as 1856, Tumblety had polished the skills of his trade. He had adopted the title of the Indian Herb Doctor and made extensive use of local newspapers as his marketing tool. After a stop in Hamilton, he set up shop in Toronto in November, 1856. A month later he announced that "after traversing the United States and Canada [he] has concluded to make Toronto his home for the future." The decision to settle down is puzzling: it appears out of character and it conflicted with the nature of his chosen trade. Although evidence subsequently emerged exposing his deep hatred for women and his preference for young men, his death certificate of 1903 states that he was a widower. Could this have been connected to his decision to settle in Toronto?
...... On April 22, 1857, Tumblety claimed to have discovered a new herb, "the medical properties of which were hitherto unknown to the medical faculty that will cure any case of fever and ague in 24 hours by applying it externally."
......Although maintaining his Toronto office, Tumblety made sojourns to Quebec. By June, Tumblety had begun a practice in Montreal. His activities, however, did not escape the eye of the police and he was arrested for attempting to induce an abortion with his medicinal herbs Tumblety successfully raised bailed and returned to Toronto. He was subsequently cleared of the charges by the Grand Jury of Montreal.
......On December 7, 1857, Tumblety placed a curious notice in the Montreal Commercial Advertiser in which he declined the invitations made by political figures in Montreal to stand for Parliament in opposition to Thomas Darcy Magee.
......In 1859 he departed Toronto.
......Captain W.C. Streeter, an old resident of Rochester recalled in 1888:
...... "He returned to Rochester [about 1860] as a great physician and soon became the wonder of the city. He wore a light fur overcoat that reached to his feet and had a dark collar and cuffs, and he was always followed by a big greyhound. When a boy he had no associates, and when he returned he was more exclusive and solitary than ever. I don't remember ever having seen him in the company with another person in his walks. When I met him on his return, having known him quite well as a boy, I said, 'Hello, Frank, how d'ye do?' and he merely replied, 'Hello, Streeter' and passed on. He had become very aristocratic during his absence. The papers had a great deal to say about him and he created quite a sensation by giving barrels of flour and other provisions to poor people. Afterwards he went to Buffalo and did likewise, and I understand visited other cities."
......It is uncertain what drew Tumblety to the port of Saint John on or about the 28th day of June in 1860, just prior to a much-publicized visit by the young Prince of Wales. The port was easily accessible by steamer and the barques and schooners which regularly travelled the Atlantic coastal waters from the ports of Boston, New York and Eastport, Maine.
......As he made his way from the docks to the steep incline of King Street, Tumblety would have been an impressive sight. Unlike the dark, furtive figure of the Ripper whose features were hidden by a scarf and black cloak (as depicted in the English tabloids), Tumblety presented a dashing figure. His attire was immaculate, tailored to attract attention. He rode a great white horse followed by his faithful grey hound.
......Tumblety's immediate destination was the American House which fronted King Street, just downhill from the corner of King and Germain streets. The American House was considered one of the finer hotels of the town. Although recently established, its proprietor, Samuel B. Estey was well-known hotel operator. A staunch Baptist, Estey insisted on the adoption of temperate habits while lodging at his establishment.
...... Having engaged two rooms at the hotel, one to be used as an office, Tumblety applied to the common clerk's office for a licence to practice. In completing the document, Tumblety recorded that he was a native of Ireland, 28 years of age and an Indian Herb Doctor.
......When the application was delivered to the assistant common clerk, it was decided to cross out Indian Herb Doctor and substitute the word druggist. This document was later used as evidence against Tumblety. Unfortunately, Wumblety's application was destroyed in the Great Fire of June 20, 1877. It otherwise would have provided a rare opportunity to compare Tumblety's signature with that of the man arrested as Jack the Ripper.
......Within a few days, Tumblety appeared in the offices of various newspapers, including the Morning News, the New Brunswick Courier and the Morning Freeman, buying advertising space for weeks in advance.
...... On July 3,1860 the Morning Freeman announced, "The Indian Herb Doctor from Canada has arrived and may be consulted free of charge at his Rooms in the American House, King Street. The Doctor will describe disease and tell his patients the Nature of their Complaints or illness without receiving any information from them."
......Readers were attracted by his flamboyant headlines such as, "Given Up By All Doctors," and "Pulmonary Consumption Cured in Last Stage." On July 26, Tumblety's favourite motto appeared in the Morning Freeman.
......We use such Balms as have no strife With Nature of the Laws of Life; With blood our hands we never stain Nor Poison men to ease their pain. Our Father - whom all goodness fills Provides the means to cure all ills; The simple Herbs beneath our feet Well used, relieve our pains complete A simple Herb, a simple Flower, Culled from the dewy lea These, they shall speak with touching power Of change and health to thee. - F. Tumblety, M.D.
......Tumblety knew his market well. In the weeks following, the Morning Freeman advertised the incredible personal testimonials of local inhabitants. Among them were John F. Toland and Miss A. Levin, both cured of consumption. A block maker at Peter's Wharf had his hearing restored. Peter Hart testified that he was cured of blindness. Alexander Johnston found relief from inflammation of the liver.
......While Tumblety attended his duties, the city was making preparations for the arrival of the Prince of Wales. In all directions flag staffs were erected. A large fountain was under construction at Market Square intended to jettison the water to great heights. An assortment of Chinese lanterns illuminated the city. Despite the destractions, Tumblety's activity had not escaped the attention of the Saint John Medical Society.
......The small but well-knit medical community was aghast by the outrageous testimonials which appeared in the advertising sheets and were appalled that Tumblety, whom they considered a quack, should be allowed to prey on the fears of the seriously ill.
......On Monday July 30,1860, Tumblety, accompanied by his counsel, David Shanks Kerr and A.R. Wetmore, Q.C., appeared before the police magistrate. The Indian Herb Doctor, was charged with falsely represented himself as doctor of medicine. The magistrate gave the following written judgment:
......"That the Indian Herb prefixed to the Doctor is nothing but a delusion and fraud, while at the same time the word Doctor and letters M.D., falsely assumed by the Defendant are admirably calculated to deceive the weary and unsuspecting."
......While the Indian Herb Doctor continued his practice, his lawyers pursued an appeal through the courts. The matter came before Supreme Court Judge Robert Parker and he ruled that the onus rested with the plaintiffs to prove that Tumblety was not a doctor and the decision was reversed with costs.
......Tumblety, ever ready to seize an opportunity, was quick to curry public favour. The amount of the fine (20 pounds 30s 6d) he announced would be distributed to the poor. On September 27th, his advertisement begins:
......"The peculiar circumstances under which Dr. Tumblety is situated forces upon him the necessity of placing a few of the many certificates before a candid public, whose appreciation of his abilities has opened to him a vast field of philanthropic usefulness and undeniable benefaction. There is indeed, as much room for reform in Medical Jurisprudence as in the Science of Politics. Facts are stubborn things, read them."
...... Tumblety, with the help of good lawyers, had escaped his second brush with the law, but his troubles did not end there. On September 17, a letter was submitted to the Morning Freeman by a local physician which read:
......"Mr. Editor - Having understood from various parties that a report is in circulation to the effect that a person known as Dr. Tumblety has stated that he cured my son Francis from being lame - which statement I most positively contradict as being without the least shadow of truth, my son never having been under his treatment, nor that of any other person except myself. - T.W. Smith, M.D."
......On August 25, 1860, the following testimonial appeared in the Morning Freeman, purportedly written by Thomas W. Robinson:
......"Dr. Tumblety - Dear Sir: For upwards of two years, I have been troubled with a bad cough, night sweats, debility, emancipation, etc. I got so bad that I at times raised large quantities of matter mixed with blood. This frightened me for I thought I had a short time to live. Night after night I used to sweat so that when I came under your treatment I was little better than a withered bud. I have had no distress from my cough since I commenced using your medicine; in five weeks I was completely restored. I have gained upwards of ten pounds of flesh and I am still on the gain."
......These testimonies attracted the attention of James Portmore, a carpenter by trade.
...... When only six years of age, James Portmore had emigrated from Ireland to Saint John in 1807 with his parents. In 1847, when the number of Irish immigrants arriving at the port of Saint John had reached its peak, James Portmore had been engaged to build a pest house at the quarantine station on Partridge Island situated in harbour. Yet so many were the deaths that the boards intended for the pest house were used instead to build coffins. James had been ill for ten years but early in September, 1860, was unable to attend to his work as a carpenter.
......Suffering from the intense pain and complications brought about by a diseased kidney and bladder, Portmore was induced by the testimonials to visit the Indian Herb Doctor from whom he purchased two small bottles of herb mixture. He would take a teaspoon from each bottle, mix it with water and swallow the contents three times daily. The first time he took the dose he exclaimed to his wife, "Oh, that would burn the heart out of a man!" but continued the treatment for a week. As time progressed, Portmore complained that his stomach was burning. He could no longer eat and his bladder condition worsened.
......He again visited Tumblety who proscribed another mixture of herbs. Still, Portmore suffered from an inflamed stomach and two days later retired to his bed having lost his appetite entirely. Alarmed at her husband's deteriorating condition, Mary Portmore sent for Tumblety who arrived at the Sheffield Street residence on the following day. She later testified at the coroner's inquest:
......"When I first saw him, I said to him, 'You have killed my husband.' He asked me how he killed him. I said by giving him wrong medicine. He asked deceased how he was. Deceased said 'I am a dead man.' "
......Before Tumblety's arrival at the their residence, Portmore had warned his wife to keep the bottle of herbs for other physicians to examine. Nevertheless, she witnessed Tumblety pick up the bottle from the bedroom table, smell it and put it down. He sent her for water to wash his hands. Upon her return, Tumblety departed the residence, saying that he would return at 4 o'clock with balsam to create an appetite. Tumblety never returned. A few minutes after he left, Mrs. Portmore discovered the bottle missing. Portmore bitterly remarked, "Let the villain take them."
......The Portmores sent for Dr. William F. Humphrey who had visited Portmore in June and had diagnosed a liver ailment. Dr. Humphrey had visited the household occasionally until the first of September. He did not place Portmore under any treatment, believing that removal of a stone he had detected in the bladder would cure him. He arrived accompanied by Dr. LeBaron Botsford and they found Portmore in bed in a semi-conscious state. He was suffering from severe pains in the stomach, excessive thirst and headaches.
......Thereafter Dr. Humphrey visited Portmore daily. The treatment included the application of leeches to the stomach. Portmore was administered cold drinks, small pieces of ice, but could not retain the prescribed purgative pills. It was apparent to the visiting physician that Portmore would not survive. On Tuesday September 25, James Portmore died.
......Botsford testified three days later: "I believe the acute inflammation of the stomach to be the immediate cause of the death of the deceased. He would ultimately have died of the disease in his kidneys and bladder, but the symptoms immediately prior to his death were not such as would necessarily be consequent upon his disease. Disease of the kidney and bladder does not terminate in inflammation of the stomach."
...... On Friday, September 28, Dr. William Bayard, the county coroner convened his jury. Among those examined were Estey, the hotel proprietor, and one James Hamilton. Hamilton had been engaged by Tumblety as a clerk, receptionist and errand boy. The inquest was adjourned to the following morning, but resumed with the noticeable absence of one key participant - Tumblety
......It was the testimony of young Hamilton that provided the whereabouts of the Indian Herb Doctor. It was between 10 and 11 o'clock the night of the first sitting of the coroner's jury that young Hamilton last saw Tumblety. Wearing a cloak, cap and grey pantaloons, Tumblety stopped briefly at the opposite end of the suspension bridge which spanned the Reversing Falls to give last minute instructions to the clerk. Tumblety said that he was on his way to Calais, Maine, but instructed Hamilton not to tell any person which way he went. Thus the Indian Herb Doctor who paraded so elegantly into Saint John was last seen galloping away into the shadows of the night towards the American border, followed only by his faithful hound.
......On the September 28, 1860, the coroner's jury returned the verdict: "That Francis Tumblety on the 25th day of September did feloniously kill and slay one James Portmore." There was no effort by the Saint John police to pursue the matter.
......But the citizens of Saint John had not heard the last from their summer visitor. On October 2, 1860, the Morning Freeman published the following letter.
......"I have received notice of the result of the Coroner's Inquest. I shall return when my business here is finished, earlier if the Authorities desire. I am innocent and anyone charging me with the offence is a liar and a scoundrel. -F. Tumblety, M.D., Calais, 1st. Oct."
......The inhabitants of Saint John, however, were never to see the Indian Doctor again - for Francis J. Tumblety had found greener pastures to peddle his wares in the land of the free.
Daniel F. Johnson is a writer
and researcher in Saint John. |
Author: Jon
Wednesday, 01 December 1999 - 03:34 pm | | Digging through some 19th Century song sheets I came across this, with a reference to Dr Tumblety & Madam Restell
:-)
 |
Author: Jon
Wednesday, 01 December 1999 - 03:47 pm | | (ok, so the file was too big.....there's more than one way to skin a cat)
Digging through some 19th Century song sheets I came across this, with a reference to Dr Tumblety & Madam Restell
:-)
THE CARTE-DE-VISITE
ALBUM.
A Comic Song written for Tony Pastor. Air: Chanting Benny.
Of novelty this is the age,
It matters not what it is;
But Albums now are all the rage,
Filled up with Cartes-de Visite.
I looked in one.. 'twas neatly bound,
And filled with art's creations--
And men and women there I found
In curious situations.
CHORUS.
But things will get mixed up, you know,
Though small mistakes we call 'em,
In putting Cartes-de-Visites in
A fashionable Album.
There Edwin Forrest first I saw,
Stuck close to Julia Daly,
And Laura Keen under George Law:
Mrs. Stowe with Horace Greeley,
Dan Bryant over Ellen Grey:
You'd really ought to seen 'em..
And Ada Menkin, young and gay,
Was next to Johnny Heenan.
CHORUS.
For, things will get mixed up, you know,
But small mistakes we call 'em,
In putting Cartes-de-Visites in
A fashionable Album.
Then famous Doctor Tumblety,
The knight of pill and pestle,
Stuck in a corner there you'd see
Along with Madam Restell.
Young Booth just by young Cora Hatch,
He cut a pretty figure:
With Wendell Philipps sticking to
A woolly female nigger.
For, things will get, &c.
Fernando Wood and Fanny Fern
Were in a corner shady,
While Gideon Welles his turn came next,
Close to the famed "French Lady!"
Then Barnum's Giant, gaily dressed,
A monster huge and fat, he,
Although much larger than the rest,
Was next to little Patty.
For, things, &c.
Our army, too, the honor shared,
From General to sutler:
There was old blackguard Beauregard
Put under General Butler;
There was Johnston, Yancey,
Toombs and Lee,
And Wise, so famed for drinking.
But over this Rogues' Gallery
Was honest old Abe Lincoln.
For, things, &c.
There was Colonel Ellsworth, hero true,
Columbia's martyred son, sir,
With Lyon, Lander, Sedgwick, too,
Along with Washington, sir.
There was Jeff Davis and the crowd
Who now his staff is swelling,
And all stuck, where they soon will be,
Under our own brave Sherman.
CHORUS.
For, mighty soon our nation's space
He'll free from rebel thralldom,
And Traitors then shall have no place
In Uncle Sam's big Album!
H. DE MARSAN, Publisher,
54 Chatham Street, New-York. |
Author: Rotter
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 01:33 am | | Madame Restell was the leading New York abortionist of her day. Interesting that Tumblety would be mentioned in the same breath.
Here is a quote courtesy of http://members.tripod.com/fighting9th/History9.htm
During the laissez-faire decades of the 19th-century, the most famous abortionist in New York,
indeed the country, was Madame Restell. She was so well known that the practice of abortion was
sometimes referred to as "Restellism". Restell, whose real name was an Ann Lohman (nee Trow),
came from England in 1831.
Her practice, which she began sometime around 1835, flourished until the 1870s, despite several
arrests (which did little but give her free publicity), public censure, and newspaper exposes.
She started in a modest home at 146 Greenwich Street and ended up a millionaire with a mansion
on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street (next door, ironically, to St. Patrick's
Cathedral, which was completed the year of her death). At its apex of 1870s, her empire
included branch offices, traveling salesmen, and a mail-order business for her "Female Monthly
Pills". On April 1, 1878, facing charges spearheaded by reformer Anthony Comstock that promised
to put her out of business, she committed suicide. |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 05:17 am | | Hi, all:
Thanks, Rotter, for posting the information about Madame Restell, and Jon for posting the period song mentioning her and Dr. Tumblety. (Here again we see Dr. T's notoriety, one of the problems people have with him as a suspect.) Well, since the Madame committed suicide in 1878, ten years short of the Whitechapel murders, I guess we cross her off our list of suspects. :-)
Chris George |
Author: Wolf
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 10:50 am | | It is interesting to note "The young Booth" mentioned. This would be John Wilkes, "the most handsome man in America". His brother Edwin, being the elder and much more famous actor at the time.
Wolf. |
Author: Wolf
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 10:54 am | | Oh, one more little aside. I believe the Maybrick Diary to have originally been used as a carte-de-visite album rather than a photo album.
Wolf. |
Author: Karoline
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 11:52 am | | A carte-de-visite album IS a photo album.
In the early days of photography 'carte-de-visite' was a size of photographic print - smaller than 'cabinet', and generally very popular.
Karoline |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 12:30 pm | | Hi, Karoline:
You are exactly right that cartes de visite were a popular photographic form of the era. I used a number of Civil War era cartes de visite in my picture book of Baltimore, "Baltimore Close-up." One of the pictures is of John Wilkes Booth, another of Frederick Douglass, as well as Union generals and soldiers, a black Union sailor, a Confederate sailor, and civilians. What is interesting about the song that Jon posted is that it sounds as if the writer of the song was actually looking at a carte de visite album containing the photographs of the people that he mentions in the song. People did collect cartes de visite of famous people and not only family members. This means that there may have been a photograph of Dr. Tumblety extant at that time but which is not known today. Intriguing. . .
Chris George |
Author: Jon
Thursday, 02 December 1999 - 02:38 pm | | I appreciate the informed responses, Rotter, Chris, Wolf & Karoline.....
Yon fella 'ere learned summat :-)
Jon |
Author: Janet Hessert
Sunday, 02 January 2000 - 01:01 pm | | Happy New Year everybody.
I am new to both this discussion group and ripperology, so please don't flame me if I ask about something that "everybody already knows" :).
I find Tumblety an interesting suspect, and am very curious about his collection of uteri. My gut reaction (no pun intended) is that he collected these from corpses (either stolen or gotten "legitimately" for medical studies), rather than from patients. Why? All the newspapers quoted in the case book point to him as "an Indian herb doctor" or "druggist" -- and the unfortunate people he is know to have killed died from ingesting medicine, rather than botched surgery. If the uteri were from patients, wouldn't at least one of the parties complaining about his lack of medical skills/qualifications have mentioned "x number of patients have died after Tumblety operated on them"?
Does anyone have any information on the following:
1.) The survival rate of hysterectomies (or other major surgeries) in the 1860s-1890s (I suspect it was small).
2.) Whether Tumblety was ever known to have posed as a surgeon or abortionist?
Where am I going with all this? If Tumblety were JtR, could his sickness have been kept in check for certain periods by cutting up corpses in the privacy of his autopsy room?
Any thoughts from the professionals?
Thanks much,
Janet |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 02 January 2000 - 01:46 pm | | Janet
The author of 'The Lodger' (Tumblety theory) writes to these message boards from time to time.
Even so, I think the answer to your first question will require independant research.
However as to your second question, Tumblety had negative feelings towards surgeons, he prefered the use of herbs to the use of the knife, and was never reluctant to let his views be known as often as he could.
Tumblety posed as a Physician, but not a surgeon.
The only connection we know of between Tumblety & abortion, was when he tried to induce an abortion using a herbal potion, it was a failure.
Tumblety's only connection with anyones death was when a man named Podmore died following treatment by Tumblety. He was charged with malpractice and fled the country, (Canada). Once again it was a potion that was the reason for the mans death, not the knife.
As for Tumblety's uteri collection, the uteri were a small percentage of his known collection, it was organs in general that were in cases for viewing and as Tumblety was very wealthy and we know of no 'ripper type' murders in the U.S.A. then we can take it that Tumblety gained his collection by legitimate means as part of his 'image' as a bonfide Physician.
The collection was refered to in the U.S. around the 1860's, some 25-30 yrs before the Whitechapel murders.
Tumblety was known to have refered to the use of the knife, medically speaking as 'the scourge of mankind'.
Tumblety was a herb Doctor, and without bonafide credentials as to even the title 'Doctor'.
Regards, Jon |
Author: Janet Hessert
Sunday, 02 January 2000 - 03:17 pm | | Jon:
Thanks very much for your response. I have read Mr. Evans' previous posts and have always found them very interesting. I hope he replies to your post, especially stating his views of why he feels Tumblety is such a strong suspect, if he was so violently "anti-knife".
I thought that Tumblety did at least claim to be a surgeon, and rereading the casebook, I found this:
"With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Tumblety moved to the capital and put on the airs of a Union army surgeon, claiming to be friends with President Lincoln, General Grant, and a host of other well-known political figures."
I am still curious if Mr. Evans (or anybody else) has found any evidence that Tumblety actually performed surgery.
I suppose I should add that I am not an amateur historian or criminologist. My interest in the case is as much "artistic" as "historical". By that I mean, it's just as fascinating to explore what could have plausibly happened, or what sort of person Jack the Ripper could have been, as it is to explore the known facts of the case. I'm adding this caveat in the hopes that the professional historians and criminologists among you will not take offense if some of my postings seem to be more than a little hair-brained.
I look forward to your responses,
Janet |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 02 January 2000 - 04:28 pm | | Janet
Believe me, we know hair-brained when we see it
You dont even come close :-)
One of the interesting things about Tumblety is the many claims he made are not verifiable.
I am also a Civil War enthusiast and am searching for legitimate proof of his claims.
Tumblety as you quote 'put on the airs of a surgeon' ...which is somewhat different to posing as a practicing surgeon, knife in hand, etc...
In fact it only means he wore the Union Military uniform with the markings of the medical attachement and relevent badges of a surgeon.
Did he actually visit the battlefield, knife in hand and with sleeves rolled up....?
We have yet to come across evidence of that.
Parading around the Capital claiming to be on the Staff, as an Official Union Army Surgeon is more of a fugurehead position, but through his life we find at any given time when his claims are questioned, at the first opportune moment, he's gone.....
The many claims in his own book of being friends & aquaintances with all the eminent people of his era, are up to now just that, unsubstantiated 'claims'.
Tumblety is an interesting character, no question about that. And he may have had dubious connections with rebels & IRA supporters, but to be actually Jack the Ripper,....I claim we dont know enough to go that far, not yet.
There are too many unanswered questions about his arrest, flight and subsequent activity in America, once he arrived back there.
Regards, Jon |
Author: joel todd
Monday, 10 January 2000 - 05:38 am | | hello,
i am new to the "ripper" case. i have gotten my info only by reading through a few web sites. it makes sense that homosexuals would kill men only but i don't believe in using the terms always and never when talking about human behavior. i wouldn't be suprised if tumblety was the ripper because of his hatered of women and his collection of uteri if both are indeed true. |
Author: Christopher-Michael
Monday, 10 January 2000 - 07:32 pm | | Joel -
Welcome to the Casebook. No doubt you will receive this advice from many of the other good posters on the boards, but if you plan to become au courant with the Ripper case, you would do well to invest in a copy of Philip Sugden's "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper."
The case against Dr Tumblety will be found in Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey's "Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer." As well, you can read an interview with Mr Evans at the Casebook Productions website at http://business.fortunecity.com/all/138/
Happy reading.
Regards,
Christopher-Michael |
Author: Jon
Saturday, 15 January 2000 - 06:26 pm | | Anyone well versed in the Tumblety fiasco may be able to explain these news reports, is there something missing?
New York Times, Nov 19, 1888.
The Dr. Tumblety who was arrested in London a few days ago on suspicion of complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and who when proved innocent of that charge was held for trial in the Central Criminal Court under the special law covering the offenses disclosed in the late "Modern Babylon" scandal.
Mark King found that Tumblety was arrested on Nov 7th. Then (above) was held for trial under a special law
He was held until Nov. 16th, when he was charged with 8 counts of gross indecency, it was at this point he made bail until a hearing on Nov. 20th. The trial was postponed until Dec. 10th.
It was on either Nov. 23rd/24th when he jumped bail and fled to France and boarded a steamer to America, arriving there Sunday Dec. 2nd, 1888.
New York Times.
San Francisco, Nov.22.--
Chief of Police Crowly has lately been in correspondence with officials of Scotland Yard, London, regarding Dr. Tumblety, who is at present under arrest on suspicion of being implicated in the Whitechapel murders.
Tumblety was still under arrest and out on bail following the hearing of Nov. 20th, as confirmed in the above news report.
Bail was only granted on Nov. 16th (as above) so Tumblety was in Police custody between Nov 7th & 16th.
So he could hardly have killed Kelly while out on bail, before bail had been granted.
Am I missing something?
Regards, Jon |
Author: Jon
Saturday, 15 January 2000 - 10:50 pm | | as an extension to the above post.....
To simplify matters, under what provision of English law are the Police allowed to release a person they have just charged?
It takes a Judge or Magistrate to set bail, so Tumblety had to stay in police custody from Nov. 7th to Nov. 16th to await the charges being stated, at that point bail is set.
From Nov. 7th to the 16th he was held by police.
Or are we to believe the police let him go without any pressure from any lawyer, without any good reason.
The more importance the authors give to the hunt for Tumblety prior to his arrest works directly against the suggestion that they just subsequently let him go.
The theory proposed in 'The Lodger' is that the police were onto Tumblety early on in the Ripper investigation. Newspaper articles refering to a suspicious American being sought by police are implied to be about Tumblety. The Batty Street lodger is supposed to be Tumblety, the police are supposed to have had him high on a list of suspects. They subsequently are supposed to have followed him to America as a very important suspect.
Then why are we led to believe this same police force let him go before a bail hearing?
We have enough negative comments about police efficiency without creating new scenario's.
There is no reason to suggest the police did any such thing. If Tumblety had been seen elsewhere between the 7th & 16th, then an explanation would be required.
If a document had been found dated between the 7th & 16th, signed by him, then again a reason would be required.
But nothing of the sort was required, his whereabout between those dates is not in question. Why make up a reason of 'police bail', indication further police incompetancy.
Under what circumstances do police provide bail for a person under arrest?
For what crimes is this allowed? theft? pickpocket? .....serial killers?
Who in the police station would sign such a document for this 'important' suspect?
Afterall we are supposed to believe that this 'police bail' was signed, then Tumblety let out and 2 days later he butchers Kelly, then returns to the bail hearing on the 16th, gets charged, bail is set, he is given a further hearing date for the 20th and then decides to jump bail on the 23rd/24th of Nov.
Do we know he even appeared at the hearing on Nov. 20th?
Doesnt this sound like a very contrived, or strained hypothasis?
Any comments?
Regards, Jon |
Author: Jon
Saturday, 15 January 2000 - 11:01 pm | | My appologies, top line should have read....
To simplify matters, under what provision of English law are the Police allowed to release a person they have just arrested?
Jon |
Author: Wolf
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 02:47 am | | Jon, there is an interview (part 2) with Stewart Evans in the latest edition of The Ripperologist which explains all the legal niceties of the Tumblety arrest, (he was arrested for a minor offence), which you can read on the Casebook Productions web site. It should answer your legal questions but not why, if Tumblety was an important suspect, he was allowed to slip through police fingers. I would have thought that Scotland yard would have had a whole task force of men watching his every move.
Wolf. |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 10:56 am | | Thankyou Wolf
I am aware of the interview.
Because of this usual lack of specific paperwork we are to assume he was set free after 24 hrs.
Having no actual record of his arrest we also assume it was for a misdemeanor.
As Stewart explained, if it was for a serious offence he would have been held until the 16th.
If it was for a minor offence he may have been set free after 24 hrs.
It also appears their was a warrant made out for Tumblety to appear on the 16th, I thought this was standard procedure, regardless of whether the accused is under police custody or out on police bail, in either case the legal instrument to get him to appear was to issue a warrant.
If this is the case, then the warrant proves nothing.
All the news reports indicate Tumblety was arrested for complicity in the Whitechapel murders. We have no police paperwork to indicate otherwise. The New York Times tells us he was subsequently held for trial under a special law.
This albiet, is only a news report, but it requires explanation. If it was in fact a special law then the police knew they had to let him go after 24 hrs (for a misdemeanor) unless they come up with something 'special'....this was the man they had hunted down for months, they were faced with him getting off on a minor offence, so they brought in this 'special law' requirement,..and he was held until the 16th, or at least that appears to be what the news artical is saying.
So what concerns me is that Tumblety was not considered a minor offender, otherwise if he was then there would be no need to enact this 'special law' in order to hold him.
We have not heard an explanation of the police powers under this special law, only the ordinary police procedure assuming they are dealing with a minor offender.
I would appreciate knowing what police procedure would be under the circumstances of this 'special law'. It is more than obvious that as the story is presented in the book then the police knew they had a special incident unfolding here.
Regards, Jon |
Author: SPE
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 05:09 pm | | The 'special law' was nothing more than Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, thus called because the Act had been 'specially' passed in 1885 to combat certain sexual offences which included procurement, child prostitution, prostitution and acts of gross indecency. Section 11 was the part dealing with gross indecency, and was particularly difficult to enforce (because any witnesses for the prosecution would, of course, be likely to be more in the nature of co-defendants). Thus the police and Treasury seemed very loath to attempt to use this new legislation, except in cases where it was deemed necessary. It was not a 'special law brought in' for Tumblety (there wouldn't have been time), it was the existing 'special' legislation of 1885.
Despite all this the section, which was to be invoked again the following year in the case of the Cleveland Street scandal, had a maximum sentence of only two years meaning it was only a misdemeanour.
However strong the police suspicions were against Tumblety in connection with the murders, they remained merely that, suspicions. To hold a prisoner on mere suspicion (as I well know) is insufficient, you need hard evidence, and that they lacked. Thus they were obliged to fall back on the lesser powers given by the gross indecency offences, which they did have hard evidence for. However, as a misdemeanour they were obliged to release the prisoner within 24 hours on Police bail, or to charge him and take him to court for any offences they could prove.
Tumblety would have been particularly difficult for the police to deal with as he was wealthy, influential, and very shrewd. One US newspaper report indicates that when Tumblety fled to the USA in late November 1888 he was followed onto the ship by an English detective who may well have been the Scotland Yard man assigned to follow him whilst on bail. The mere fact that Tumblety was followed to New York, and that Littlechild (who was a Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard until 1893) still thought him to be a likely Ripper as late as 1913, shows that Tumblety was never actually cleared in Police eyes.
The document discovered by Mark King, which I have a copy of, is not an official police arrest and bail record, it is merely the printed calendar of cases scheduled for the Central Criminal Court (The Old Bailey), which lists the date the person was first taken into custody, but not subsequent appearances on police bail. The document does not show that Tumblety was 'held for trial.'
I would make the following comments in response to points raised by Jon above.
Yes, the newspaper reports show that Tumblety was suspected of being concerned with the Whitechapel murders, so the fact that the police suspected him of this obviously 'leaked' out to the US press, probably from the NYPD. However, the indications are that he was actually arrested for the gross indecency offence(s), and that,as with other suspects, the police had no 'hard' evidence to hold him for the murders. I repeat, suspicion is not enough to hold someone when it is not backed with evidence.
It does not 'take a Judge or Magistrate to set bail,' the police do it daily. There are different types of bail, and they are granted by both the police and the courts. The police may bail pending further enquiries and return to the police station for dealing with, charge and bail, or release without charge or bail (refused charge). The police release prisoners just arrested for lesser offences every day of the week without recourse to a court. The present legislation covering this is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984, but such legislation also existed in Victorian times.
There are many cases in the history of crime where killers have been released after arrest for lack of evidence, and then gone on to kill again. It is not uncommon. It is very difficult for the average layman to fully appreciate the law and police powers, but they are not as great as many assume when it comes to holding onto a prisoner where the evidence is lacking. The Police bail would be granted by the station sergeant or inspector. I myself have bailed many prisoners without any recourse to a court.
A warrant is issued for the arrest of a person, by a magistrate, if they fail to answer their bail or fail to comply with any bail conditions. A warrant is not issued to grant bail.
The whole gist of the police suspicion against Tumblety, or any other genuine suspect, is that fact that the police, as we know, never had any hard evidence against anyone. Those who have read my book, or seen the documentary, will have seen that I have explained this all before. I hope that this assists Jon in his understanding of the legal aspects. |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 06:02 pm | | Much appreciated SPE, as always.....
For anyone not familiar with the Modern Babylon scandal, please read below (its a biggie, pack a lunch) but on reading thru it, we are presented with a question. Was Tumblety charged with being a client, or Pimp? Was the 2yr max. charge for being a client?
What was the charge for being involved in white slavery, the abduction, rape & torture of women & young girls?
Regards, Jon
read on.......
"White Slavery" As Metaphor
Anatomy of a Moral Panic
by Mary Ann Irwin
On 6 July 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette, one of England's premier daily newspapers, began a series titled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon." The series was an instant sensation; it not only rocked English society to its foundations, but sent shock waves throughout Europe, through France and Belgium, and into the United States. The public outcry that followed forced Parliament to enact specific legislation and led to the establishment of local organizations and international networks which survive to the present day. The topic of "The Maiden Tribute" was white slavery-the abduction, sale, and organized rape of English virgins.
As the title suggests, "The Maiden Tribute" successfully linked in the public mind two basically unrelated topics-prostitution and slavery. The title was itself an odd admixture of Christian legend and Greek folklore, combining temple prostitution in anc ient Babylon with the tale of the Minotaur. According to Greek mythology, every seventh year the people of Athens were compelled to sacrifice seven virgins to this "frightful monster, half man, half bull, the foul product of unnatural lus t." But in "The Maiden Tribute," London had become the modern Babylon:
This very night in London, and every night, year in and year out, not seven maidens only but many times seven, selected almost as much by chance as those . . . flung into the Cretan labyrinth, will be offered up as the Maid. [1]
In successive installments, the Gazette presented the stories of prostitutes decoyed into the life while still innocent children. The series described the tricks used to lure virgins into the locked rooms that sealed their doom, and detailed the c orruption of officials who winked at the trade and thus allowed it to continue. More shocking still, the Gazette drew back the curtain on those wealthy Victorian men to whom the white slave trade catered, suggesting graphically the sexual tastes of those to whom "the shriek of torture [was] the essence of their delight." As it progressed, "The Maiden Tribute" revealed the silk-hatted, kid-gloved Minotaur at play, secreted with his terrified human sacrifices in specially equipped ro oms, there to "enjoy to the full the exclusive luxury of revelling in the cries of the immature child."[2]
As intended, the series threw Victorian England into a panic over prostitution and forced an official response to the activities described. But the idea of white slavery was nothing new. Rather, the moral panic which followed "The Maiden Tribute" drew it s force from a potent reworking of reformist idioms made familiar in the course of England's long battle over the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869. Briefly, the Acts provided for identification and registration of prostitu tes in specific military depots in southern England and Ireland, mandated regular speculum examination of registered prostitutes, and granted police sweeping discretionary powers in identifying and incarcerating women suspected of prostitution.[3] Although prostitution had long been a fact of English life, in the late nineteenth-century it assumed the proportion of a pressing social problem. Where only a few publications appeared between 1810 and 1840, sixteen books and twenty-six article s on prostitution were published between 1840 and 1870.[4] Although the Contagious Diseases Acts were designed to deal with a perceived increase in prostitution and a concommitant rise in venereal disease, the Acts essentially sanctioned an implicit system of regulated prostitution in England. Opponents of this system argued that regulated prostitution created a permanent class of sex slaves and stimulated the traffic in women and children. The white slavery metaphor thus became a staple of anti-regulation rhetoric, developed and refined in the context of England's struggle to define an official response to the problem of prostitution.
The metaphor "worked" because it succeeded in forcing separate and unrelated ideas into a single conceptual framework. This success was rooted in the social and material conditions of Victorian society; for men and women anxiously regarding signs of corr uption and moral decline, the white slavery metaphor organized a number of nameless fears into a unitary moral framework. The tensions created by economic depression, political upheaval, social reorganization, and demographic imbalance fo und voice in the seemingly endless debate over private morality, and set the stage for the evolution of the white slavery metaphor and the panic its rhetoric fueled.[5]
In following this evolution, it becomes evident that the white slavery metaphor comprises an intriguing cluster of ideas concerning men and women, sex and society, rich and poor, villains and victims, corruption and exploitation. These themes and the rhe toric of white slavery are connected to the conditions and cultures of Victorian society. Reformers struck upon the rhetoric of white slavery as a means of redirecting the public debate over prostitution. The white slavery idea helped to recast the image of the prostitute, enabling the public to see her sympathetically as the victim of social and economic forces beyond her control. This reformulation allowed reformers to shift attention away from the prostitute and toward those who profited by her trade, redirecting censure from victim to exploiter, from individual to society, and, most importantly, from women to men. The white slavery trope thus structured a dialogue based in social criticism, outlining reformers' vision of the evils caused by an exploit ive and oppressive economic system, the injustices countenanced by a heartless and hypocritical society, and the relentless cruelty occasioned by men's oppression of women.
Whether or not white slavery actually existed or represented a significant factor in prostitution will not be argued here. Many Victorians were convinced that white slavery existed, while many others were just as certain that it did not; what is of conc ern is the dialogue itself. The issue is essentially one of definition: acceptance of the white slavery idea depends a great deal upon how one defines it. For example, what the modern feminist might call white slavery the anthropologist benignly labels "t he exchange of women." Claude Levi-Strauss identifies the exchange of women as "a fundamental principle of kinship," with women acting as the units of exchange by which men established kinship ties and avoided constant warfare; hence Levi -Strauss argues that the traffic in women is nothing less than the foundation of civilization.[6] Alternatively, Marxists draw upon the concept of white slavery as a means of blurring the distinction between sexual and economic exploitati on; the earliest use of the term actually refers to the exploitation of wage laborers by industrial capitalism. It is in this sense that Karl Marx argues that "prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer," and he nce casts the capitalist as white slaver.[7]
This blurring of sexual and economic function was a critical component of the white slavery image. Speaking on behalf of the Ladies' National Association, formed to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, feminist-activist Mary Hume-Rothery used white slave ry rhetoric to attack the subjection of women in marriage. Obliquely linking bourgeois marriage to prostitution, Hume-Rothery wrote that she would sooner see women risk starvation than "sell themselves, whether to wealthy husbands, or les s eligible purchasers."[8] Frederick Engels used the same logic to argue that when a husband assumed control of a woman through marriage, "she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children."[9]
But in its most successful and long-lived formulation, white slavery has come to mean the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of women and children. This equation has retained most of the essential components and a good measure of its original emotional i mpact from the expression's earliest appearance in Victorian England. Many historians of prostitution, in fact, reproduce uncritically the stories which form the subject of this study; very few histories omit from their indices the catego ries "white slavery," "forced prostitution," or "traffic in women and children."[10] Clearly the rhetoric of white slavery, if not the actual practice, is still very much alive.[11
Anti-Regulationists and White Slavery Rhetoricians
Whatever its precise symbolic configuration, the rhetoric of white slavery derived much of its impact by updating the familiar rhetoric of abolition, in which the degraded black slave was replaced by the demoralized white woman. Victor Hugo first made thi s connection in a letter to anti-regulationist Josephine Butler, in which he identified registered prostitutes as slaves. "The slavery of black women," Hugo wrote, "is abolished in America, but the slavery of white women continues in Euro pe."[12] This parallel was still obvious in 1913, when the venerable American reformer Jane Addams compared prostitution to its evil "twin of slavery, as old and outrageous as slavery itself and even more persistent."[13] In this context, the term "white slavery" was intended to distinguish female sexual slavery from the enslavement of Africans, but it was also meant to draw a moral comparison between the two types of exploitation.[14]
In comparing the taking of black slaves for labor with the enslavement of white women for sex, writers often placed higher value on the sufferings of the women, whose purer natures made sexual contact particularly abhorrent. Anti-regulationi st Alfred Dyer, for example, wrote that the entrapment of English girls was "infinitely more cruel and revolting than negro servitude" because it was slavery "not for labour but for lust; and more cowardly than negro slavery" because it fell upon "the young and the helpless of one sex only."[15] This assessment undervalued the humanity of blacks and ignored the sexual exploitation of black women as it described a moral universe in which the misuse of white women constituted an evil f ar more heinous than perpetual slavery.
As the linkages between slavery and prostitution were so obvious to opponents of regulation, it is not surprising that many former abolitionists allied themselves with the anti-regulationists, nor that regulation opponents called themselves "the New Abol itionists." In fact, anti-regulationists sharpened the impact of their arguments by incorporating the well-known symbols and rhetoric of the anti-slavery crusade.[16] Josephine Butler called upon this tradition as she b roadened the definition of white slavery to include the practice of prostitution itself. Butler argued that regle-mentation created a permanent "slave class of women . . . . The inauguration of legal prostitution," she wrote, "is nothing else than . . . t he protection of a white slave-trade-in a word, the organization of female slavery."[17] London Chamberlain Benjamin Scott, who was also an opponent of reglementation and the chairman of the London society to suppress white slavery, agre ed with Butler. Scott wrote that once a woman was registered as a prostitute she belonged to the police, and the police "were loath to let go their hold upon a woman, and so lose their control over her. She could not free herself. She was allowed to give up a vicious life . . . by favour of the police only as a matter of indulgence."[18]
The prostitution-slavery equation was not simply the histrionics of anti-regulationists; even advocates of licensed prostitution understood the system's bleak consequences for women. In his tract favoring reglementation, Marseilles physician Hippolyte Mi reur put the matter succinctly: "The system of registration which regulates and legalises [sic] the sorrowful industry of the prostitute," he observed, "is in fact, the sinister stroke by which women are cut off from society" Once registered, the women "no longer belong to themselves, but become merely the chattel of the Administration."[19]
Where police registration failed to maintain the prostitute in her trade, legal collusion in enforcing collection of brothel debts made her enslavement complete. Regulation opponent Alfred Dyer argued that brothels ensured the prostitute's obedience by a rbitrarily assigning debts and threatening imprisonment for nonpayment. For example, women were "forced to accept garments of a disgusting nature, for the hire of which, and also for everything they require[d], they [were] charged exorbitant prices." Addi ng insult to injury, one English woman claimed that the brothel keepers who purchased her actually charged the fee of the placeur against her debts to the house. Debtor laws were used to enforce the claims of the brothel keeper, ensuring that prostitutes would be "kept deeply in debt and terrified with the threat of imprisonment if they dare[d] attempt to leave without paying."[20] For this reason, when women did escape and were chased screaming through the streets, the police came to the assistance not of the woman, but of her pursuers. "We have, in fact," wrote one anti-regulationist, "returned to the permitted practices of the slave-holders of America, and logically we might now also set up the practice of keeping bl oodhounds to trace and hunt down the fugitives."[21] The rhetoric of white slavery thus urged acceptance of a symbol which combined sexual and economic exploitation as it conflated regulated prostitution with the institutionalization of racial slavery.
But for men and women intent on changing government policy, regulation of prostitutes had even more pernicious effects. It was an item of faith among opponents of the Contagious Diseases Acts that state-monitored brothels created and fueled the white sla ve trade. In one of the earliest tracts on the European slave trade, Pastor T. Borel wrote:
Licensed brothels are not solely supplied from the class of women who voluntarily give themselves up to debauchery. These would not suffice. It is necessary to fill up deficiencies . . . and to procure an article of human merchandise which will attract cl ients by freshness, youth, or by mere novelty.[22]
Benjamin Scott agreed; with regulation came "a premium for abduction" in which "high prices are given for young, and often innocent, British subjects."[23] Alfred Dyer claimed that brothel patrons required an endless st ream of women to "pander to [their] craving for novelty"; for this reason, "the keepers of the houses provide[d] a constant succession of fresh victims, including sometimes a negress, and in a recent case in Brussels, a Zulu girl."[24
Early in 1880, Dyer and Josephine Butler published personal accounts of their investigation into the white slave trade and separately petitioned Parliament to take action. In a memorial to Lord Granville, Butler described the "little children, English gi rls of from ten to fourteen years of age, who have been stolen, kidnapped, betrayed, carried off from English country villages." Held captive in Belgian brothels, "the presence of these children is unknown to the ordinary visitors; it is secretly known only to the wealthy men who are able to pay large sums of money for the sacrifice of these innocents."[25]
Dyer's account was scarcely less sensationalistic: Dyer bluntly described the ease with which "the wealthy Continental debauche . . . pa[id] an amount equal to a poor man's annual income for the opportunity of violating a betrayed, terr ified, and helpless virgin."[26] Writing from Belgium (where he had gone in search of helpless virgins), Dyer sent beseeching letters to the editors of London's daily newspapers; he appealed for funds with which to rescue English girls and exhorted the English public-particularly those with young daughters-to beware the tricks of white slavers. Upon his return, Dyer published a lengthy account in The Christian; to his dismay and quite vocal outrage, the London dailies refused to carry it.[27]
For opponents of regulation, the reluctance to offend delicate public sensibilities amounted to nothing more than a conspiracy of silence or, worse still, tacit acceptance of sexual criminality. Anti-regulation tracts were rife with condemnation of gover nment and newspapers for maintaining their sham propriety. Butler wondered how Christian men and women could "bear any longer to look on in silence at this costly and impious sacrifice of souls"; Butler was so enraged by the reticence which surrounded the exploits of a certain nobleman that she not only published an account of his crimes, but named him as well. Appealing directly to the mothers of England, Butler knew they would not blame her "for 'wounding the susceptibilities' of perso ns in high office, perverted judges, luxurious livers, who condone and take part in such horrors."[28]
Non-believers were tarred with the same broad brush as the procurers themselves. Editor-journalist and crusader William T. Stead answered his detractors with ominous innuendo: "If we had only committed these crimes instead of exposing them, not one word would have been said."[29] Stead challenged "the 'men of the world'" who cry out ". . . this is not done." They only say so, Stead claimed, because they are "accomplices of the criminal and the apologists." Never one for subtlety, Stead equated opposition with guilt: "[i]f these people told the truth," he claimed, "it might be found out that they'd done it themselves."[30]
But far from fearing exposure, many upright Britons freely admitted that "they'd done it themselves." Some even based their opposition to legislative reform on the historic privilege of the upper-class rake. For men unburdened with a puritan conscience, prostitution appeared to be both necessary and inevitable. Such men openly and repeatedly stated that their objections, for example, to raising the age of sexual consent arose from the understanding that they or their sons would be threatened by such legi slation. As one member of the House of Lords put it in 1884, "very few of their Lordships . . . had not, when young men, been guilty of immorality." He thus hoped their Lordships would pause before enacting legislation "within the range of which" their own sons might come.[31
Opponents of legalized prostitution soon realized that countering gender- and class-based assumptions of sexual noblesse oblige would require more than appeals to masculine chivalry or Protestant virtue. Although Butler's and Dyer's petitions did eventually lead to a Parliamentary investigation in the summer of 1881, their efforts to publicize the pernicious effects of regulated prostitution failed to stimulate either public outcry or legislation to protect women and children from sexual exploitat ion. By offering revelations of young, innocent English girls suffering the sexual attacks of foreigners, Butler and Dyer had hoped to inspire legislators to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. They might have been surprised to learn that the Government was already well aware of the traffic in English girls.
Regulationists and Anti-Rhetoricians
On 30 March 1847, a bill was presented to Parliament for "the suppression of trading in seduction and prostitution and the better protection of females." The bill was read only after spectators had been cleared from the halls and was withdrawn after only one reading. Members protested that the bill had already "done much injury by directing the attention of people towards [the subject] when they might never otherwise have heard of it."[32] In 1881, police investigator C.E. Howard Vincent again voiced concern that the public might be offended should Parliament enact statutes on which to prosecute sex crimes against children. After Vincent testified to the rising tide of child prostitution in London, the committee asked why he had not recommended criminal sanctions for sexual assaults upon children. Vincent replied that "it would be such a horrible thing to put before the public, that I did not think it necessary."[33]
As early as 1874, the British Home Office was monitoring certain individuals known to routinely travel with small groups of English girls clearly bound for foreign brothels. At the end of his report concerning a procurer convicted of tr ansporting English minors to French brothels, Consul Wodehouse observed that "it is notorious that the only girls of tender age to be found in these [brothels] . . . are English or Belgian subjects."[34]
Evidently, this traffic in underage women was not a new and unusual occurrence: in the summer of 1877, Belgian Consul Lumley advised Earl Derby that the "average number of young English girls rescued from houses of ill-fame in Brussels during the last se ven or eight years has been two per month."[35] Lumley's use of the word "rescue" in this context is somewhat ambiguous; while London reformers used it to describe their efforts to reclaim the fallen, "rescue" could also imply the offici al sense that at least some of these English women did not wish to be in Belgian brothels.
As one might expect, the tone of correspondence between government representatives is wholly unlike that found in the writings of anti-regulationists, and the reader must dig deeply to uncover the logic of the official response. But if the British Foreig n Office was tracking the prosecutions of known traffickers and making quiet inquiries on behalf of English subjects held captive in foreign brothels, why did they resist the claims of anti-regulationists? The most likely reason is that government and pol ice officials remained unpersuaded by the rhetoric of white slavery. Those charged with protecting and regulating English womanhood were not convinced that traffic in women and children was a necessary by-product of reglementation; for many, their own exp eriences with prostitutes simply would not permit it. For example, many police investigators scoffed at repealers' claims that children required special legal protection because they were highly prized by white slavers. Reformers claimed that children were favored sexual targets because popular wisdom held that sex with a virgin cured venereal disease.[36] Therefore, according to Alfred Dyer, "the more childish and innocent the victims, the more profitable they were."[37] But reformers' charges seemed to belie some officers' experience with child prostitutes, who apparently refused to consider themselves victims. In his testimony before Parliament, for example, criminal investigator Joseph Dunlop descr ibed the occasion on which he found "an elderly gentleman in bed with two of these children." When Dunlop asked the girls' ages and began a conversation with them, "they laughed and joked me," knowing he was powerless to interfere.[38] Though Dunlop admitted that child prostitution was rampant in his district, he denied that white slavery had anything to do with it. Rather, Dunlop alleged that prostitution was simply an accepted fact of lower-class life, a sort of family tradition handed down from mother to daughter. For example, when Dunlop returned one child to her home after the juvenile had been arrested for prostitution, the mother was indifferent. "I had to look after myself when I was her age," the woman replied, "and she must do the same."[39] The possibility that Dunlop's assessment was shaped by class prejudices must be considered. However much one might sympathize with officials expected to manage London's staggering number of prostitutes, i t is likely that the values and prejudices of middle-class officers and bureaucrats made working-class mores completely unintelligible. In other cases, British foreign officers were obviously confused by the conflicting communiques which travelled the dip lomatic channels between brothels, police stations, and foreign consulates. For example, in October 1876 French consul Hotham received the complaint of an Englishwoman that her sister was being held against her will in a brothel at Omar. Hotham wrote to t he local authorities and sat back to await their response. The Sous-Prefet in Paris eventually forwarded to Hotham the report of the local Commissary of Police, which in turn had been obtained from the brothel at Omar. Despite its meandering course, Consu l Hotham was satisfied with the report's conclusion that "the girl in question came to France with full knowledge of her destination," and moreover, "she does not want to return to England at present."
Oddly enough, however, three days later Hotham notified his superiors that this and another English woman had been sent to him from Omar without explanation. More puzzling still, Hotham noted, "the girls appeared only too grateful to be able to return to England."
On my remarking that the Commissary of Police had stated that they had no desire to return to England at present, they replied that this was not true, that they had begged the owner of the house to allow them to go, but that they had bee n partly frightened, and partly bribed by false promises to remain where they were.[40]
Hotham did not offer an explanation for the reversal, leaving the reader to wonder why the brothel operator, or the authorities at Omar, or both, suddenly determined it impolitic to keep the young women they had earlier claimed were quite content.
It is relatively easy, on the other hand, to decode the responses of police officials to the charges of anti-regulationists. One inspector after another simply denied that white slavery existed in their divisions; this categorical denial alone is enough to raise suspicions. Both investigator Dunlop and advocate Alexander Truitt, for example, insisted that women and children could not be held captive in their divisions simply because they would know.[41] Inspector Danie l Morgan declared that children could not be prostituted in his division because it was too respectable; similarly, there could be no white slavery in Mr. Arnold's neighborhood because it was too poor.[42]
Others argued that white slavery was simply too "un-British" to take root in English soil. Barrister Thomas Snagge, who officially documented the trade in English girls to Belgium, revealed his ethnocentrism when he rejected the possibility of a local sl ave trade. While foreigners were guilty of kidnapping innocent English girls and transporting them abroad, a counter-traffic of Continental virgins to England was clearly unthinkable. In the first instance, "there is more liberty in England"; in the secon d, it was difficult for Snagge to imagine a foreign virgin. "The girls brought from foreign countries into this country," Snagge declared, "are generally girls who understand their business perfectly well; they come over here to be professional prostitute s." English girls, however, "those put into these maisons de debauche abroad," were another matter; these were trapped "in houses where they are kept in as prisoners."[43]
But ethnocentrism was not the special province of either camp; Chamberlain Benjamin Scott also framed his attacks on the Contagious Diseases Acts in terms of prejudice against foreigners. "In other countries," Scott observed, "prostitut ion was tolerated and regulated, but France has the bad pre-eminence of being the most forward and devoted copyist of the vile Grecian and Roman systems of vice-licensing."[44] The Catholic Church, tellingly known as "the Whore of Babylo n," also came in for a share of opprobrium; drawing upon centuries of Protestant-Catholic antagonism, Scott argued that prostitution was not an English sort of crime at all, but rather "the filthy product of pagan depravity." In a curiously virile body me taphor, Scott asserted that English immorality had resulted when "Rome impregnated Europe" with the insidious sexual practices of the Catholic Church. Thus Scott was able to blame the Vatican for England's perplexing problem with prostitution.[45]
In nineteenth-century terms, the Victorian furor over white slavery was very much an issue of race. By forwarding frighteningly plausible tales of Continental predators scouring train terminals and country villages for English virgins, Britons were invok ing race as a morally acceptable explanation for the rising tide of prostitution at home. The rhetoric of sexual slavery operated, in Judith Bennett's phrase, at the critical "intersection of race, class, and gender." It was by tapping i nto that murky, inarticulate, but highly-charged freight of unexamined fears and prejudices that the white slavery metaphor was able to generate and sustain much of its psychic power.[46]
In weighing governmental response to the white slavery idea, we must also consider officials' basic attitudes toward prostitution and the women who practiced it. Apparent in their response is a willingness to believe that prostitutes chose their trade or , alternatively, an unwillingness to believe any prostitute's claim to the contrary. Little resistance was expressed in February 1880, for instance, when Consul Lumley passed along the reports of the Belgian Foreign Office which asserted that English girl s knew precisely the sort of work they would find in Belgium. Moreover, the Belgian officials stated with remarkable precision that the girls identified by Alfred Dyer were hardly the innocents he claimed: one had been a clandestine pros titute for six months, the other for three years.[47]
The possibility that English officials believed that choice, not circumstance, dictated prostitu-tion is also suggested by the delay of Parliament's investigation of the charges made in January 1880 until June 1881. Perhaps many authori ties believed, as journalist Henry Mayhew did, that "everything that a woman of loose morals says must be received with caution, and believed under protest."[48] Clearly this was Thomas Jeffes' motto; when called before Parliament the Be lgian consul admitted he had initially believed the charges of white slavery were true. However, after interviewing several of the purported victims, Jeffes came to doubt their stories. "Now I do not . . . believe," he said, "that there was one single cas e of a virtuous girl, few who had not been leading a really loose life before they came over; and scarcely one, where the girl had not been leading a doubtful life before she came over to Brussels."[49] Jeffes insisted that no virtuous g irl could be tricked into prostitution. If a girl had really been misled abroad with promises of marriage or employment, Jeffes argued, if "she were a virtuous girl . . . she would positively refuse" to undergo the legally required speculum examination. J effes reasoned that this internal inspection would be so "abhorrent to a decent girl" that examination alone could stand as incontrovertible proof of a woman's professional status. In tidily circular logic, Jeffes thus satisfied himself that no honorable woman would "undergo the ordeal if she had not already led an immoral life."[50]
In the same vein, English magistrate Arnold insisted that women recruited into foreign brothels knew where they were going and only complained because they had less freedom than they enjoyed at home. Arnold went even further and testified that no woman e ver faced the choice between prostitution and starvation: "I never met with an instance where a girl became immoral or became a prostitute through poverty." Arnold might have accepted the notion that it was men, not women, who were the victims of sexual i mmorality; as the superintendent of the French Morals Police patiently explained to Josephine Butler, "women continuously injure honest men, but no man ever injures an honest woman."[51]
Victorian society understood that in the absence of chastity women had no redeeming social value, and this was precisely the attitude of many officials charged with regulating prostitution. The Roman Minister of Justice and Police chill ed Butler to the marrow with his complacent assertion that "a woman who has once lost chastity has lost every good quality. She has from that moment 'all the vices.'"[52] By this logic, impure women were undeserving of male protec tion, civil rights, or even the barest of sympathy. The central issue for English officials thus was one of morality-not of the procurers or brothel operators, but of the women themselves. Held in hopeless opposition was the social demand that women maint ain their chastity at all costs, and the profound disbelief that they could actually do so.
Man's Salvation, His Temptress, His Victim
In the writings of journalist Henry Mayhew one finds exaltation of woman's spiritual purity resting side by side with a fear of her uncontrollable sexuality. On the one hand, Mayhew observes that "female chastity marks more closely than any other thing th e moral condition of society." In almost the next breath he notes that few women actually were chaste. In an inventory of every class and category of English womanhood from the middle-class housewife to the lowest scullery maid, Mayhew methodically impugn s the virtue of each. "Ballet-girls have a bad reputation," he writes, "which is in most cases well deserved." "Female servants" he also dismisses as "far from being a virtuous class." As maid-servants have "no character worth speaking about to lose," May hew explains, "it cannot be wondered that they are as a body immoral and unchaste." Even women who simply fell in love are struck by Mayhew's axe: "Literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue," he asserts, "is a prostitute."[53]
More than a hint of misogyny is suggested by such attitudes. But however distasteful their sexual politics, the non-believers played a significant role in the rhetoric surrounding white slavery. It would not only be unfair to explain away Mayhew's or Con sul Jeffes' attitudes as simply misogynis-tic, but such a dismissal would preclude consideration of social values critical to this inquiry. Much of nineteenth-century thinking and writing dwelt specifically on just this issue-the virtue of women. In the g uise of ideal mother and wife, the nineteenth-century woman was heralded as the source of all goodness and purity. She thus found herself assigned the central (but not necessarily comfortable) role of society's conscience.
In The Age and Its Architects, Edwin Hood made the weight of the Victorian woman's social burden clear: "The hope of society is woman! The hope of the age is in woman! On her depends the righting of wrongs, the correcting of sins , and the success of all missions."[54] In a very real sense, the personal ideal of purity was also a social ideal. As literary historian Francoise Basch argues, for the frugal, social-climbing Victorian, "chastity for men and, even more , for women, was regarded as a force for action, as a means to avoid wasting time and energy."[55] Individual advancement, as well as social progress, demanded that base and unproductive animal energies be redirected, channelled into soc ially acceptable and hopefully remunerative activities. And at the center of this cultural fulcrum was the ideal of feminine purity.
Woman's responsibility for maintaining her own sexual purity weighed even heavier than that of saving society from itself. English novelist William Gayer Starbuck described Victorian woman's difficulty in 1864 in his declaration that, "when a woman falls from her purity there is no return for her-as well may one attempt to wash the stain from the sullied snow. Men sin and are forgiven; but the memory of a woman's guilt cannot be removed on earth."[56] In a society whi ch prized female virginity above all else, it is hardly surprising that real English girls-no less than their fictional counterparts-were given the impossible choice between death and dishonor, and were clearly expected to prefer death. Believing without question that virginity was "what a woman ought to value more than life," William Stead made his own preference clear when he described a terrified young woman lured into a brothel and left to await her fate; Stead gallantly "would to God she died" before it arrived.[57] Victorian men and women both understood that there could be no happy ending for the woman who suffered the proverbial fate worse than death.[58]
For this reason, when opponents of regulated prostitution referred to the slaughter of innocents and called white slavery "murder," their hyperbole had the ring of social truth. The woman who lost her virtue also lost her every avenue for respectable lif e. Once discovered, she could no more redeem her position than the rescued white slave could return to her former life. Snagge put his finger on it when he told Parliament: "I do not think there would be any difficulty" in retrieving English girls from fo reign brothels "and bringing them back to this country." Rather, he reported, "the only thing is to know what to do with them when you get them here."[59] Pastor Borel agreed that there was "no place in society" for the reclaimed captive. "If she escape death, and enter society again," he warned, "[w]hoever approaches her will be infected. . .. Her vast experience of evil . . . scatters the seeds of moral death far and near."[60] In other words, the un chaste were socially dead. Even the innocent victim of rape had no alternative to prostitution. Mixing metaphors madly, Stead argued that it was "bad enough when a man kills a sheep for the sake of its fleece, but it would be worse if the animal were slau ghtered solely for its ears." Yet this was a fair analogy to the sale of virginity; Stead drew a straight line from rape to prostitution when he argued that, even though the initial performance could never be repeated, the girl was still utterly "ruined . . . lur[ed] into a position from which a life of vice is the only exit."[61]
The theme of "ruin," in all its relentless finality, is repeatedly invoked in the nineteenth-century literature of prostitution. As Sally Mitchell observes, for unmarried women the personal cost of seduction was enormous. The poor could tolerate the rais ing of children by single mothers but those who aspired to something better could not-respectability was the dividing line.[62] Ruined women were outcasts, unfit for marriage, motherhood, or even the lowliest employment. Cast aside as i rredeemable, the seduced woman was, once again, perpetually sacrificed to male lust.
For Josephine Butler, this inevitable ruin could not be the fault of women, whose essential purity she never doubted. Rather, Butler placed the blame squarely on the sporting men of England. "How many of these girls are thrust upon the streets by abandonment after seduction?" she asked accusingly, and "[w]hat is your part in the matter? . . . You engulf them further; you thrust them down lower; you throw on them the last shovelful of earth to hurl them into the abyss."[63]
Implicit in Butler's indictment of male morality are assumptions regarding male and female sexuality. The best scientific minds of her day would have agreed that, by their natures, women were inherently passionless, whereas men's sexual appetite was natu rally a raging tide. "In men," writes William Rathbone Greg, "the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous. In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent."[64] Physician William Acton agreed, reassuring his (male) readers that "what men are habitually, women are only exceptionally." A modest woman, Acton wrote, "submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions."[65]
The argument that women lacked sexual instinct could work in favor of those who pleaded the cause of the prostitute as victim of society and masculine appetites. But it could also be used against them: if women fell from grace, then the offense had to be deliberate. Absent physical force, women's sin was necessarily the conscious and knowing choice of evil over good. But the rhetoric of white slavery cut to the heart of this dichotomy, uncoupling a conceptual framework which had held disastrous consequen ces for women.
For Butler and those swayed by her logic, the idea of sexual slavery offered a way of thinking about prostitution that shifted the blame from the individual to society, from the victim to her exploiter, and, most importantly, from the prostitute to her p atron-that is, to men. This shifting of terms opened the contested terrain of male and female relations to new interpretations, and offered women new strategies for personal and collective social action. Butler herself was well aware of the political impl ications of her anti-regulation campaign. While working for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, for example, she and her followers expanded their efforts to expand the rights of married women, including the Married Women's Property Act (which guarante ed wives the right to their own earnings) and reform of the Mutiny Act (which required that married and unmarried soldiers take financial responsibility for their children). Butler also pressed for women's access to higher education: in 1865, Butler petit ioned the University of Cambridge to open entrance examinations to women and, in 1867, she served as president of the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women. In that same year, Butler's name was included among signato ries to John Stuart Mills' woman suffrage petition to the House of Commons.[66]
But arguments regarding women's innate sexuality also had pressing implications for Britain's growing number of "redundant" women. If what was called sexual instinct in men was an innate desire for maternity in women, then what became of women who could not mother? The 1851 census revealed that the excess of females over males in Great Britain was more than half a million; almost forty percent of the women in England between twenty and forty-four were unmarried.[67] M oreover, one man in ten left the country, temporarily or permanently, as he approached marriageable age. Many more simply chose to remain single; a bachelor could have an unmarried sister to maintain his household, while women from the underside of Victor ian society could tend his other wants. The surplus of women, combined with the shortage of husbands and unavailability of respectable female employment, assured the bachelor an ample supply of prostitutes.[68] Ironically, Victorian soc iety came to idealize the home, or more precisely, marriage and family, at precisely the moment many women found it impossible to achieve either.
This suggests a provocative question: did the Victorian problematization of prostitution hide a growing realization of women's marginal social and economic status in an increasingly industrial-ized and urban nation? Did middle-class Vi ctorian women who were no longer needed as economic partners in marriage, but had instead become financial liabilities, subconsciously fear that men might not marry if they could get sex cheaper elsewhere, thus leaving them childless and unfulfilled?[69] Perhaps the Victorian preoccupation with prostitution had less to do with prostitu-tion than with a very real clash between cultural ideals and social reality.
As the abundant literature of prostitution reveals, at the same time the Victorian public was displaying an insatiable interest in all things sexual, it was also developing a consciousness of sex as an acute problem. Sex seemed to be, i n Steven Marcus's words, "a universal and virtually incurable scourge."[70] Behind the fictive and clinical literature of sexuality (allowing for a good deal of overlap between the two), beneath the fantasies and the ignorance, one sense s the Victorian's genuine fear of uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexuality. In nineteenth-century writings the reader finds fear of sex in general and sex in particular, fear of impotence and potency, fear of indulgence and excess. When William Acton obs erved that "the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind"; when W.R. Rathbone echoed that, if women were as passionate as men, "sexual irregularities would reach a height, of which, at present, we hav e happily no conception," it is the word "happily" which most intrigues us. This one word speaks eloquently of the extent to which Victorians viewed individual sexuality as a vexing social problem.[71]
It is also intriguing to note that the Victorian preoccupation with individual sexuality emerged during a troubled reordering of England's economic and political landscape. A critical component of the white slavery story is its reinterpretation of the in creasingly disputed terrain of social relations, not only between men and women, but also between classes. The social and private responsibilities of women and women's legal, political, and economic position in society were issues which had already been raised, if not resolved.[72] The social and economic order of English society was also undergoing challenge and reorganization, as successive legislation widened male suffrage and as a growing middle class gained an econ omic foothold and accumulated the numerical strength required to enforce its values on English society. It was from these class tensions that the white slavery idea drew its most explosive and potentially disruptive power, just as it was from the recently -enfranchised that the metaphor claimed its potential for inciting political upheaval.[73]
The ability to invoke and effectively channel working- and middle-class hostility toward a profligate aristocracy was central to white slavery's evolution from metaphor to full-blown moral panic. The theme of sexual poaching across class lines had long b een present in white slavery rhetoric, just as the seduction of lower-class girls by upper-class men had long been a recurrent theme in nineteenth-century writing. William Acton acknowledged that such seduction was a common occurrence. " No one acquainted with rural life," he wrote, "would deny that seduction was a sport and a habit with vast numbers of men, married . . . and single, placed above the ranks of labour."[74]
Invariably in nineteenth-century tales of seduction, the unchaste girl was of a lower social class than the man. Typically she was a servant, seamstress, or uneducated village girl, and he was a gentleman or the son of a newly-rich commercial family. Joa n Scott notes the same undercurrent of class animosity in her study of French peasants. Following in lock-step the patterns found in English literature, the story of the seduced seamstress was recounted again and again, becoming a folk tale with a predict able plot and outcome. The destroyed seamstress was a middle-class symbol which simultaneously idealized young womanhood while it showed the full measure of bourgeois hypocrisy and class oppression. "Working class 'reality' was shown to be a far cry from bourgeois ideals," Scott observes, in which ruin arrived as the "young fop who takes advantage of a working girl's straitened circumstances" and thus destroys her only chance for happiness.[75]
The popular consciousness of cross-class sexual exploitation readily lent itself to the rhetoric of white slavery. Josephine Butler was scathing in her condemnation of the sexual proclivities of the privileged. Without exception, the destroyers of women were the aristocrats, "the wealthy miscre-ants, the purchasers, [the] sheltered unjudged."[76]
In one instance, Butler described the plot by which the Baron de Mesnil Herman "had somewhere set his adulterous eyes" on the daughter of a respectable, middle-class Belgian widow. The Baron easily engaged a procuress to abduct the child from school; some weeks later and much the worse for wear, the child was located in a Parisian brothel. Although the authorities were full y aware of his role, to Butler's dismay "the Baron de Mesnil was not even summoned as a witness at the trial . . . . Silence on the subject was for a long time maintained by the press, on account of the Baron's high position."[77] Thus, even worse than the conspiracy to rape small children was the conspiracy of silence which cloaked the sexual predations of upper-class men.
The Anatomy of a Moral Panic
Ultimately it was the sensationalist William Stead who proved most adept at putting the class terms of the metaphor to work. Editor of an influential Liberal Party daily newspaper, the crusad-ing Stead had guided the Pall Mall Gazette through a ser ies of shocking exposes which had made the Gazette required reading for public life. In the 1885 publication of "The Maiden Tribute," Stead made the revisions needed to develop the white slavery idea into a full-blown moral panic. Where earlier versions of the story had pitted upper-class rakes against the daughters of the dubious poor, Stead had redefined the white slaver's victims as the respectable daughters of the ascendant middle classes.[78] Where earlier critics of official policy toward prostitution had pointed to the practices of foreign municipalities, Stead brought the slave trade home to London. But the critical factor in creating moral panic, perhaps even more powerful than the rhetorical gymnastics of the editor, was the potent instrument of the Pall Mall Gazette itself. A mass circulation daily newspaper that could reach into virtually every business and dwelling in the United Kingdom, it was the power of the press which brought the white slavery i dea home.
From start to finish, the series was a masterpiece of sensation, manipulation, and showmanship. It began on Saturday, 4 July 1885, with "a frank warning" to its readers. Stead explained that the House of Lords intended, once again, to allow the session t o end without considering the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. As initially drafted, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was intended to extend police powers in dealing with prostitution and, perhaps only incidentally, to raise the female age of sexual consent fr om thirteen to sixteen. Motivated by what he described as his sense of public responsibility, Stead warned his readers that he intended to publish his investigation into "those phases of sexual criminality which the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was framed to suppress." He cautioned "the squeamish or prudish" that those "who would prefer to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious of the torment of those whose lives are passed in the London Inferno, would do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette" of the following days.[79] Whatever may have been the true depth of Stead's sense of responsibility, nothing could have been better calculated to stimulate public interest.
As promised, Stead began the series on Monday, 6 July 1885. From the first moment of his descent into the underworld, Stead reported that the world of vice operated in much the same fashion as the worlds of business or politics. This was not surprising, Stead wrote, because the same characters dwelt in each. "I heard much of the same people in the house of ill-fame as those of whom you hear in caucuses, in law courts, and on exchanges," Stead wrote, "but all were judged by a different standard, and their relative importance was altogether changed. It was as if the position of our world had been suddenly altered, and you saw most of the planets and fixed stars in different combinations."[80]
Stead described the ease with which he himself had arranged the purchase of five virgins-the assortment of human chattels presented for his inspection, the arrangements made to satisfy his insistence upon virginity, and the inevitable dickering over pric e. These transactions complete, Stead wrote, arrangements were then made for consummation of his evil bargain. The first installment ended with the delivery of thirteen year old "Lily" to Stead in France. The reader was left beholding Lily asleep in a loc ked hotel room, dreaming the last dreams of innocence. Suddenly, "a stranger enters. The child awoke crying . . . and then all once more was still."[81]
As intended, the first installment of "The Maiden Tribute" hit London like a bombshell. The public purchased every single copy of Monday's Gazette. There were accusations of profiteering, and extra editions were successively reprinted to meet dema nd. Tuesday morning the street in front of the Gazette was clogged with men fighting for the next edition. With the exception of the Manchester Guardian, which termed the story "prurient," the London papers maintained a stoic silence. Newsstands in train terminals refused to carry the Gazette, and newsboys were arrested for selling it. George Bernard Shaw, then working as a reviewer for the Gazette, took a bundle of papers on the Strand and sold them. In Parliament, M.P. Cavendish Ber tick asked the Home Secretary "whether his attention ha[d] been called to several objectionable matters being printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, and whether he intend[ed] to take any steps in the matter." Bertick's inquiry raised c ries of "Hear, hear" from the Ministerial benches.[82] On Wednesday, the London magistrate refused to charge the arrested newsboys. Mindful of the dangerous shoals of public opinion, the official observed, "Well, Mr. Crawford, this of c ourse is a very important matter." But whether the Gazette was right or wrong in publishing its serial, the Lord Mayor noted his sincere belief that "the editor is influenced by high and honorable views." By Friday, 11 July, public response was unm istakable. In that morning's Reynolds' Newspaper appeared evidence that no elected official could afford to overlook: "The daughters of the poor are bought and sold like cattle," charged an enraged reader, "yet Parliament has steadily refused to pa ss any law by which girls above thirteen can be protected from ruin."[83]
Clearly the tide of public opinion had turned. Legislators understood that opposition to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill would be tantamount to admitting that one regularly molested little girls. Friday afternoon, Sir R. Cross resumed the adjourned debat e on the Bill, and remarked that "the House of Lords' report and evidence left no doubt . . . that a bill of this kind was impera-tively necessary." Albert Gray announced that "tomorrow he should ask the Home Secretary if he could assure that . . . every possible exertion allowable by law [was used] to suppress the abominations revealed by the Pall Mall Gazette." Gray even suggested that more stringent amendments be added to the Bill to ensure that those committing "such abominations should be brou ght to justice." In marked contrast to their response only four days earlier, references to the Bill and the Gazette now provoked universal cheers from the Ministerial benches.[84] With no small measure of cynici sm the Liverpool Echo reported on Saturday morning that the Bill
which a few days ago was regarded as a dropped measure, and which was almost universally cold-shouldered by the representatives of the people, has been suddenly taken up by the Government of the day as one thoroughly ripe for discussion and urgently needi ng immediate attention.[85]
For weeks following publication of "The Maiden Tribute," readers's letters filled the Gazette and provincial papers; statesmen, clergymen, housewives, and even skeptics poured out heartfelt horror. Typical was the letter of a member of the House o f Lord's Committee on the Protection of Young Girls, who thanked the Gazette for "the masterly way in which you brought light into those infernal regions" of modern Babylon. Every offense and inconvenience was justified, if it "save[d] young girls from the lusts of the Minotaur and the artifices of the traders in iniquity." A clergyman agreed, writing "we need to set up a Committee of Vigilance, a moral police, to put down this infamy. Meanwhile, let the light shine in without stint." In the same vein, a woman wrote that "the deeds you expose are, indeed, the deeds of darkness and hell; and it is the letting in of the pure light of heaven above that can cleanse society from the foul putrefaction which, if allowed to flourish in ob scurity, would eat out the heart of the nation."[86]
Striking each key theme in the white slavery metaphor, public addresses were made to crowds at the Exeter Hall in London and the Princes' Hall in Picadilly. Participants at the Picadilly rally included Josephine Butler and social purity worker Ellice Hop kins, who urged the ladies present to rouse public opinion in favor of the Bill "if their homes were to be kept sacred" from the moral pollution that surrounded them. Canon Knox-Little addressed a large assembly of working men at the Worcester Cathedral o n 17 July, telling them that "the crying evil of our day is impurity, unchastity, and want of self-control." A rally for working men was held at Mile-End, in which James Wookey denounced the government for "refusing the same protection to the poor, orphan friendless girl that they gave to their own daughters, who often had footmen to ride behind them to protect them from harm." A petition to the Government urging passage of the Bill was placed in every Salvation Army hall throughout Britain. When signed b y 393,000 people, the sheets joined together stretched two and one-half miles. On Friday, 7 August 1885, the Bill was read for a third time and, a week later, became law.[87] No one was ever prosecuted under its provisi ons.
Conclusion
Ultimately, "The Maiden Tribute" succeeded in creating a moral panic over white slavery where previous efforts had failed. The ensuing panic forced legislative action designed to prevent prostitution by offering greater protection to women and children. T he major social themes of the metaphor had not been changed but simply rearranged. Stead had moved the practice of white slavery home to London and had made the victims the daughters of the respectable middle class, rather than those of the unsympathetic poor. In focusing public concern on an identifiable and easily maligned villain-the rapacious aristocrat-and narrowly focusing his call for action on passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, Stead grossly oversimplified the causes of prostitution and m ade the problem and its solution appear quite clear. This, of course, is the vital feature of the effective metaphor-its ability to reduce complex issues to manageable proportions.[88]
In itself, the white slavery panic probably accomplished very little. Despite its sound and fury, it is unlikely that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill which followed in the wake of public outcry actually diminished the traffic in women or ended the sexual exploitation of children. It is even less likely that the panic did anything to resolve class antagonism, redistribute wealth, provide meaningful employment opportunities for women, raise wages or improve labor relations, reorganize the personal lives of the urban poor, or ameliorate any of the social and economic problems which reformers saw as the root causes of prostitution. Through the frenzy of newspaper coverage and the drama of public demonstrations, the white slavery panic brought with it the app earance, but not the reality, of social change. When the tumult dissolved, the problem of prostitution and its causes remained.
On the other hand, the white slavery metaphor itself was quite effective; like the panic, its work was symbolic rather than substantive. The white slavery idea provided a new conceptual framework for thinking about the position of women in Victori an society. The metaphor served to reform the popular image of the prostitute, enabling the public to see her not as the internally corrupt fallen woman, but as the pitiable victim of malignant external forces. Reformers tradition-ally had been concerned about prostitution, the plight of the prostitute, the viciousness of the double standard, and the problems of the working-class woman and the "redundant" middle-class spinster, but without the white slavery story they lacked the symbolic charge to generat e public support. Protestant cries for fidelity and chastity were too tepid to evoke the kind of uprising "The Maiden Tribute" generated. It was the metaphor's symbolic power that propelled a truly effective national effort to check prostitution and to e nforce the moral values of the middle classes.
But the success of the white slavery metaphor had particular significance for women, a success with implications that merit further study. For example, the white slavery metaphor may have worked against the interests of proto-feminists. Perception of the prostitute as victim, an image the white slavery metaphor clearly provided, emphasized the helplessness of women and undermined women's claims to legal, social, and economic equality with men. As Deborah Gorham observes, the image of the prostitute as th e sexually innocent, passive victim of individual men did not threaten the images of womanhood and family life that formed an essential part of the middle-class Victorian's world view. Had they allowed themselves to see that many young girls engaged in pr ostitution because their choices were so limited, reformers might have been forced to recognize that the causes of prostitution were to be found in an exploitative economic structure. Instead, as Judith Walkowitz has shown, focus on wome n's inherent vulnerability served to funnel reformist zeal into more traditional social purity programs to rescue and redeem the "fallen."[89]
Public outcry for more stringent "protection" of feminine virtue in the wake of "The Maiden Tribute" reveals another of the panic's unintended consequences. Following the public explosions of 1885, social purity campaigners were more than willing to coun tenance repressive measures to enforce their middle-class moral values and sexual standards. Although intended to reform the intimate habits of both sexes, purity efforts probably served to maintain the double standard and thus to preserve women's sexual disfranchisement.
Repressive social purity measures were also far from the original ethos of the libertarian repeal movement. William Stead, for example, argued against legal interference in private sexuality, asserting that "the streets belong to the prostitute as much a s to the vestryman" and advocating the same punishment for customers as prostitutes. Stead even encouraged open and frank discussion of sexual matters with young girls, and excoriated the ignorance and prudery of English mothers, who kep t their daughters "in total ignorance of the simplest truths of physiology."[90] Ironically, this liberal approach would increasingly be at odds with the repressive social purity movements that grew out of efforts to abolish the dehumani zing system of regulated prostitution.[91]
But the white slavery metaphor and the panic it engendered may also have had positive consequences for women. The shift in the terms of public debate over prostitution gave women a compelling basis for cross-class alliance. One study suggests that "traum atic is not too strong a word to describe the reactions of women, shielded from such realities, as the evidence of the sexual abuse of children and the forcing of women into prostitution." The panic may have "achieved a solidarity among women that the earlier attempt to expose the exploitation of what were thought to be willing prostitutes failed to do."[92]
The metaphor may have performed another political service for women. In the same way that female anti-regulationists had expanded women's access to collective political action simply by the fact of their agitation, so women's insistence upon public discu ssion of sexual matters expanded women's ownership of a topic to which they had previously held little claim. The sexual slavery idea provided the moral framework within which women found justification for their discussion of sexual practices-especially m en's sexual practices.
The panic which followed "The Maiden Tribute" suggests another indirect benefit for women. The Gazette insisted that it was performing a public service by bringing every smarmy detail of life in the London Labyrinth out of the darkness of ignoranc e and into the light of day. Such claims for the benefits of frank discussion buttressed women's demands for unhampered access to sexual information. Reformers had long argued that unlimited access to scientific information on sex and physiology would pro tect women from the deceit, exploitation, and conflict that inevitably ensued from sexual ignorance. But viewed from the twentieth century, the principle of "no secrets" could be used as a rationale for women's claims to ownership of their own bodies. Re formers like Josephine Butler insisted upon the "inalienable rights of every woman, chaste or unchaste, over her own person." Although Butler claimed this right as a means of protection against speculum-wielding physicians, the principle of bodily ownersh ip also carried the seeds of an argument for reproductive autonomy. From the principle of "no secrets," as well as the notion of bodily ownership, women could launch a direct assault on masculine control of female sexuality, to which cha llenges had already begun to surface before publication of "The Maiden Tribute."[93]
Intriguingly, it is the issue of bodily ownership which returns full circle to the original question -that is, the definition of sexual slavery. Men's assumed right to ownership of sexuality, and hence their right of control over women's bodies, is littl e different from the privileges assumed in any other form of slavery-inherent in each is the notion that one individual may possess and control another. To contest masculine control of sexuality, women would have to rebel against the dictates of Victoria n society in general and their "decently-educated" husbands and fathers in particular. To assert their right to bodily autonomy, women would need the strength to abandon those polite conventions-including the imposition of silence-which, in Josephine Butler's words, had "bor[n]e with such murderous cruelty" upon them.[94] The white slavery metaphor offered women a new conceptual framework for understanding sexual relations and provided reformers with a platform from which to question and, if necessary, attack masculine prerogative. What had begun as a revolt against the s ystem of regulated prostitution had thus become a serious challenge to the sexual hegemony of men. As Butler told the Northern Counties' League in 1874, "our operations [have] widened . . . since the time when we first challenged public opinion"; the issue had become instead the "root question of human life-the true relation of the sexes."[95] Butler advised women that even more important than passing legislation to protect women and children was ensuring that women "re quire sternly of men that they be pure," that women demand virtue of men "as they have hitherto demanded it of us."[96] The shift in focus from women, as prostitutes, to men, as their exploiters, opened a formidable wedge in the previous ly forbidden topic of sexuality and, in the process, exposed male and female relations to new-and potentially radical-interpretations.
Endnotes
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1 Pall Mall Gazette (hereafter "PMG"), Monday, 6 July 1885, 1:1. Return to essay
2 PMG, 6 July 1885, 5:2. Return to essay
3 See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Return to essay
4 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1957), 366. Return to essay
5 The concept of moral panic was developed by British sociologist Stan Cohen, cited in Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology and American Laws (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1990), 64. My use of "metaphor" is drawn from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 210-211. "Rhetoric" is used in the usual sense of persuasive argument, but see John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey's discus sion of historical rhetoric in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). On the "problematization model" of prostitution, see Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (Lo ndon: Routledge, 1990). As Mahood observes, studying prostitution in its social and economic setting allows one to see the interplay between economic forces (such as depression, poor wages, unemployment) and cultural processes (including the sexual double standard, sentimentalization of home and family) and the role of these forces in reconceptualizing prostitution. I have made this model more complex by considering the demographic conditions (sexual imbalance, late marriage, changes in fertility and mort ality, and so forth) which structured the possibilities of Victorian life. Return to essay
6 The feminist can be thankful for the evolution of the handshake. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship [1969], quoted by Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Towar d an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. For discussion of "White Slavery: Myth or Reality," see Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Chapter 7. Return to essay
7 The earliest such use I have found is Richard Oastler's A Letter on the Horrors of White Slavery (Leeds: J. Smithson, 1830); the latest is Wile Britton's The White Slavery; a Study of the Present Trades Union System (1909). Quotation from Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 223. Return to essay
8 Mary Hume-Rothery, A Letter Addressed to Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, M.P., . . ., quoted in Walkowitz, 128. Return to essay
9 Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1891), 120-121, quoted in Reiter, 169, no. 1. The view that all women are prostitutes was shared by the anonymous author of the Victorian sexual memoirs, My Secret Life. Describing women's false modesty, he wrote: "I came to the conclusion that in the woman it is the result of training, with the cunning intention of selling the view of their privates at the highest price-and inducing the man to giv e them their huge price for it-the marriage ring. Women are all bought in the market-from the whore to the princess. The price alone is different, and the highest price, in money or rank, obtains the woman." Quoted in Jeremy Sandford, Prostitutes: Portrai ts of people in the sexploitation business (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 206. Return to essay
10 Note the Victorian tone used by Charles Terrot in his study of white slavery, published in 1960: "The white slave traffic had existed in Britain since time immemorial. . . . The business consisted of capturing by trickery and abducting by force young girls who were transported to Continental brothels from which escape was almost impossible. Within a few years there arose an insatiable demand for English girls." Traffic in Innocents: The Shocking Story of White Slavery in England (New York: Dutton, 1960), 13. One of the best general histories of prostitution is Vern and Bonnie Bullough's Women and Prostitution: A Social History (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), but even the Bulloughs' carefully balanced account draws a straight line from 1885 to 1987, accepting without question the Pall Mall Gazette's argument that England's relatively low age of consent created the traffic in English girls. Return to essay
11 Nor are white slavery stories confined to a distant past; consider the Washington Post's 5 August 1993, article, "Japan Apologizes to Sex Slaves," in which the Japanese Prime Minister asked the forgiveness of Asian women forced into prostitution by the Imperial Army during World War II. For analysis of the sex industry created for American soldiers during the Vietnam war, see Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery (New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979). Outlines of the w ell-known tale are also evident in Far Eastern Economic Review's 28 September 1989, article, "Shanghaied for Sex: Women Kidnapped and Enslaved by Prostitution Rings," and literally dozens of stories like it. Return to essay
12 Victor Hugo to Josephine Butler, 20 March 1870, in Josephine E. Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1911), 13. Return to essay
13 Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: MacMillan, 1913), 4. Return to essay
14 The 1921 Conference of the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons dropped the term "white slavery" for the less loaded term "traffic in women and children." See United Nations Department of Economic and Soci al Affairs, Study on Traffic in Persons and Prostitution (Suppression of the traffic in persons and of the exploitation of the prostitution of others), (New York: United Nations Publication No. 59. IV. 5, 1959). The United Nations group derives fro m the British organization formed in the wake of the "Maiden Tribute" panic. Return to essay
15 Alfred S. Dyer, The European Slave Trade in English Girls; a Narrative of Facts (London: Dyer Brothers, 1880), 6. Return to essay
16 In 1875, James Stuart published a history of the Acts entitled The New Abolitionists. Return to essay
17 Butler, 42, 98. Walkowitz notes that of the thirty-three women leaders of the Ladies National Association, ten had been involved in the earlier anti-slavery movement. Walkowitz, Table 1, 126-127. The rhetorical connections between blac k and white slavery have been explored; Grittner and Barry note that authors often take pains to depict the sexual slavery of white women as somehow crueller than racial slavery; Grittner, 5; Barry, 10. Grittner incorporated race and ethnicity as a critic al feature of the American white slavery panic which resulted in passage of the Mann Act of 1911. Similarly, British prejudice against foreigners was also revealed in the earlier English version, but unlike the American episode, the British panic seemed t o draw more of its strength from class antagonisms than from racial or ethnic prejudices. Return to essay
18 Benjamin Scott, A State Iniquity: Its Rise, Extension and Overthrow (London: Kegan Paul and Company, Ltd., 1890), Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), 42. Return to essay
19 Hippolyte Mireur, quoted in Pastor T. Borel, The White Slavery of Europe; or, Licensed Houses of Debauchery in Their Relation to the Law and to Public Morality (1875), trans. by Joseph Edmondson (London: Dyer Brothers, 18 76), 25, no. 1. Return to essay
20 Dyer, 5, 4. "The Memorial to the Right Honorable the Earl of Granville, K.G., Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs" (1880) (hereafter "Memorial"), Declaration of A-- T-- (26 July 1880), 129. Ret urn to essay
21 Butler, 160. Return to essay
22 Edmondson, 6. Return to essay
23 Benjamin Scott to Earl Granville, August 5, 1880, in "Correspondence Respecting the Immoral Traffic in English Girls in Belgium " (1881). Parliamentary Papers, C.2910 XCVIII.183 (mf 87.851-852) (hereafter "Correspondence"). Return to essay
24 Dyer, 5. Return to essay
25 Butler's account of French and Belgian traffic in English girls was first printed in London in the 5 March 1881 edition of The Shield (the official organ of the National Association, an anti-Contagious Diseases Acts organization ). Complaints from Belgian authorities regarding Dyer and Butler's accusations prompted an official investigation under the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Law Relating to the Protection of Young Girls, the report of which is cited here. Par liament also sent barrister Thomas Snagge to Brussells to investigate the charges and to monitor legal proceedings against the accused procurers. These charges were evidently sustained, with a number of brothel owners and procurers receiving prison terms ranging from ten months to three years. Butler, 210. Return to essay
26 Dyer, 5. Return to essay
27 "Correspondence," Consul Lumley to Earl Derby, 17 June 1877; also in Dyer, 9, 16. Several provincial papers carried Dyer's story, and the Marquis Townsend published it in his weekly periodical, Social Notes. Dyer would later offer the same information in his testimony before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Law Relating to the Protection of Young Girls in 1881. Return to essay
28 Butler, speech at Croyden, 3 July 1871, quoted in Scott, 113-114; Butler, 226-227. Return to essay
29 PMG, 10 July 1885, 3:1; 8 July 1885, 1:2. It is worth noting that feminist historian Kathleen Barry employed the same rhetorical device in her 1979 study of white slavery. Barry argued that those who refuse to recognize sexual s lavery for what it is must in some way benefit from preserving the status quo-if not by direct financial profit, then by the psychic satisfactions of "general participation in the sexual power that accrues to men through female sexual slavery." Barry, 7. Return to essay
30 PMG, 6 July 1885, 3:1. Return to essay
31 Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 3d ser., 300 (30 July 1885), cols. 579-585, quoted in Deborah Gorham, "The 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England, " Victorian Studies, Vol 21, No. 3 (Spring 1978), 353-379; Walkowitz, 3. Return to essay
32 Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women's Reading, 1835-1880 (Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981), 43, no. 19. Return to essay
33 C.E. Howard Vincent, Director, Criminal Investigations (12 July 1881), from the Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Law Relating to the Protection of Young Girls; together with the "Proceedings of the C ommittee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix" (1881). Parliamentary Papers, Rep., Proc., Mins. of Ev., App., Index 1881 (448) IX.355 [mf 87.60-62) (hereafter "Report"), 73. Return to essay
34 Consul Wodehouse to Marquis Salisbury, "Correspondence," 12 January 1874. Return to essay
35 Consul Lumley to Earl Derby, 17 June 1877, "Correspondence." In keeping with her emphasis on female agency, Walkowitz argues that these investigations found little evidence of "widespread involuntary prostitution of British girls at ho me or abroad" Walkowitz, 247. Clearly, two women per month over a seven or eight year period would only account for 168 to 192 British women rescued from Belgian brothels, which is a mere fraction of the estimated thousands of "voluntary" English prostitu tes. The evidence also suggests that few of these rescued women were the innocents Dyer or Stead described. Yet one wonders how many incidents of involuntary prostitution constitute "significant" evidence. Even if only a dozen British women of the highest moral character had been decoyed into foreign brothels, each would have found the incident highly significant. It does no damage to Walkowitz's argument to concede that some women may have been victims, at least temporarily, or at least long enough to do damage. Return to essay
36 Ronald Pearsall, Night's Black Angels: The Forms and Faces of Victorian Cruelty (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1975), 243; Gorham, 371. Note the ongoing link between disease and child prostitution: in the nineteenth centu ry, men sought sex with children to "cure" venereal infection; alternatively, men fearing infection sought sex with children, whom they assumed would be free of disease. In the twentieth century, fear of the AIDS virus has once again made children sexual targets; sadly, in neither century has extreme youth guaranteed sexual purity. See Vitit Muntarbhorn, "U.N. Says Prostitution of Children Growing," New York Times, 19 February 1992. Return to essay
37 Dyer, 5. The reformers' position is supported by the earlier account of policeman John Fielding, who suggested that the sexual abuse of children was a practice of long standing in England. It was usually the "mothers [who], either star ved by their Necessities, or drowned in Gin, and, for a Trifle . . . have trepanned their Children into Bawdy-Houses, and shared with the Bawd the Gain of their own Infant's Prostitutions." In the same year philanthropist-reformer Robert Dingley also refe rred to parents who sold their children's sexual services, and urged the rescue of "Female Children, from Twelve to Fifteen Years, of the lower Class of people, who are often abandoned by their Parents, and even sometimes sold by them to Procuresses." Joh n Fielding, "An Account of the Origins and Effects of a Policeman Set on Foot by His Grace the Duke of Newcastle in the Year 1753, Upon a Plan Presented to His Grace by the Late Henry Fielding, Esq., to Which is Added a Plan for Preserving Girls Who Becom e Prostitutes from Necessity" (1758), 46; Robert Dingley, "Proposals for Establishing a Public Place for Reception of Penitent Prostitutes" (1758), 7, both in Prostitution Reform: Four Documents, London, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985. Retu rn to essay
38 Joseph Dunlop, Superintendent, C Division, Metropolitan Police (10 July 1881), Report, 76, 77. Return to essay
39 This sort of dialogue made up the bulk of administrative testimony before the Select Committee in 1881. Magistrate William Hardman, for example, testified that he was well aware of child prostitution in London; like Dunlop, Hardman als o attributed the prevalence of juvenile prostitution to environmental causes. "I can see how evil influences are early brought to bear upon [juvenile prostitutes]; and there are assaults committed upon them in many cases by their own near relations, by br others and even fathers. . . . Only the other day I tried the case of a man who assaulted a little child, who was his own granddaughter, and he was convicted." William Hardman, Chairman, Quarter Sessions, Surrey (19 July 1881), Report, 91-92. Return to essay
40 Consul Hotham to Earl Derby (12-15 October 1876), "Correspondence." Return to essay
41 Dunlop, 76; Alexander Truitt, Advocate, French Bar (12 July 1881), Reports, 57. Return to essay
42 Daniel Morgan, Inspector, Criminal Investigations Department, Paddington, X Division (19 July 1881), 87; Inspector Arnold (19 July 1881), Reports, 88. Return to essay
43 Snagge, Report, 20. The same invincible pride in all things English is revealed in journalist Henry Mayhew's global history of prostitution. In his discussion of the various classes of prostitutes, for example, Mayhew wrote that "there are very few English girls who can properly be termed sailors' women; most of them are either German or Irish." Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopedia of the Conditions and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Can not Work, and Those That Will Not Work (London: Griffin Bohn & Company, 1862), 228. Return to essay
44 Scott, 6. Return to essay
45 Ibid, 4. The 1830s saw a wave of anti-Catholic fictional literature exposing the evil practices of the Catholic Church; novels with such titles as Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed revealed that convents were "slave factories," "Popish br othels," and "priests' harems." Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, quoted in Grittner, 30. As Grittner observes, "by attributing sexual deviancy to these 'alien' groups, their opponents drew symbolic boundaries demarcating appropriate se xual roles, values and behavior. The construction of boundaries," in this case between Protestant and Catholic, "was an exercise in power designed to affirm traditional cultural values." Grittner, 30. Return to essay
46 Judith M. Bennett, "Feminism and History," Gender & History 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1989), 256-257. Return to essay
47 Consul Lumley to Marquis Salisbury, 22 February 1880, "Correspondence." Return to essay
48 Mayhew, 257. Return to essay
49 Thomas Edward Jeffes, Belgian Consul (12 July 1881), Report, 33. Return to essay
50 Jeffes, Report, 35. Considering the vehemence of Jeffes' testimony, it is worth considering the contradictory evidence given by Ellen Cordon. Cordon was one of the underage women reportedly held against her will in a Belgian bro thel (and-perhaps not coincidentally-one of the countrywomen for whom Jeffes was officially responsible). Cordon reported that she had been taken to Belgium by a young man who promised marriage but instead sold her to a brothel. The initial medical examin ation revealed that, not only was Cordon a virgin, but due to an unspecified defect, she was "incapable of sexual intercourse." After several unsuccessful attempts to breach her virginity in the usual way, Cordon reported that she was sent to a Belgian ve nereal hospital where "they commenced to operate upon me for the purpose of making me capable of prostitution. They did not even give me chloroform, but the students held my hands and feet, whilst the operator seemed to tear and cut away my living flesh." Dyer, 27. Return to essay
51 Report, Arnold, 90, 88. In some cases, the observation was true; one English woman told Parliament: "Before I entered the house I knew it was a maison de tolerance, but not that my clothes would be taken from me, or that I shoul d not be allowed to go in and out when I pleased, or that the door would be locked, or that the 200 francs, the fee of the placeur, would be charged against me. I was led to believe that I should lead a jolly life, but I was much disappointed. . . . I tho ught I should have more liberty." Declaration of A-- T--, Memorial, 129. Butler, 76. Return to essay
52 Ibid, 89. Return to essay
53 Mayhew, 215, 198. Victorians at mid-century had not yet exclusively defined prostitution as the exchange of sex for money. Like Mayhew, writers of the period frequently equated sexual promiscuity with prostitution. Larry Wolff, "Juveni le Criminality and Erotic Sentimentality: The Gendering of Victorian Prostitution," paper given at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, California, 8 January 1994. Return to essay
54 Edwin Hood, The Age and Its Architects, quoted in Houghton, 352. Return to essay
55 Of course, frugal Victorian men were cautioned not to frivolously "spend" their sexual energy as well. Quote is from Francoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), xix. Discussion of nineteenth-century Victorian fiction is drawn from Basch, Houghton, Mitchell, and the indispensable Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Boo ks, Inc., 1964). For discussion of trends in intellectual, as opposed to popular, literature, and especially for the influence of Enlightenment thinking on proto-feminist thinking, see William Leach's True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980). Return to essay
56 Mitchell, x. Return to essay
57 PMG, 6 July 1885, 1:1; 8 July 1885, 2:2. Return to essay
58 Basch, xv. Return to essay
59 Snagge (5 July 1881), Report, 23. Return to essay
60 Edmundson, 18. Return to essay
60 PMG, 10 July 1885, 4:1. Return to essay
62 Mitchell, 17. Return to essay
63 Butler, 119. As Judith Walkowitz points out, feminist repealers such as Butler linked their defense of prostitutes to a "separate spheres" ideology which stressed women's purity and moral supremacy over men. This ideology naturally lim ited feminists' ability to empathize with unrepentant prostitutes. Butler and her cohorts were indignant when registered prostitutes' signatures appeared on a Pro-Acts petition in 1872, the prostitutes claiming that "the women signing this petition are no t reclaimed women or women seeking to be reclaimed but are practicing prostitutes under Goverment sanction; whereby . . . they procure increased custom, more money, and a recognized social position." Wester Daily Mercury, 16 September 1872, quoted in Walkowitz, 186-87. Return to essay
64 William Rathbone Greg, "Prostitution," Westminster Review, 53 (1850), quoted in Mitchell, xi. Return to essay
65 William Acton, The Function and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations (1857), quoted in Marcus, 31. See also Thomas Walter Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London: Allen Lane, 1979); David F. Greenberg, The Const ruction of Homosexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). Return to essay
66 See Millicent G. Fawcett, Josephine Butler: Her Work and Principles, and Their Meaning for the Twentieth Century (London: Orchard House, 1927), 26-27. Return to essay
67 Census of Great Britain, 1851, in Mitchell, 16-17. Between 1851 and 1900 no further enumerations were undertaken. See Sheila Ryan Johansson, "Demographic Contributions to the History of Victorian Women," in Barbara Kanner, Th e Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, Interpretive Bibliographic Essays (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1979) 259-295. Return to essay
68 In an era in which a man "was expected to provide his wife with a carriage and to associate with men of wealth," one demographer found that "the average age at which he could afford to marry was almost thirty." John A. Banks, Prospe rity and Parenthood; a Study of Family Planning and the Victorian Middle Classes, quoted in Houghton, 384. Return to essay
69 Mitchell, 17. Return to essay
70 Marcus, 14-15. Return to essay
71 Greg, quoted in Mitchell, xi; Marcus, 14-15. Return to essay
72 The seeds of feminism were present long before the passage of universal suffrage in 1918 and 1928; in 1837 Caroline Norton was fighting for married women's property and child custody rights; 1847 saw the first restriction on working ho urs for women and in 1857 the first divorce law was passed. In 1867, John Stuart Mill moved for an extension of the Reform Act to include suffrage for women and, in 1869, published his highly influential Subjection of Women. Return to essay
73 The Reform Act of 1832 marked the first stage in the sharing of political power by the landed aristocracy and the newly affluent members of the middle classes. The second Reform Act of 1867 went even further: though it still contained property qualifications, the Act granted the franchise to the lower-middle class and to a small, privileged section of the working class. The Reform Acts created an electorate in which the working class was in a considerable majority; the strength of this new electorate was revealed in the success of the anti-regulationists' 1870 electoral campaign against Sir Henry Storks. Basch, xvi; Butler, 11. Return to essay
74 Acton, Prostitution. . . , quoted in Houghton, 365. Robert Dingley assumed in 1758 that most prostitutes were foolish lower-class women seduced and abandoned by upper-class rakes. Dingley, 4. Christine Stansell observed the same pencha nt for cross-class sexual pillaging in nineteenth-century America, wherein "popular dissatisfaction with the privileged crystallized into an image of aristocratic sexual license." Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New Y ork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 23-25. Return to essay
75 Mitchell, 31; Joan Scott, 110. The class antagonisms tapped by the white slavery metaphor underscored real economic divisions and political tensions in British life. Houghton points out that during the Victorian period, England suffere d periodic bouts of explosive economic and political discontent, entering the last quarter of the nineteenth century in a severe depression. Houghton, 239-40. Return to essay
76 Butler to PMG, 9 July 1885, 3:2. Return to essay
77 Butler, 221. Condemnation of the sexual habits of the rich was not limited to reformers. A woman who claimed to have personally experienced white slavery also pointed an accusing finger at society's elite. Ellen Cordon told Parliament that "one ruffian, who bore a title, treated me so brutally, I thought I should have died under it." Dyer, 27. Return to essay
78 I disagree on this point with Deborah Gorham's "The 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' Re-Examined." Gorham argues that the subjects of Stead's expose were "in almost all cases, young working-class children-the daughters of the people. " I believe Gorham reads Stead's reference to "the people" too literally; unlike Gorham, I argue that "The Maiden Tribute" was able to achieve its stunning political success by invoking the anxieties of the middle-classes regarding their own daughters. Go rham admits, however, that, after initial working-class enthusiasm died out, social purity reform would remain primarily a middle-class movement. Gorham, 353, 377, 378. Return to essay
79 PMG, 4 July 1885, 1:1. Return to essay
80 PMG, 4 July 1885, 1:1. Return to essay
81 In the weeks following the "Maiden Tribute" series, the woman who (purportedly) sold Stead her thirteen-year-old daughter Eliza Armstrong was (purportedly) encouraged by Stead's enemies to file kidnap charges against him. Stead was pro secuted under these charges and eventually spent six months in prison. Return to essay
82 Terrot, 171; Manchester Guardian, 7 July 1885, 6:1. Return to essay
83 Manchester Guardian, 7 July 1885, 8:4; PMG, 11 July, 12:2. Return to essay
84 Manchester Guardian, 10 July 1885, 1:1.; 10 July 1885, 1:1; 6:2. Return to essay
85 Terrot, 181. The surge of public interest that followed publication of "The Maiden Tribute" illustrates what Roger Cobb and Charles Elder have called "the dynamics of agenda-building." In any society at any one time there are a variety of political issues and controversies that are perceived as the legitimate subjects of governmental concern; only a few of these items ever make it from this "systematic agenda" to the "formal agenda" of governmental action. In Cobb and Elder's theory, an issue will only recieve review and possible action by moving from the systematic to the formal agenda. Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johms Hopkins Press, 1983), quoted in Grittner, 133. In the summer of 1885, the moral panic over white slavery made this move in dramatic fashion, squarely placing the issue on the formal agenda of federal, state, and local governments. Return to essay
86 PMG, 9 July 1885, 3:1, 4:1, 11 July 1885, 3:1. Return to essay
87 PMG, 17 July 1885, 7:2; Terrot, 184, 186. Return to essay
88 Geertz, 210-1. Return to essay
89 Gorham, 355. This raises an important distinction: although many middle-class reformers shared common objectives, such as repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts or raising the age of sexual consent, reformers did not necessarily have identical social agendas. Whereas social purity campaigner Ellice Hopkins, for example, advocated a code of repressive individual morality, as a means of reducing prostitution, Josephine Butler insisted that economic necessity drove many women to prostitution, and advocated a restructuring of the wage system which would permit working women a "living" wage. See Women's Work and Women's Culture: A Series of Essays, Josephine E. Butler, ed.(London: MacMillan & Co., 1869). Return to essay
90 PMG,7 July 1885, 2:1; 10 July 1885, 3:1. Return to essay
91 Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 263. It is worth noting that politics continues to make strange bedfellows. In order to secure legislative reforms, Josephine Butler threw in social purity activists agandas much more repressive than hers--and came to regret it. In her current efforts to abloish pornography, feminist historian Kathleen Barry has in the same way allied herself with fundamentalist religious groups who share her aversion to pornography--but surely little else. Return to essay
92 Synopsis of Michigan Papers, "white Slavery," in Barbara Kanner's bibliography, Women in English Social History, 1800-1914. A Guide to Research in Three Volumes (vol. II) (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988). Return to essay
93 Butler, 12. Return to essay
94 Quoting Josephine Butler, Fawcett, 21-2; also in Mitchell, 41. Return to essay
95 Butler, speech of 11 November 1874, quoted in Scott, 186. Return to essay
96 Butler, speech at Croydon, 3 July 1871, quoted in Scott, 114. Return to essay |
Author: SPE
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 06:29 pm | | The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885
Section 11 Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour. |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 08:29 pm | | This is all very enlightening, thankyou again for the specifics SPE.
It has likely been a mystery to more than just myself in wondering what possible connection their could be between a person arrested as JtR, then charged with involvement in child prostitution.
Not knowing the circumstances of his initial arrest is perplexing, but there had to be a connection in both offences, it beg's the question, 'what was the connection?'.
If he was arrested under suspicion of complicity in the killings then how could they possibly change the charge to relate to child prostitution?.
Unless, he was first picked up in relation to child prostitution, but then why arrest him in connection with the murders?.
Do we have anything from the English press that states he was arrested in connection with the murders? or is this just American press?
From what I've read up to date, there's nothing in the English press at all. Even Littlechild tells us he was arrested in connection with unnatural offences, but not with the murders.
I appreciate you taking the time Stewart, lets hope more snippets of info rise to the surface in the forseable future to help fill in the gaps, until then, Tumblety's connection with the murder of Kelly hangs in the balance.
Best regards, Jon |
Author: Jon
Sunday, 16 January 2000 - 09:51 pm | | The following site gives a very complete explanation of the 1885 act.
http://spade3.ncl.ac.uk/1999/issue4/stevenson4.html
Including the punishment....
"Twenty-five lashes were agreed as a suitable penalty where the offender was less than 16 years of age and a maximum of 2 years imprisonment in all other cases."
And the irony was.......
"Bishop Walkowitz notes that at the time no-one openly acknowledged the supreme irony of the proposal of flogging as a punishment for sexual violations when the practice of flagellation and chastisement for sexual gratification was one of the major abuses exposed in the Maiden Tribute scandal"
Only in Britain, eh :-)
Regards, Jon |
Author: ChrisGeorge
Monday, 17 January 2000 - 09:28 pm | | Hi, Jon:
Thanks for pointing this out for us. But it is NOT Bishop Walkowitz!!!!! Judith Walkowitz is an author of our day who has done considerable work on the sexual practices and related prostitution laws of the Victorian era. The quote should have been as follows:
"The Bishop of Rochester moved an amendment to empower the infliction of corporal punishment for the defilement of innocent girls of a tender age (HL [280] 1384-6). Walkowitz notes that at the time no-one openly acknowledged the supreme irony of the proposal of flogging as a punishment for sexual violations when the practice of flagellation and chastisement for sexual gratification was one of the major abuses exposed in the Maiden Tribute scandal (Walkowitz 1992, p 104)."
Here, the Walkowitz reference is to her highly recommended study of the sex and prostitution in the era of Jack the Ripper: Judith R. Walkowitz, "City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Chris George |
Author: Jon
Monday, 17 January 2000 - 09:36 pm | | Yeh, I realized I'd forgot to edit out 'Bishop' from the text :-(
It's at times like this that Spry's so-called post poste 'editing' feature should've worked !!!!
Jon |
Author: Dave Sceats
Wednesday, 16 February 2000 - 06:48 pm | | Hello Everyone
I don't know if this is useful. I come from Bethnal Green in the East End of London. About 20 years ago i was speaking to an old friend about the subject of Jack The Ripper, her old gran was in the room and overhearing us claimed that her mother had told her a story of an American Doctor who was known in the area and had a reputation of helping "local girls" with un-wanted babies at the time of the Ripper Murders. At one point he was suspected by locals of the murders, but at the time of the last murder (Mary Kelly's) he was in police custody, so the suspition was dropped.
However the story has a twist.
She claims she was told that, Barnett finding out the Mary Kelly had aborted his child some time after went around there in a drunken fit..well you know the rest.
Guess who was the Doctor who aborted the said child?.
Who knows maybe Tumblety planted the idea into Barnetts head to take some of the heat off.
I have no way of confirming this as the said lady past away soon after, also any foreigner in the area at the time was treated with suspition. It had to be somebody who
1. Would know the area.
2. Be known in the area.
3. Could walk through the area covered in blood with a knife on there person in the early hours.
Maybe an abortionest has that reason?.
Hope This has Been Some Help To Someone
Dave |
Author: Guy Hatton
Thursday, 17 February 2000 - 05:19 am | | Hi Dave -
In 1888, an abortionist would surely have been unwilling to be seen walking around covered in blood. A slaughterman may have had a legitimate excuse, but abortion was strictly illegal.
It seems that what you have here may be a genuine, but slightly garbled recollection of the "American doctor" story as told by Wynn Baxter at Annie Chapman's inquest. In that sense, there is nothing extraordinary about the story, except for the reference to the suspect being in police custody at the time of the Kelly murder, which is intriguingly close to the established facts of Tumblety's arrest and charge for indecency offences, facts which were not previously thought to be publicly known until Evans and Gainey investigated the case only a few years ago. It would be interesting to know what Stewart makes of this.
All the Best
Guy |
Author: Dave Sceats
Friday, 07 April 2000 - 04:04 pm | | Hi Everyone
I've heard that Tumblety may have been an Irish/American. Does anybody know what was the Irish link?.
It seems that the "Letter From Hell" letter sent the the Plice may have an Irish syntex.
All The Best
Dave |
Author: Julian Rosenthal
Sunday, 09 April 2000 - 11:23 pm | | G'day Dave,
For Stunnedletty's Irish connection check ou the A-Z Pg 453.
As for the 'From Hell' letter, it certainly looks like it was written by someone who'd had a bit too much whiskey, so you might be onto something with this Irish connection.
Jules |
Author: Alegria Mendes
Tuesday, 25 April 2000 - 11:39 am | | | Hello. I am very new to Ripper lore and am still making my way through the basics (possible victims/suspects). I have a question regarding the murder of Carrie Brown. In her synopsis it states that she is only linked through Chapman but isn't it possible that if Tumblety was JtR then he could have killed Brown as he was also in America and N.Y at around that time? Again I am new to this and there may be facts that I am unaware of that make this impossible. Could someone enlighten me please? |
Author: David M. Radka
Tuesday, 25 April 2000 - 12:44 pm | | Aleqria,
Good question.
There is no information linking Tumblety to the approximate area where Carrie Brown was murdered, but there is information linking Klosowski to that place, approximately. This is one of the chief pieces of circumstantial evidence, cited by writers such as Gordon, used in support of Klosowski's candidacy for the Ripper.
David |
Author: Allan McCormack
Thursday, 04 January 2001 - 02:55 pm | | Hello,
I respectfully request the opportunity to join in your discussions, which I have been reading for the past several months.
With a view toward contributing something, I have placed transcriptions of Texas newspaper articles from 1888 describing the 1884-1885 serial murders at Austin, Texas, USA and their alledged link to the Whitechapel murders at the following URL:
www.geocities.com/austinhistory/ripper.html
Also, newspapers accounts specifically about the 1884-1885 Austin serial murders can be found at:
www.geocities.com/austinhistory/page1.html
Additionally, two 1888 AUSTIN STATESMAN articles are reproduced at this URL:
www.casebook.org/press_reports/austin_statesman/
Allow me to introduce myself: I am an historian, 35, and have studied the Austin murders for six years; a portion of my research into the Austin serial-murders is published in the July 2000 issue of TEXAS MONTHLY magazine.
I have made these transcriptions available for the benefit of researchers interested in the Austin murders.
Please note that the old newspaper accounts are replete with factual errors relative to the murders: the Texas press was reluctant to publish details of the extensive mutilations of the female victims.
A study of the Austin murders might not be of interest to those persons who propose that serial killers never change their m.o.;or to those persons who believe that the Whitechapel murderer did not act with an accomplice; or to those persons who are certain that the Whitechapel murderer was never in Austin, Texas--for such a statement implies that the individual already knows the identity of the Whitechapel murderer and his/her history.
However, a study of the Austin murders might be of interest to those persons who believe that, in addition to the identified suspects, that any documented accounts of serial murder occurring shortly before or after the Whitechapel murders should be investigated, for the reason that serial killers contemporary with Jack the Ripper, because they are serial killers, merit investigation.
Furthermore, a study of the Austin murders might be of interest to those persons entertaining the possibility that the Whitechapel murderer had an accomplice; and by those individuals who are interested in Francis Tumblety, as an Austin researcher (as reported in TEXAS MONTHLY) believes that Tumblety was in Austin, Texas in 1884-1885.
It might also be of interest to some, that the Texas state capitol building (built of granite and made famous during the recent presidential election) was being constructed (in 1884) by imported and skilled stonecutters--at times as many as 200 English, French, Italian and German stonecutters lived in Austin during 1884-1888. The state-house was finished in spring 1888, after which time the majority of stonecutters returned to their homes.
Allan McCormack
Austin, Texas
P.S. I have posted a copy of this message in the General Discussions category for the benefit of persons interested in the Austin murders specifically. |
Author: Ashling
Friday, 05 January 2001 - 05:37 am | | Hi Allan--Welcome aboard! Thanks for posting your links. I bookmarked the pages and will comment later on ... if new info has surfaced on Tumblety, I look forward to studying it.
Thanks,
Ashling |
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