City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

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INTRODUCTION

In April 1980, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London installed a new exhibition in its Chamber of Horrors: the Jack the Ripper street. With the aid of concealed refrigerators that brought the temperature down to that of a foggy winter’s night, it set about literally making the blood run cold. Newspapers around the world excitedly reported what might be in store for the intrepid visitor. After passing a wall plastered with Victorian tabloid illustrations of the Ripper murders and their locale, the visitor finds himself stumbling over cobbles, past green slime-covered walls, his way barely illuminated by flickering gas lamps. On the left the effigy of Mary Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper, waits for custom at the door of her sordid room. Meanwhile,

Boisterous singing from a nearby pub does little to dispel the sense of malice and foreboding. Suddenly there is a shadow on the wall, the sound of running feet, and then a hideous scream. Nervously, the visitor presses on—only to wish he hadn’t. In a back alley, lies the disfigured woman with her throat cut. . . . It is horribly realistic.

Yet the star of the new installation, Jack the Ripper, was nowhere to be seen—only a disappearing shadow, whose signature was the mutilated body of a woman.¹

The Ripper street transports the visitor back into a Victorian Carnival of the Night of mean streets, menacing obscurity, and drunken raucous laughter. Newspaper accounts of Tussaud’s street represent it as a movie set designed from the male point of view, despite the fact that women and children also walked through the exhibit. As the spectator abruptly observes the prone body of the murdered Catherine Eddowes, he/she becomes complicit in the act of looking, forced into an uneasy alliance with the disappearing shadow of the Ripper.² The power of the male gaze does not go unchallenged, however; it is met by the blunt, frontal stare of the prostitute Mary Kelly, standing at her door; audacious, unflinching looks, like these, or so cultural critics tell us, are a sure sign of the unchaste public woman whose sinful wages must lead to death.³

The installation of the Ripper street represents an important departure from tradition for Madame Tussaud. In keeping with its proud heritage of authenticity and fact, the descendants of Madame Tussaud had steadfastly refused to include the notorious Ripper of 1888 in their exhibit, despite the frequent surprise of visitors on failing to find him there. For the Ripper had never been apprehended: No one had caught a glimpse of his figure, or even a likely figure, let alone a face. And Tussaud’s, while willing to apply illusionary techniques to a setting, will not invent a face.⁴

By 1980, however, Madame Tussaud’s faced a dilemma: visitors (particularly children) were complaining that the Chamber of Horrors was not horrible enough. People were just not finding it bloody enough. By installing the Ripper street, Madame Tussaud bowed to demands for more gore. To accommodate new tastes, modern sound and lighting effects were introduced to produce a realistic setting, so that the accuracy of likeness and presentation still prevail.⁵

The elusive identity of the murderer and the authentic setting so carefully represented in Tussaud’s Ripper street were not facts but complex rhetorical structures, public fantasies containing contradictory and historically shifting meanings. In returning to London of the 1880s, City of Dreadful Delight examines the cultural dynamics and social struggles that informed these fantasies and originally produced Jack the Ripper in 1888 as a mythic story of sexual danger.⁶ This study locates the Ripper story as part of a formative moment in the production of feminist sexual politics and of popular narratives of sexual danger. It examines the competing cultural elements incorporated into the Ripper narrative, as well as those elements that the Ripper story excluded and resisted, particularly those in which women were not silent or terrorized victims.

Tussaud’s Ripper street condenses many elements of the original tabloid reporting about the murders, but it presents a far more stabilized account than media coverage offered at the time. In 1888, the narrative of the murders was assembled piecemeal and retrospectively during that year’s autumn of terror, when five prostitutes were brutally murdered within ten weeks (31 August to 9 November), some sexually mutilated as well. All but one murder occurred within the East London parishes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields (the exception occurred nearby, just within the boundary of the City of London). Although some prior homicides of prostitutes were retrospectively linked to the Ripper, only after 31 August did coroners and police suspect something extraordinary. Only then did police authorities, newspaper readers, and the local population of Whitechapel come to interpret the cluster of five murders as the work of one unknown killer and to brace themselves for more to follow. Like the disappearing shadow of Tussaud’s installation, the murderer, who was never caught, was known only by his modus operandi—despite the concerted efforts of police and citizen action groups to hunt him down.⁷

A wide variety of stories circulated around the identity of the murderer and the meanings of his murders. As anxiety and interest in the case intensified, different constituencies assembled a convergent set of fantasies in relation to the figure of the murderer. Eventually some newspaper correspondents imagined the Ripper as a privileged, sexually dangerous man and publicity hound who, they believed, communicated with a mass audience through letters published in those very same newspapers. His sexual appetite was perverse and unbounded. His lust murders and sexual mutilations of prostitutes were, commentators claimed, unnatural alternatives to heterosexual copulation. His taste for clinical, sadistic practices also led to speculations that he was a mad, syphilitic doctor. Often imagined as a seasoned urban traveler, the Ripper could move effortlessly and invisibly through the spaces of London, transgressing all boundaries, committing his murderous acts in public, under the cover of darkness, exposing the private parts of public women to open view. While these compelling stories never cohered into a single version, for Londoners of the 1880s, these perceptions shaped the Ripper murders into a story of class conflict and exploitation and into a cautionary tale for women, a warning that the city was a dangerous place when they transgressed the narrow boundary of home and hearth to enter public space.

The popularity of Madame Tussaud’s exhibit testifies to the symbolic potency of the Ripper murders as quintessential acts of transgression, evoking the repressed Victorian past, when a dangerous male sexuality—a sexuality that many experience as all too contemporary—found stark representation. In featuring Jack the Ripper, Tussaud’s continued a well-established media fascination with the world’s ultimate sexist murderer.⁸ No single criminal has appeared so tirelessly in literature, drama, opera, television, and motion pictures. If a journalist cannot sell anything else in London he can always sell a story about ‘Jack the Ripper,’ observed one author in the 1920s; the frequency with which printed solutions to the hundred-year old mystery have been turned into films, argues Christopher Frayling, is "a clear indication of their strong resonance in contemporary popular culture.⁹ The Whitechapel murderer has been the subject of over one hundred literary and visual productions, from the dark mental fantasies of the expressionists, who situated the Ripper’s acts of sexual violence in someone else’s nightmare, to the Hollywood thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, featuring the man-with-the-knife" and the deadly, controlling, murderous gaze.¹⁰

Renewed contemporary interest in the Ripper story may also account for Tussaud’s decision to spotlight the Ripper. New trends in horror movies, the real life exploits of a contemporary Ripper operating in the north of England, and a revival of speculation about the historic Ripper, vastly increased general familiarity with the details of the Ripper story and provoked a consuming desire to re-enact and resolve the mystery. Post-1960s theories which identified the original Ripper as a homosexual member of the Royal Family and the Ripper’s recent reincarnation as the proletarian Yorkshire Ripper testify to the Ripper story’s capacity to play out an elaborate repertoire of contemporary anxieties—from heterosexual violence, to the lavender menace, to the specters of imperial and domestic industrial decline. Yet Tussaud’s refusal to invent a face capitalized on the most terrifying meaning of all: the myth of an eternal Ripper, the never named, could-be-anyone killer, unifying past and present terror.¹¹

Like the feature-length films and dozens of Ripper books churned out at the end of the 1980s to celebrate the centenary of Jack the Ripper, Tussaud’s Ripper street adheres to a certain invention of the Victorian past, expressed through an overworld/underworld structure. This historical imagination recreates Victorian London as a geographically and classdivided city whose social boundaries were regularly transgressed by illicit acts of sex and crime. Whereas Tussaud’s Ripper street provides the period setting for the poetics of transgression, other accounts of the Ripper frequently invent an overworld family identity for this supremely undomesticated killer. To the male fantasy of urban descent, advocates of a Royal Ripper theory, for instance, have attached a domestic melodrama, featuring the highest family in the land.¹²

The overworld/underworld structure of Ripper histories informs the political lessons drawn from them. Such a structure allows contemporary authors to articulate a longing for the secure world of our fathers, but also to penetrate the smug, hypocritical facade of that world to uncover a perverse sexual jungle. As Jeffrey Weeks notes, this historical imagination represents a certain projection into the past of current debates over the constraints of society and the unruly energy of sex. Nostalgia for a golden age of propriety represents a retreat from contemporary challenges to the values and family life of the neo-Victorian fifties, challenges posed by the disruptive forces of the 1960s, the youth culture, and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Yet piercing the nostalgia for sturdy Victorian values and stable family life is the belief that the Victorians themselves were wracked by anxieties and contradictions—that they too had terrible secrets.¹³

Ripper productions may be symptomatic inventions of the past, but they are not, as one reviewer of the genre observes, critical interrogations of the Victorian culture that created and succored a figure like Jack the Ripper,¹⁴ critical interrogations that City of Dreadful Delight proposes to undertake. This study treats the Jack the Ripper story, told in chapter 7, as a far less unified and bounded production than the depiction offered by Tussaud’s installation and other popular renditions. To account for the Ripper narrative’s power and instability, City of Dreadful Delight assesses the internal contradictions of the Ripper story and juxtaposes the Ripper narrative against competing narratives of gender and sexuality circulating in the late-Victorian metropolis.

City of Dreadful Delight maps out a dense cultural grid through which conflicting and overlapping representations of sexual danger circulated in late-Victorian London. Two newspaper scandals, W. T. Stead’s 1885 exposé of child prostitution, the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, and the tabloid reporting of the Ripper murders in 1888, provide my chronological frame. Although they emanated from different political locations, both media scandals manipulated similar cultural themes and rhetorical strategies. Both produced contradictory and unanticipated effects. As catalyzing events, the Maiden Tribute and the media coverage of the Ripper murders forced a range of constituencies to take sides and to assert their presence in a heterogeneous public sphere. In the process, such narratives influenced the language of politics, fictional forms, and journalistic innovations in fin de siècle London.

Although City of Dreadful Delight observes chronological boundaries, it does not proceed in linear fashion. It moves synchronically, linking the narrative tradition of urban exploration and the dark labyrinthine city, found in media scandals like the Ripper or the Maiden Tribute, to contiguous stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, some of them located in different social spaces of the metropolis. Like the Ripper story, these other stories (presented in chapters 2, 5, and 6) introduce a wide panorama of social actors, who engaged in cultural contests over sexuality and gender that both echoed and inverted the theme of sexual danger and the social vision of the city that were featured in the Ripper story. In these alternative narratives of gender conflict, women appear as interlocutors as well as figures in the imaginary urban landscape of male spectators.

A conjunction of shifting sexual practices, sexual scandals, and political mobilizations provided the historic conditions in the late-Victorian period for the elaboration of such narratives. In their assessment of similar developments on the other side of the Atlantic, American historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman contend that nineteenth-century sexuality acquired a privileged status as a primary identity precisely as sexual practices and meanings became disengaged from procreation in the United States, at least for the white middle-class portion of the population. This provoked a shift in the dominant [i.e. middle-class] meaning of sexuality from a primary association of sexuality with reproduction within families to an association with a more intimate, nonreproductive yet conflicted marital sexuality and to sex outside the family. To assuage a mounting anxiety that the erotic had lost its moorings and fixed identity in reproductive sexuality, they argue, cultural commentators marked off a range of sexual practices—same-sex relations, free love, commercialized sex—as dangerous and set about specifying a new heterosexual (nonprocreative) norm.¹⁵

A similar constellation of media scandal, anti-vice campaigns, and proliferating sexual categories and identities occurred in Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Out of this maelstrom, the narratives of sexual danger emerging in London in the 1880s developed. These narratives reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the correspondence columns of the daily press. Diverse men and women employed a variety of competing social languages to interpret sexual experience, from the language of sexual bartering, to melodramatic newspaper representations, to the authoritative language of the law and medicine. In these discussions, gender transgression and sexual transgression continually overlapped, for as Thomas Laqueur observes, "almost everything one wants to say about sex already has in it a claim about gender."¹⁶ As a consequence, concern over dangerous sexual practices focused on much more than disorderly sexual conduct: dangerous sexualities had as much to do with work, life-style, reproductive strategies, fashion and self-display, and nonfamilial attachments of urban men and women as with nonprocreative sexual activity.

Women as well as men participated in the debates and cultural exchanges around dangerous sexualities. In the two decades prior to the Ripper murders, female reformers had actively engaged in public discussions of sexual danger. Through the feminist politics of prostitution, middle-class women inserted themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, using access to new public spaces and to new journalistic practices to speak out against men’s double lives, their sexual diseases, and their complicity in a system of vices that flourished in the undergrowth of respectable society. Along with female antivivisectionists, who plastered the thoroughfares of London with the posters of mutilated and tortured bodies of innocent feminized laboratory animals, feminist opponents of regulated prostitution disseminated images and narratives of scientific sexual violence more widely than any other literary vehicles of the time, including pornography.¹⁷

These campaigns facilitated middle-class women’s forceful entry into the world of publicity and politics, where they claimed themselves as part of a public that made sense of itself through public discourse.¹⁸ These women were able to capitalize on the volatile political conditions of the 1880s, particularly the expansion of political opinion out of doors, to gain access to a redefined public sphere.¹⁹ As political actors, female moral reformers drew on traditions of radical political culture aimed at producing and consolidating public opinion against a privileged class of sexually dangerous men who preyed on the innocent. Women’s presence in this public world provoked a heightened sense of sexual antagonism and reinforced assumptions of sexual difference, particularly the prevailing Victorian association of sexual desire with maleness. A number of historians, including myself, have criticized the social purity legacy of first-wave feminism for reinforcing women’s subordination and sexual fear.²⁰ But these campaigns also opened up new heterosexual expectations for middle-class women, even as they set into motion repressive public policies, mostly directed against working-class women on the streets.

A number of factors inspired me to undertake a cultural history of this sort. In part, I am continuing to explore some interpretive questions suggested by, but left undeveloped, in my earlier study of the state regulation of Victorian prostitution. In Prostitution and Victorian Society, I was able to call into question certain myths about prostitution handed down from the Victorian era: that prostitution was a question of working-class supply and middle-class demand; that prostitutes were social outcasts, irrevocably cut off from a community of the laboring poor; that the wages of sin were death. Yet these myths compelled the attention of people across gender and class lines, forming a story that powerfully ordered people’s experience and their own self-representations.²¹

This line of inquiry itself emanates from intellectual and political debates of the late twentieth century. The pornography debate among feminists in the early 1980s provoked me to confront thorny and unresolved problems about the power of representation and feminists’ relation to cultural production. Equally provocative and unsettling were the epistemological challenges posed by poststructuralist critics, who insisted that historians pay closer attention to the complex way meanings are constructed and cultural practices are organized, in particular, the rhetorical, linguistic means by which people represent and understand their world.²²

By considering these questions historically, this study engages in a productive dialogue with poststructuralists, reformulating their insights about cultural meanings to address analytic categories conventionally of interest to the historian: power, agency, and experience. This book also draws a cultural map that resists the conceptual oppositions that traditionally inform historical interpretation: representation and reality; elite and popular culture; the creation/reception and production/consumption of cultural texts. It posits instead a more complex interaction of cultural worlds.²³

The events and stories narrated in this book illustrate the operation of power in a Foucauldian sense, as a dispersed and decentered force that is hard to grasp and possess fully. On the whole, my own narratives, in keeping with Foucault’s insight, call into question old-fashioned assumptions about a centralized and stable hierarchy of power. Mindful of feminist critiques of Foucault’s theory that have developed in the past few years, I have set out to illustrate simultaneously how different individuals and social groups had access to different levels and sources of power.²⁴ While challenging a picture of a fixed hierarchy of power, City of Dreadful Delight still tries to convey a sense of the inequality of power—along class and gender lines—and of the unequal power of different stories amidst the proliferation of cultural meanings.

In his last three books, Foucault came to believe that the discourse of sexuality was a privileged object of analysis, the essential place to grasp the working of power in modern Western societies.²⁵ Many of his insights into Victorian sexuality were already anticipated by feminist scholars, who also recognized that there was nothing natural or inevitable about sexual practices and meanings. Feminist historians such as Linda Gordon, Nancy Cott, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg had already begun to outline the contested, heterogeneous, and pluralistic history of sexuality in the nineteenth century. They had come to recognize, in the words of Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, that sexuality was not an unchanging biological reality or a universal natural force, but was rather a product of political, social, economic, and cultural processes. Sexuality, that is, had a history. Feminist scholars showed how sexuality was a contested site for other struggles and social divisions, particularly those of class, gender, and race.²⁶

Even if it were not alone in historicizing sexuality, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality helped to sharpen and focus the discussion of the politics of sexuality in some important ways. Foucault took the lead in repudiating the repressive hypothesis underlying Marcus’s dichotomized and condescending psychic map of the Victorians. Far from repressing sexuality, Foucault argued, Victorian culture actually produced, multiplied, and dispersed it. This volubility led to the special privileging of sexuality as the core of a private identity, which was dangerous when made public. Through the incitement, prohibition, and normalization of desire, these discourses facilitated the policing of society, a policing that extends into the liberated twentieth century, when the mechanisms of repression deceptively seem to be loosening their grip: We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.²⁷

Feminist scholars have called for a more complex picture of Victorian sexual politics and sexual practice than Foucault’s paradigm allows, one that gives more attention to the material context of discursive struggle and to the specificity of women’s experience in these struggles. They have not lost sight of the dominating role played by sexual danger in Victorian sexual discourses and of its implications for women. They have been sensitive to the difficulty faced by women of all classes in entering public discourse and to the deep sense of sexual vulnerability (because they were more vulnerable) that most women articulated when they claimed public space to speak on sexual matters.²⁸

Foucault’s insight that no one is outside of power has important implications for expressions from the margins. Just because women are excluded from centers of cultural production, they are not left free to invent their texts, as some feminist critics have suggested.²⁹ They are not innocent because they are on the sidelines. They are bound imaginatively by a limited cultural repertoire, forced to reshape cultural meanings within certain parameters. Women, for example, do not simply experience sexual passion and naturally find the words to express those feelings, nor do they experience sexual danger and naturally find the words to express the threat. In the simplest sense, women of different classes and races all have to rely on cultural constructs to tell their truths, but the cultural constructs available in different social situations vary. London in the 1880s was a historic moment when middle-class women were enabled to speak publicly about sexual passion and about sexual danger, thanks to the new spaces, forms of social communication, and political networks available in a redefined public domain.

Foucault and other poststructuralists have called into question the authority of the subject as a free, autonomous author of a text. Yet, as Judith Newton has observed, the fact that subjects are culturally determined does not mean that human agency in a changing world is for the most part illusory.³⁰ That individuals do not fully author their texts does not falsify Marx’s insight that men (and women) make their own history, albeit under circumstances they do not produce or fully control. The historian’s task still remains to explain cultural expressions in terms of historically situated authorial consciousness³¹ and to track how historic figures mobilized existing cultural tools. In my account of late Victorian sexual scandals, figures like the journalist W. T. Stead and the feminist Josephine Butler acted as catalysts who made things happen. They were important historical actors, if not autonomous authors, even if the outcomes of their actions were not always or only what they had intended.

This book shows the narrative challenges raised by the new agenda of cultural history.³² City of Dreadful Delight observes many conventions of historical writing, particularly those of social history; yet it has had to depart from a traditional historical narrative to convey the dynamics of metropolitan life as a series of multiple and simultaneous cultural contests and exchanges across a wide social spectrum. It has resisted, for example, providing narrative closure to some chapters, or organizing its historical account in terms of fixed gender and class polarities. It does not emphasize change over time so much as it highlights a shifting pattern of cultural and social perspectives, set in dynamic relationship to each other, that offered a range of social constituencies different incitements to self-expression and self-creation in a modern urban landscape.

On the whole, I analyze the cultural events of the 1880s from the critical standpoint of my generation of feminist scholars, but I start by identifying the systems of meaning articulated by social actors of the past. Their perspectives—on gender and power, on representations of the city and the self—constitute the conditions of possibility that allow me as a latetwentieth century feminist to examine Victorian social and sexual relations. That is to say, there is a family resemblance, if not complete identity, between the interpretive strategies available on sexuality and the social order in the 1880s and those available and contested today. Most notably, the dilemmas that late-Victorian feminists confronted echo many of the dilemmas we feminists encounter today, with many of the same terms of agreement and disagreement operating inside and outside of feminist ranks. Contested terrain appropriately characterizes urban life and sexual politics of the 1980s and 1990s as it did the social world of the late-Victorian metropolis.

City of Dreadful Delight opens with two chapters that examine why London in the 1880s provided a fitting imaginative landscape for sensational narratives of sexual danger like the Maiden Tribute and the Ripper stories. The material and cultural features of late-Victorian metropolitan life helped to inspire a range of explorations into consciousness and identity as well as to shape the stories of sexual danger circulating in London at the time. Specifically, these two chapters look at the tradition of urban male spectatorship and the creation of a bifurcated imaginary urban landscape as a backdrop for personal adventure and self-creation. Throughout the Victorian period, it had been the prerogative of privileged men to move speedily as urban explorers across the divided social spaces of the nineteenthcentury city, to see the city whole, and thereby to construct their own identity in relation to that diversity. However, in London in the 1880s, the prevailing imaginary landscape of London shifted from one that was geographically bounded to one whose boundaries were indiscriminately and dangerously transgressed.

In fact and fantasy, London had become a contested terrain: new commercial spaces and journalist practices, expanding networks of female philanthropy, and a range of public spectacles, from the Hyde Park Maiden Tribute demonstration of 1885, to the marches of the unemployed and the matchgirls in the West End, enabled workingmen and women of many classes to challenge the traditional privileges of elite male spectators and to assert their presence in the public domain. In so doing, they revised and reworked the dominant literary mappings of London to accommodate their own social practices and fantasies. The effect was a set of urban encounters far less polarized and far more interactive than those imagined by the great literary chroniclers of the metropolis.

W. T. Stead’s reworking of melodrama and urban sexual adventure are the focus of chapters 3 and 4, centering on his newspaper exposé, the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. Maiden Tribute presented a distorted picture of youthful prostitution, whose very distortions and silences called attention to themselves within the text. Yet Maiden Tribute shifted the public discourse on sexuality, encouraged women to articulate publicly a new sexual subjectivity, and incited political movements that had a marked effect on class relations and the political economy of sex.

Tracking the progress of the Maiden Tribute through Victorian London is a dizzying exercise in the interaction and collision of cultural worlds: first originating in the newspaper, it was retold in the houses of Parliament, recast in the courts of law, heralded by feminists and socialists, read aloud in the slums of Marylebone. The wide circulation of the Maiden Tribute (estimated at one and a half million unauthorized copies) signaled a new stage in the expansion of a mass market that was simultaneously segmented into multiple reading publics. Thanks to this expanding market, the Maiden Tribute became a component of political culture, the everyday culture of work, family, and gender relations; the mass culture of the new journalism, the official culture of the law, and the high culture of intellectuals. In these different contexts, Maiden Tribute was taken up by different social constituencies and revised for a variety of political purposes. Stead himself had produced the Maiden Tribute by renovating an older melodramatic narrative of sexual danger, merging it with cultural products of the late-Victorian period. His story in turn was taken up by feminists and working-class radicals who resisted its innovations; meanwhile popular journalism quickly pounced on the new typology of sexual crime—and possibilities for sexual terrorism—that was packaged in the Maiden Tribute and that was fully elaborated three years later in the narration of the Ripper murders.