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Victorian Pros and PoetryShalyn Claggett

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Shalyn Claggett

VICTORIAN PROS AND POETRY

Science as literature in William Acton’s

Prostitution

In 1864, the British Parliament passed the first Contagious Diseases Act, which allowedpolice officers in specified garrison towns to arrest suspected prostitutes, compel them toundergo gynecological examinations, and incarcerate those thought to be contagious in lockhospitals. William Acton’s medical and sociological study Prostitution Considered in itsMoral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects (1857) significantly contributed to creating aclimate of support for passing and extending the regulatory power of the Acts. Acton’s bookhas often been criticized by scholars for its literary and stylistic qualities, but these veryaspects may account for the rhetorical power of Acton’s prose. This essay contends thatActon strategically used formal devices, including allusions, etymologies, and metaphors, tosubstantiate political arguments he could not support with medical and statistical evidence.Examining the work in this context reveals the textual mechanisms through which limitingthe liberty of women was problematically but powerfully rationalized in the name of publichealth.

Keywords William Acton; prostitution; Contagious Diseases Acts;etymology; allusion; Alfred Tennyson; Idylls of the King; metaphor

For the past 40 years, scholarship on prostitution in the Victorian era has either reliedon, or taken issue with, William Acton’s Prostitution Considered in its Moral, Social, andSanitary Aspects (1857). Social historians have disagreed on such issues as Acton’s statuswithin the medical profession, the degree to which his perspective was representativeof the dominant ideology, and whether his book offers a misogynistic or compassionatedepiction of the prostitutes themselves.1 Despite these conflicting perspectives, mostrecent assessments agree on two points: first, that Acton’s book was incrediblyinfluential in passing, enforcing, and extending the Contagious Diseases Acts; andsecond, that Acton’s book did not accurately represent the real state of prostitution inVictorian England. Far from being considered a useful historical document, Prostitutionhas been variously described as “a museum devoted to all the mythologies ofprostitution fostered during the nineteenth century” (Spongberg 46), “an interestingexample of a middle-class Victorian male’s ignorance” (Finnegan 8), and “the ultimateelaboration of a style, a ‘literary genre’” (Walkowitz 46). Acton’s Prostitution, it seems,offered its nineteenth-century readers some highly persuasive misinformation – or,put another way, it was a fiction able to contour the reality it claimed to represent.2

Prose Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 April 2011, pp. 19-43

ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440357.2011.568779

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This essay seeks to show that the reasons cited by recent scholars for criticizingActon’s work – namely, for its mythic and stylistic qualities – are the very aspects thatgave the text its rhetorical power. This is not to minimize the significant contributionsof historians who have ably demonstrated the degree to which Acton’s book divergedfrom the realities of his time. It is also important, however, to examine criticallyexactly how Acton misrepresented his subject. Rather than dismissing Acton for hisinaccuracies, a critical approach to his text as a text reveals the troubling ways in whicha writer can strategically bridge the gap between knowledge and belief. Prostitutionoffers a particularly significant example of such ideological distortion since Actontransformed his medical and sociological study into a persuasive argument by relying,not on facts and figures, but on figures of speech. Acton’s book, in fact, was firstrescued from the dustbin of history by Stephen Marcus precisely for its stylisticqualities. In his groundbreaking study The Other Victorians, Marcus characterizesProstitution as “a very good book” that ably demonstrates Acton’s “raw talent” as a writer(4, 7).3 Marcus’s response and the numerous appreciative assessments it launched showhow a text that purports to anchor its legitimacy in descriptive empiricism can becomerelevant not just for what it says, but also for how it says it. This is not to suggest thatthe value of Prostitution is principally aesthetic, or that the work should be revalued bycritics as a prime example of the literary nature of scientific prose. Instead, I would liketo argue that an examination of the work in terms of how it achieved its persuasivepower reveals the mechanisms through which the surveillance and regulation ofwomen’s bodies was rationalized – or perhaps more accurately, “romanticized” – inthe name of public health.

Initially intended to decrease the alarming rates of venereal disease in the armedforces, the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 provided that womensuspected of prostitution in specified garrison and naval towns be arrested byplainclothes police, compelled to undergo a medical examination, and detained in alock hospital if found to carry a venereal disease (Walkowitz 76). Whereas the 1864Act affected 11 districts and incarcerated infected women for up to three months, the1869 Act extended regulation to 18 districts and detained women for to up to a year(Smith, “Contagious Diseases Acts” 197). Starting in 1866, a campaign to extend theActs to the civilian population began to gain momentum, with Acton serving as its“principal propagandist” (Walkowitz 80). In reaction to the 1869 extension, theNational Association and the Ladies National Association (organized by JosephineButler) formed to oppose and call for the repeal of the Acts. Further supported byCongregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians, and Methodists, the movement eventuallyresulted in the Acts being suspended in 1883, and repealed in 1886 (Finnegan 9).

From 1857 to 1880, Acton and his book played a significant role in creating theconditions for regulation in both the medical and political sphere. Both the 1857 and1870 edition of Prostitution were positively reviewed in the medical press, and based onhis expertise, Acton was invited to serve as an advisor to the 1868 Select Committeeinvestigating the efficacy of the Acts. In the government report, which provided theevidence used to support the 1869 extension, Acton is cited more than any othermedical authority (Crozier 16). Establishing a climate that would embrace regulationwas no mean feat, since the existing apparatuses for dealing with prostitution, such aspolice interference and evangelical rescue programs, were aimed at suppressing, andultimately (if implausibly) eradicating the vice. Acton’s work was therefore

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instrumental in influencing this perceptual shift away from suppression and towardinstitutional regulation.

Although incredibly influential, Acton’s arguments were not novel, and his studyoffered very little in the way of original research.4 Acton’s particular contribution tothe regulation debate, however, was stylistic rather than substantive. In fact, betweenthe 1857 and 1870 edition, Acton dramatically increases his use of formal elements,emphasizing his continued recognition of their persuasive power.5 This is not to saythat Acton was more interested in adding literary flourishes than he is in makingcredible arguments – rather, he offered these literary constructions as if they werecredible arguments. To offer an extreme example, at one point Acton pens his ownfiction and cites it as evidence in support of his claim that rural villagers forgive fallenwoman if locally seduced and childless:

Scene a Hayfield. The clergyman addresses Mrs. Smith, who is raking behind thecart, “Well Mrs. Smith, how is Fanny?” “La, sir! why the baby is dead! so now I saysshe is quite as good as she was afore.” “Quite!” said the Rev. gentleman (265;emphasis in original).6

Here, Acton imagines a setting, creates characters, and invents a dialogue in orderto substantiate a claim for which he has no empirical evidence. This is the only point atwhich Acton goes so far as to write his own fictional vignette, but in doing so he revealsthe degree to which he is invested in the rhetorical power of literary discourse.Elsewhere Acton relies on the more subtle use of formal devices and literary techniquesin order to persuade his audience of claims he could not support with fieldwork orstatistics.

Of course, the logic underpinning this type of substitution is entirely suspect, butActon’s approach is strategic. Acton firmly believed that fictional texts could powerfullycreate and reify the public’s perception of social realities. In the second chapter ofProstitution, he postulates that the public’s incorrect assumptions about the prostitute’slife originated with Augustan essayists who “elected to work upon the public mind . . .with types and parables” (27). Later he laments that writers frequently attribute fancifulopinions to scientific authorities, which are really “culled . . . from ‘Jack Sheppard,’‘Oliver Twist,’ and the comedies of the Restoration” (95).7 According to Acton,literature helped to create and perpetuate an inaccurate representation of prostitutionwhich became perceptually, if not factually, true. Further, he claimed that thepossibility of regulating prostitution depended entirely on changing this publicperception (27). Acton excuses writers from the eighteenth century for theirinaccuracies, claiming that at that time the country was moving from a state of “moraldelirium towards a state of repose” that required extreme didacticism. Since that time,however, he argues that authors failed to modify representations of prostitutes byinstead remaining “content to do little more than retouch and restore the pictures of theancient masters” (27). Since literary authors have failed to provide appropriaterepresentations of this social reality, Acton performs this cultural function in their place,positing himself as the one who must, out of necessity, usurp the power of literary menby appropriating their techniques in order to correct the public’s perception.

Acton devotes much of Prostitution to hospital statistics and summaries of Europeanregulatory systems, but the context in which the literary turn appears in his prose is

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telling. Throughout, Acton correlates specific formal techniques with particularrhetorical aims, and over the course of the work, these constructions accrue a symbolicvalue which serves to substantiate arguments he cannot otherwise support withempirical evidence. In this stylized register, Acton attempts to substantiate two keypremises: first, that prostitution is a pervasive and ineradicable phenomenon, which hejustifies through an appeal to etymologies; and second, that the degree to whichwomen’s bodies were controlled would affect the prosperity of the nation, which hesupports with an array of evocative allusions and illustrative metaphors. These premiseswere essential to Acton’s overarching argument for regulation because the firstnullified the existing system of suppression, whereas the second extolled the benefits ofa new system.

In keeping with their function, the particular devices Acton employs to supportthese claims do not introduce an entirely new reality, but rather attempt to offer adifferent perspective on a familiar phenomenon. Acton alleges that the public iscompletely aware of prostitution’s existence and prevalence, but remains blinded by asort of willful self-delusion. As he observes in the preface, “Who are those painted,dressy women, flaunting along the streets and boldly accosting the passers-by? [. . .] Thepicture has many sides; with all of them society is more or less acquainted” (viii).Ultimately, Acton’s stylized prose attempts to catalyze a private (psychological) andpublic (social) admission of what Acton claims the public already knows.8 As he puts it,“To ignore an ever-present evil appears a mistake as fatal as the attempt to repress it. Iam, therefore, an advocate of RECOGNITION” (viii). This “recognition” is analogousto the Aristotelian concept of the same name, indicating an inward apprehension of thetrue state of things. Convincing his audience to publicly acknowledge prostitution’sprevalence is particularly difficult because, as he claims, the subject is often “ignored orset aside for genteel and virtuous polity” (48). For this reason, in order to catalyzeapprehension rather than repression, Acton strategically uses formal devices to contourhis desired response, the “RECOGNITION of prostitution by the State” (vii).

Etymological precedents

Acton’s premise that prostitution would exist at all times and under any socialconditions was crucial for his position because the existing system of rescue missionsand reformatories worked under the assumption that the suppression of prostitutionwas possible, and by extension, that its prevalence was only the effect of social andcultural circumstances. From this viewpoint, regulation was tantamount to legitimizingprostitution’s continued existence.9 In opposition to this perspective, Acton states,

one fact must be carefully borne in mind, that [prostitution] is no evanescent evil,but that it has existed from the first ages of the world’s history down to the presenttime, and differs but little, and in minor particulars, in this the nineteenth century,from what it was in the earliest times (viii)

Rather than claiming that venereal disease be eradicated by eliminating prostitution, heurged a course of palliative care predicated upon the assumption that prostitution is anendemic social phenomenon.

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To justify this universalizing generalization within a temporal register, Acton usesetymologies to offer a linguistic precedence for prostitution’s prevalence throughouthistory. Acton does not justify or explain this use, but the particular class of words hechooses to trace is telling since they are all words associated with prostitution,including “brothel” (4), “procuress” (14), “harlot” (27), and “whore” (1). As RaymondWilliams has pointed out, one of the theoretical problems that attend an attempt tolocate meaning through an appeal to etymology is a tendency to develop a “sacralattitude to words” often accompanied by complaints of “contemporary misunderstand-ing and misuse” (18). Acton’s use of etymology, however, assumes this tension in orderto highlight the degree to which one thing – the world’s oldest profession – has notchanged. Through frequent recourse to selective etymologies, he emphasizes a staticcentral meaning that remains stable despite historical variation.

The very first sentence of the book, in fact, draws attention to the supposedlysingular and stable meaning of prostitution while simultaneously establishing thesignificance of etymology more generally as a structuring principle for the work. Actonbegins, “Etymology would, of course, at once suggest a ‘standing forth, or plying forhire in open market,’ as a definition of the word prostitution” (1). The entire chapter,titled “Prostitution Defined,” offers a survey of political and legal arguments aboutwhat defines a woman as a prostitute only to emphatically reclaim all instances of“hiring” as prostitution. In it, he reproduces evidence provided to the 1869 SelectCommittee on the Contagious Diseases Act, in which such various definitions aresuggested, such as women who make their living by it wholly, women who make theirliving by it in part, and any woman for hire except mistresses (2). By citing thesereconsiderations of prostitution, Acton lays the groundwork for a return to etymologyas a definition that simplifies and solves all legal difficulties:

I shall here content myself with a definition sufficiently accurate to point out theclass of persons who ought, in my opinion, to become the objects of legislation,and shall assume . . . that the fact of ‘hiring,’ whether openly or secretly, whetherby an individual or a plurality in succession, constitutes prostitution (2).

By paring down the definition, Acton increases its legal applicability and permeability,extending what counts as prostitution from the streets to private rooms, from womenwho make a living by it, to women who use prostitution to supplement their regularincome. Applying a single criterion as the defining aspect of prostitution allows Actonto create the perceptual conditions by which prostitution emerges as having alwaysbeen everywhere. He anchors this etymological stability with the subordinateetymology of “whore,” which points to the same single meaning. He notes, “Whore, ispast tense of verb to hire, means one hired,” to which he adds a list of translations:“Dutch, Hoer; Swedish, Hoera; German, Hure; Anglo-Saxon, Hure; Danish, Hore.Derived from Hyran, conducere, to hire. ‘W’ has been idly prefixed, it is said”(1; emphasis in original). Taken together, the definition and list function as a simplifiedversion of the implicit argument he presents in the chapter as a whole, first offering asingle definition of “whore,” and then demonstrating that the definition holdseverywhere. Whereas in the rest of the book he generally uses the word “prostitute,”without its “idly prefixed” first letter, “whore” more closely resembles “hire,” the wordhe wishes to define it. In this instance, etymology conveniently collapses the distinction

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between term and definition, allowing Acton to advance his definition of prostitution asthe least arbitrary, while its linguistic similarity to the same word in other languagesallows him to suggest that this definition has been similarly recognized and codified intolanguage throughout Europe.

Acton also uses etymology to substantiate his claim that prostitution has alwaysexisted as a system. In this sense, Acton’s desire to catalyze recognition attempts towork against the actual, rather than psychological, repression of prostitution throughrescue missions and police intervention. This is a particularly problematic position forActon, who freely admits,

A great difficulty meets us at the very outset of our endeavours. . ...Any scheme oflegislation, having for its object the regulation of prostitution, must have at its startingpoint the recognition of it as a system, requiring not repression, but direction (99).

To argue that present strategies aimed at eradicating prostitution will inevitably fail,Acton attempts to establish a temporal precedent by tracing the history of the word“brothel.” He refers to its etymology at two key points in the book, first in addressingthe “Extent of Prostitution in London” (4), and again in a description of prostitution’sprevalence in France (107). The first instance appears in a note below a chart recordingthe estimated number of brothels and prostitutes by neighborhood within themetropolitan police district in 1857. He writes,

The word brothel, or rather the French word bordel, is said to come from bord eteau, because houses of ill-fame were at first established on the borders of rivers orclose to baths. This is corroborated by old records of London, which prove thatsuch houses, called stews, were excluded from the city of London, but wereallowed over the water in Southwark. Jeannel thus describes one – “For thebrothel it is the sign, and in default of the sign it is notoriety. It is the incoming andoutgoing of strange men which constitute pubic acts giving cause for theintervention of the police” (4).

Here, the literal sign (indicating a house of ill repute) and its analogouscounterpart, the linguistic sign (“brothel”), are no longer crucial. The close fit betweenterminology and definition simply disappears because the importance of the word shiftsfrom its legal meaning to its social significance – that is, a brothel is not defined by thesign that indicates it as such, but rather, by its “notoriety.”10 In this formulation thebrothel is, by any name (bordel, bord et eau, stew), the site through which anonymousmen move and the correspondent need for a police presence. Since Acton’s aim is topersuade his reader to support the extension of the Acts to the civilian population, thestrategy of de-emphasizing the sign by depicting it as supplementary or unnecessaryhelps to legitimize an increase in regulatory practices. Whereas a signboard locates andidentifies, a brothel known only by reputation may be anywhere or everywhere, beingonly known to those who know. Being fluid and unlocatable, the brothel assumes theshape of an ungoverned system that threatens the public through its totalizingomnipresence: that which could be anywhere might be everywhere.

Chapters later, Acton contrasts this unmanaged state of English brothels to theFrench regulatory system by linking them through their etymologies. He observes that

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the “Parisian maisons de tolerance, formerly called bordels (hence the English wordbrothel), in which prostitutes are lodged gregariously, are . . . under the most completesupervision of the police” (107). Acton viewed the French system, which since 1816enforced the registration and routine medical examination of prostitutes, as the bestexisting regulatory model, since it aimed to “repress private or secret, and toencourage public or avowed prostitution” (100). Acton’s description of this systembecomes polemical, however, when he links the French requirement of markingbrothels with conspicuous address numbers to an ancient practice. He observes,

This public way of calling attention to the nature of the house does not seem to beconfined to modern times. I am told by those who have visited the remains ofPompei, that stone phalli are to be seen over the doors of some of the excavatedhouses . . . (107).

Including this historical aside allows Acton to align the current system in France with areturn to an ancient tradition. As in the former example, what the sign is (a phallus orlarge house number) is not as significant as the social system that recognizes the needfor a culturally decipherable mark. In his formulation, modern France has paradoxicallyadvanced by reinstituting a system of regulation that recognizes prostitution as a staticfixture of civilization.

Overall, Acton’s use of etymology has the veneer of dispassionate linguistic andhistorical scholarship, but his aim is thoroughly rhetorical insofar as it attempts tojustify an argument about policy. The words he chooses to define, and the way heframes them, reveal a desire to present a political argument as if it were a series ofestablished facts, naturalizing prostitution’s prevalence by emphasizing points ofcorrespondence with the past. In this way, Acton deploys etymology as a textual devicethat works in the temporal register to achieve the effect of recognizing prostitution asan ever-present phenomenon. This rhetorical strategy works at the cognitive level –that is, it aims at constructing a particular view of what prostitution is and how itshould be understood, but does not make a direct appeal to the emotions. For this,Acton turns to literature itself.

Corroborative allusions

Whereas Acton uses etymologies to bring about the recognition of prostitution assomething that has and will always exist, he uses allusions to encourage the recognitionof prostitution’s cause. Understanding prostitution as an effect of social conditionsthreatened Acton’s argument because such a premise implied that prostitution’sprevalence could be decreased by altering environmental circumstances. Acton,however, claims that the ultimate origin of prostitution is anchored in women’sessential nature. As he explains in the beginning of the fourth chapter, one must“separate those [causes] inherent to human life, and ineradicable, from those dependenton accident and circumstance . . .” (161). Although he does cite such environmentalcauses as poverty and neglect, he identifies “natural instinct” as the “Primary orUniversal” cause which renders the elimination of prostitution impossible. Acton alsoidentifies the cause of this cause: whereas the “instinct” to which he refers is the sexual

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instinct in men, the desire to indulge this instinct only arises when men are tempted bywomen, making prostitution the “cause of its own existence” (167). Further, thesource of this creative cause stems from “the natural instinct, the sinful nature . . .idleness, vanity, and love of pleasure” (165). By identifying women as the ultimatesource of the demand for prostitution, and by locating the ability to create this demandin women’s inherent inclinations, Acton strategically avoids countenancing objectionsbased entirely on environmental circumstances.

Corroborating this universalizing argument, however, presented Acton with yetanother difficulty, because he could not rely completely on either scientific evidence orChristian ideology. Since Acton claims that women are not physiologically capable ofdesiring or enjoying sex, he could not offer a biological argument for women’swillingness to engage in prostitution (164–5). This left him in the awkward position oftrying to prove what cannot be shown with medical evidence – namely, that womenare “naturally” vain, lazy, and self-indulgent. Acton also had to avoid any direct appealto religious sentiment studiously because the fiercest opponents of the Acts claimedthat governmental regulation was tantamount to licensing sin. Instead, Acton usedallusions to gesture toward a literary, rather than a biblical or scientific, tradition. Thisfigure of speech is particularly fitting given that allusions function corroboratively,signaling a point of thematic connection or similarity in two different (and oftendisparate) contexts. In a sense, allusions enact the rhetorical effect of recognition on asmall scale through intertextual reference, calling for the reader to identify thecorrespondence between the context of the immediate subject and that of the originalsource.

Before using allusions to naturalize the temptation to engage in prostitution assomething inherent in all women, however, Acton attempted to dismantle the culturalassumption that prostitutes were a special category of immoral women who died fromthe consequences of their sins. To do this, he takes particular aim at William Hogarth’sA Harlot’s Progress (1731), which depicts Mary Hackabout’s increasingly degenerate lifeas a prostitute, culminating in her death from syphilis.11 In the introduction to the firstedition of Prostitution, Acton claims that “‘The Harlot’s Progress,’ and thecommonplace reflections which usually accompany engravings after them, have donemuch towards founding the necessity for this work. [These engravings] have inspiredour people from generation to generation with the notion of a Pariah class existingwithin the bosom of society, whom the world of sinners might be pardoned for stoningto death” (4). Acton’s assessment of the popularity and influence of the series wasaccurate – the narrative was told and retold in moralistic publications, the images werefrequently reproduced on items ranging from fans to china, and allusions to the seriesabounded in the popular press (Bender 122). Also, as Amanda Anderson has shown,medical and sociological accounts of prostitution in the mid-nineteenth centuryfrequently cited the “specifically literary depiction of the ‘harlot’s progress’” in order to“support their faith in the downward path” (12).12

To counter the cultural purchase of this powerful trope, Acton offers his ownversion of the story in a chapter titled “The Modern Harlot’s Progress.” In it, he claimsthat Hogarth’s series misrepresents the career of actual prostitutes because death fromvenereal disease “is the altogether rare exception, not the general rule” (57–8).13

Instead, he claims, most prostitutes marry “almost always above [their] originalstation,” and further, because they are “frequently barren, or have but a few children

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[they] live in ease unknown to many women who have never strayed” (68, 64).14 Byoffering an alternative narrative to Hogarth’s “progress,” Acton attempts to disarmreligious objectors who believe prostitutes suffer dissipation and death as a form ofprovidential retribution. Acton’s revision of the “harlot’s progress” has been cited asevidence of his progressive stance insofar as it accords prostitutes with a degree ofagency in extricating themselves from an otherwise rigid categorization asirredeemable. Ivan Crozier, for instance, approvingly characterizes Acton’s perspectiveas one that “extended beyond mere typologies” by “deconstruct[ing] the stereotypes ofthe prostitute in order to further understand it” (15).15 As Roxanne Eberle far moreaccurately observes, however, Acton really only “seeks to interrupt the ‘harlot’sprogress’ after she has contracted a disease but before she begins ‘poisoning’ innocentmen; once she is cured, however, he sets her back on the same path” (210). Acton’sreappropriation of the trope also served to emphasize prostitution’s increasingprevalence among all women. As he puts it, because most prostitutes “become the wifeof an Englishman and the mother of his offspring,” the state should interest itself incurtailing venereal disease as it inevitably affects “the race of the people” (49). Byarguing that there is a constant recirculation of potentially diseased women into thepopulation, prostitution becomes an invisible but also omnipresent national threat thatcannot be curtailed without panoptic surveillance and enforced regulation.

Acton’s critique of Hogarth’s series tellingly appears at a point in the text whereActon lacks the corroborative evidence of any other medical authority. Acton resorts tosupporting his claim with personal anecdotes, insisting that it is not “a fervidimagination, but hard memory” that inspires his descriptions (71). In the 1870 edition,however, Acton can cite the testimony of medical officers questioned by the SelectCommittee, and removes the allusion to the series. He does, however, append thefollowing observation at the end of the same section:

When the first edition of this book was published, it would have been in vain forme to have sought for any corroboration of these (at that time startling) views, butnow that it is the habit of the different local government medical officers to studythe natural history of the prostitute, I find plenty of corroborative evidence . . .(49).16

Removing the references in the second edition reveals how the reference formerlyfunctioned: by opposing Hogarth, Acton attempted to bolster his medical authority bycontrasting his “sobriety of tone” and “degree of freedom from emotion orexaggeration” with the “injurious and abused impressions on the subject they [theengravings] profess to delineate” (4). Where medical testimony and statistics can speakfor him, however, Acton does not need to emphasize the fictional status of a powerfulcultural narrative.

After establishing that prostitution cycles and spreads throughout the population,Acton must further explain why, if all women are capable of becoming prostitutes,only some do. Two key traits that Acton claims all women possess, but whichprostitutes exploit, are the ability to have sex without feeling pleasure and the“preferment of indolent ease to labour” (165). In supporting these claims, he makes anallusion to Alexander Pope’s second epistle, “To a Lady,” from the Moral Essays (1735),in which Pope uses specific female characters to represent more abstract types,

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including Cloe, a heartless lady of leisure. Acton introduces the allusion by observingthat prostitutes “pass their lives in, and gain their living by, affording enjoyments whichthey do not share,” which he substantiates with Pope’s description of Cloe, “Who whileher lover pants upon her breast,/ Can count the figures on an Indian chest.”17 Actonfollows the quotation with the observation that prostitutes live in “an unnatural state,”which seems to contradict the idea that women who engage in prostitution are actingon natural impulses (163). Pope, however, reconciles this apparent contradiction in hisdescription of Cloe as, paradoxically enough, naturally unnatural. Pope writes:

Nature in her then err’d not, but forgot.‘With ev’ry pleasing, ev’ry prudent part,Say, what can Cloe want?’—she wants a Heart.She speaks, behaves, and acts just as she ought;But never, never reach’d one gen’rous Thought (II. xiv. 158–62).

Cloe, then, lacks in her essential nature (what nature “forgot”) the emotionalcapabilities that would otherwise render her complete. The tension Pope highlights isbetween seeming and being, the former allowing Cloe to behave in a way that has nonecessary connection with internal motivations. This corresponds to Acton’s claim thata prostitute occupies an “unnatural state” because she “obtains for a mere moneyconsideration that enjoyment of the person which should be yielded only as the resultand crowning expression of mutual passion” (163).18 Acton parallels Cloe’s ability tosimulate emotion with the prostitute’s ability to offer “substitutes for, or imitations of”proper sexual relations. Interestingly, he also describes the prostitute as possessing amoral vacuity which parallels Pope’s description of Cloe’s lack of sympathy: “She is awoman with half the woman gone, and that half containing all that elevates her nature,leaving her a mere instrument of impurity” (166).

All of this might seem to contradict Acton’s claim that the “vices of women” areessential and ineradicable, but in his formulation, prostitutes are women who have usedone aspect of their nature—the ability to decouple the act of sex from its moralimplications—to indulge their other supposed inherent feminine vices of “Idleness,vanity, and love of pleasure” (168). Of Cloe, Pope similarly observes, “Virtue she findstoo painful an endeavour” (163), while she nonetheless interest herself in suchtrivialities as chintz, mohair, and the “figures on an Indian cabinet” (168, 170). Popedepicts Cloe’s unwillingness to exert herself emotionally as a self-serving act resultingfrom moral lassitude, which parallels Acton’s version of the “profligate sisterhood” thatthoroughly enjoys a life of drink, amusement, and leisure (23). In referencing the Cloesection of “To a Lady”, Acton attempts to corroborate his claims about women’sessential nature through a poet’s earlier study of their essential “characters.” Acton, inother words, reappropriates Pope’s satire for the sober purpose of universalizing hisclaim that a woman can be tempted into a life of prostitution due to her inherentpredispositions.

Acton further extends this argument through several allusions to AlfredTennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), trading both on the poet’s popularity and theVictorian interest in chivalric culture.19 At the time, the Idylls were at the forefront ofthe minds of readers, since the much-anticipated second portion of the cycle appearedin 1870, the same year as the second edition of Prostitution. Acton, however, drew his

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allusions from the first installment of the cycle, which appeared two years after the firstedition of his book.20 Given the fact that he quotes from the “Guinevere” section atlength three times in the text, it seems Acton recognized in it the same applicability tohis argument that he wished to instill in his readers. Strangely enough, Acton equatesprostitutes with Arthur’s queen, although he draws the parallel to emphasize thedegree to which a corruptible woman can threaten the welfare of a nation. By alludingto Tennyson’s poem, Acton was accessing a very specific version of the Arthurianlegend, in which Guinevere voluntarily enters an abbey to repent of her sins rather thanescaping with Lancelot. Alluding to this particular episode in the Idylls creates a seriesof suggestive parallels: between the fallen queen and fallen woman, between Arthur’spolitical prowess and Acton’s medical authority, and between the purifying seclusionof the abbey and the lock hospitals created to cleanse women of their disease andimmorality.

As numerous critics have observed, the Idylls reinforced the dominant patriarchalideology of the day insofar as Tennyson correlates his female characters’ moral valuewith the degree to which they measure up to feminine ideals.21 As Elliot Gilbert haspointed out in his influential reading of the poem, Arthur fails because he chose to“build a community on the idealization of nature and female energy” (875). Acton’s useof the poem similarly underscores the danger inherent in placing too much trust infeminine virtue, particularly as a foundational principle for the organization of asociety. Significantly, Acton selects all of his allusions from Arthur’s accusatory addressto the queen after the discovery of her betrayal, but before the collapse of the kingdom.Acton uses these allusions not only to show that England is facing a similar criticalmoment in its history, but also to suggest that Arthur’s infelicitous fate can be avoidedif women are viewed with suspicion and preemptively controlled.

The first allusion to “Guinevere” reinforces Acton’s claim that unregulatedprostitutes increase the demand for prostitution. He argues that by frequenting publicplaces, prostitutes create impure thoughts that would “otherwise remainundeveloped,” and further, that “thousands would remain uncontaminated iftemptation did not seek them out” (166). Acton amplifies this idea of contagiousimmorality and its attendant disease by referencing Arthur’s explanation of why it isdangerous to allow an adulterous woman to remain free from scandal. In Tennyson,the lines run:

She like a new disease, unknown to men,Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and sapsThe fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulseWith devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young (514–18, quoted in Acton166).22

Arthur argues that if an immoral woman is not publicly recognized, she willinevitably pollute society through her undetected but corrupting sexuality. Accordingto Arthur, this dynamic also explains the moral erosion of his own court, sinceGuinevere’s affair with Lancelot prefigured and mysteriously inspired the infidelity ofthe other knights.23 By alluding to these lines, Acton suggests that in the same way thatGuinevere’s unrecognized and unchecked immorality corrupted the court, the

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uncontrolled liberty of prostitutes will lead to an increase in prostitution and venerealdisease in England. In his reframing of the lines, it is not the adulterous woman, but theprostitute who “creeps,” spreading literal and moral “disease” to “every quarter towhich she has access” (166). In Tennyson’s poem, Guinevere’s corrupting influence iscontained, although too late, within the abbey. In Acton’s version, however,prostitution must be contained by confining healthy prostitutes to licensed brothels anddiseased prostitutes to lock hospitals. Acton elsewhere emphasizes this point,announcing that

Diseased prostitutes can no longer be permitted to infest the streets and spreadcontagion and death at their good pleasure. They cannot be kept off the streetsexcept by being placed in confinement, and curing their diseases seems to be thenecessary accompaniment of restraining their liberty (240).

The implication of both the allusion and Acton’s larger argument is that prostitutes,much like adulterous women, should not remain anonymous and unfettered, butrather, be known, controlled, and cloistered in order to ensure the nation’s prosperity.

The second allusion to the speech offers Acton’s attempt to correct Arthur’s errorof making women’s virtue a foundation for a moral society. Arthur explains toGuinevere that to safeguard the character of his knights, he encouraged them to “loveone maiden only [and] cleave to her,” reasoning that there was “no more subtle masterunder heaven” than a man’s love for a chaste woman (Tennyson, “Guinevere,” 471,474). In the lines Acton quotes, Arthur claims that a chaste woman is able

Not only to keep down the base in man,But teach high thought, and amiable wordsAnd Courtliness, and the desire of fame,And love of truth, and all that makes a man (476–9, quoted in Acton 167).

Because Arthur posits the virtue of women as the moral foundation of the court,any woman’s faithlessness threatens the stability of the entire system. Like Arthur,Acton ascribes to the theory that women’s virtue has a supplementary importanceinsofar as it can complement men’s moral development (162). In his reframing of theallusion, however, he cancels the foundational power Arthur attributes to women,distancing himself from Arthur’s theory not merely because it fails, but also because itdoes not tally with his earlier claim that women’s essential nature is inherentlycorruptible. Acton recasts women’s virtue, which Arthur posits as the necessarypremise for a functioning society, as a potential liability that must be sheltered. In thesentences leading up to the allusion, he depicts chaste women as damsels in distressthreatened by the corruption prostitutes instill in men. By “familiarizing man” with“sensual gratification,” prostitutes teach men to view every woman as “a thing to wearlike a glove, and fling away; to use like a horse, and send to the knackers . . . the mereobject of his fancy and servant of his appetite . . .” (167). Placed in this context, chastewomen are already imperiled by the very society Arthur would have them safeguard.Since all women are either corrupted or capable of being corrupted, they must besequestered, regulated, or protected.

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In his final allusion to Tennyson’s poem, Acton draws a parallel between the stateof England before Arthur’s rule and the then current state of the nation (that is, beforethe attempted extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts to the civilian population). Inthe context of the poem, the lines offer Arthur’s characterization of the state ofEngland after Roman rule: “the ways/ Were fill’d with rapine, here and there a deed/Of prowess done redress’d a random wrong” (Tennyson, “Guinevere,” 454–6). In thecontext of the poem, Arthur continues, “But I was first of all the kings who drew/ Theknighthood-errant of this realm and all/ The realms together under me, their Head,/In that fair Order of my Table Round . . .” (457–60). Arthur argues that whereasheroic acts were formerly executed in a haphazard manner, his political interventionbrought peace through organization and systemization. Acton uses the allusion in thepenultimate chapter of the book, in which he surveys and criticizes existing methods ofameliorating the circumstances of prostitutes. The particular context in which theallusion appears addresses privately funded reformatories and hospitals, and Actonintroduces the allusion with the observation, “A little tinkering here and there, mayhere and there produce a little good.. . . What we want is combined effort and regularmachinery, carrying out some well-considered, universally accepted and definitescheme” (267). By comparing private attempts to provide relief to prostitutes withincidental acts of bravery before Arthur’s rule, Acton manages to indirectly critiquephilanthropic efforts as well-meaning but ultimately ineffective. The allusion,however, also allows Acton to draw a parallel between his readers and Arthur: whereasthe latter organized the “knighthood-errant” into the “fair Order” of the Round Table,Acton calls for his readers (and parliamentary men in particular) to place prostitutionunder the “concentrated action of the State” (267).

The “order” he advocates, however, was a compromise between the licensingsystem used in some continental nations and the voluntary system common to England.Although Acton claims that the former system improves upon the latter, he ultimatelysupported a plan unlike either of these, in which prostitutes are not granted a licensefrom the state, but are simultaneously subjected to increased police surveillance. This,he claims, is not licensing prostitution, but rather its “recognition” as “a thing to be keptwithin certain bounds, and subjected to certain restraints and surveillance” (206). Thisplan also sought to circumscribe prostitutes physically by using the police to delimitprostitutes’ access to public thoroughfares in addition to being incarcerated if suspectedof disease. Reasoning that the suppression of accommodation houses would increasethe diffusion of prostitution elsewhere, Acton suggests that police shepherd the womenback to specified resorts because “prostitution must so far as possible be kept a thingapart and by itself” as “Society must, so far as possible, be secured against itscontaminating presence” (230).

Given that Acton advocates an untried system, he can offer only an approximatescientific argument by citing medical reports from countries under the licensingsystem. In order to support his unique position more directly without recourse toempirical evidence, Acton quotes from John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1633), at a point inthe play which stresses the potentially disastrous effects of allowing unchaste women tocirculate freely. In Acton’s text, the allusion appears at the end of a survey ofcontinental prostitution, and before Acton presents his argument that, while publicprostitution practiced in these nations gives prostitutes too much liberty, it isnevertheless superior to England’s “clandestine” prostitution (155–60). Acton ends

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the synopsis with a description of a suburb outside of Naples where prostitutes aregathered together “under the charge of military posts.” He then observes,

this system of suburban prostitution may have obtained in the days of the dramatistFord. In Love’s Sacrifice . . . D’Avolos is made to say: – “Your only course, I canadvise you, is, to pass to Naples, and set up a house of casualty; there are many fairand frequent suburbs, and you need not fear the contagion of any pestilent disease,for the very worst is very proper to the place” (155).24

In Ford’s text, these lines follow a critical turn in the action of the play. In thepreceding scene, three unmarried women of the court discover they have all beenimpregnated by the courtier Ferentes, who they collectively and publically stab todeath. Caraffa, duke of Pavy, unaccountably sends an innocent witness namedMauruccio to prison for the murder. In the following scene, this secondary plotconverges with the central narrative, involving the duke’s growing suspicion that hiswife, Bianca, is having an affair with his best friend, Fernando. When the two ask theduke to release Mauruccio, conditional upon his marriage to Morona (one ofthe seduced women), their willingness to “share any disgrace” by championing thedishonored couple convinces the duke of their guilt (Love’s Sacrifice, IV. i. 174). Theduke then displaces his anger toward Bianca and Fernando by exiling Mauruccio and hisnew wife, at which point D’Avolos offers Mauruccio the advice quoted by Acton.

Considered in its original context, Acton’s allusion operates as far more than anincidental aside, since both the duke and D’Avolos depict Morona as a contaminatingpresence that taints the court’s moral atmosphere. Much like Tennyson’s Arthur, theduke connects an increase in sexual immorality with a correspondent decrease inpower and authority within the court, stating, “We’ll have no servile slavery of lust /Shall breathe near us; dispatch, and get ye hence” (Love’s Sacrifice, IV. i. 183–4).D’Avolos statement serves to further intensify the implications of this argument bylikening Morona’s to a “pestilent disease” (IV. i. 192). In Acton’s text, however, thismetaphoric contagion becomes a literal disease that only containment and regulationcan curtail. In the section immediately following the allusion, Acton claims thatbecause clandestine prostitutes circulate freely in public places, they “daily receive bythe dozen soldiers, vagrants, and others,” spreading the “mischief these unfortunatewomen produce wherever they go” (156). By comparison, “registered women presentdiseases of a trifling character,” because they are contained within specified districtsregulated by the state (155). Acton’s plan is to create the social equivalent of a medicalquarantine for prostitutes in order to halt the spread of a moral vice. In Love’s Sacrifice,however, the solution to separate fallen women from the court comes too late, sincethe seduced women (who are repeatedly called “strumpets,” “whores” and “harlots”)have been circulating freely within it.25 Further, the destabilizing effect of Morona’ssexuality does spread like a “pestilent disease,” since it is seeing Bianca touch her thatpersuades the duke of his wife’s infidelity. Because Bianca’s faithlessness replaces theduke’s “cap of state” with a “coronet of horns,” he destroys his own court by murderinghis wife, his friend, and himself. Acton’s use of this allusion, then, not only endorsesthe system of containment at Naples, but also suggests that the political stability of thestate is conditional upon the vigilant surveillance of women.

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In his final allusion, which ends his book, Acton makes a direct appeal to his idealaudience by equating the support of the Contagious Diseases Acts to one of the laborsof Hercules. He writes:

While men stood with folded arms aghast at the evil which appeared of too longstanding, and too stupendous for human power to cope with, the filth of theAugæan stables continued to accumulate, but when resolute will, highintelligence, and manly courage took the task in hand, and let loose upon thefilthy stalls the cleansing waters, the mischief was removed. Laugh not, neutralreader, at the old classic tale, “mutato nomine de te fibula narrator” (302).

The flattering parallel elevates parliamentary and medical men to the status ofdemigods who are called to wash away the filth of prostitution and venereal diseasethrough their support of regulation. This final allusion attempts to catalyze a personalrecognition within resistant readers, who Acton gives the choice of either standing with“folded arms” or assuming the “manly courage” of Hercules. The familiar Latin phrasethat closes the book makes the parallel even more explicit by announcing that “a merechange of the name reveals this story is about you” (302).26 Appearing in the closingsentence of the book, this phrase not only encourages a self-recognition of potentialpolitical heroism, but also the reader’s recognition of the ultimate purpose of the bookitself – that is, to elicit the individual reader’s support for the extension of the Acts tothe civil population. Concealed within this aggrandizing allusion, however, is a tellingsubmerged metaphor: if Augeas’s kingdom is England, Hercules is the reader moved toaction, and the filth in the stables is venereal disease, then the prostitutes are the filth-producing cattle in need of constant supervision and management. Acton’s othermetaphors for prostitutes and prostitution, however, make this same point in a muchmore explicit and troubling way.

Infiltrating metaphors

Whereas etymology works to substantiate his claim that “prostitution must alwaysexist,” and allusions offer a corroborative proof of women’s “Natural sinfulness,” Actonuses elaborate metaphors to make his most controversial argument: that the nation’sfuture prosperity is contingent on the surveillance and control of women’s bodies.In terms of structure, these metaphors are figures of resemblance and contiguity (thatis, they function in a way that works like metaphor and synecdoche). Acton uses thisstructure to suggest that prostitutes are polluted and polluting – dangerous inthemselves, but also able to diffuse a noxious influence throughout the social body.Whereas Acton’s other formal devices work to encourage the reader’s recognition ofwhat has not changed (prostitution’s existence) and what cannot change (women’sessential nature), his metaphors dramatically represent a current state of crisis thatthreatens the future of the nation.27

Interestingly, these metaphors reveal an agenda that often has less to do withcontaining disease than with confining women to the domestic sphere. Throughout thetext, Acton often seems most horrified by the fact that prostitutes exhibit a degree ofprofessional and personal freedom at odds with women’s “proper” role as housewives

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and mothers. By dismantling this binarism between the prostitute and the honestwoman, however, Acton also justifies an increase in the regulatory control ofwomen.28 It is precisely because the prostitute can “settle down into a gradually regularlife . . . often [as] a mother of a family” that “State interference” becomes crucial (245).Throughout the work, Acton consistently links women’s social value to theirprocreative and domestic functions, which he fears will be threatened by theirincreasing familiarity with prostitution through personal experience and observation.Concerning the mixing of men’s wives with prostitutes in public houses, he remarks:

My chief interest lay in considering the effect produced upon married women bybecoming accustomed . . . to witness the vicious and profligate sisterhood flauntingit gaily . . . accepting all the attentions of men, freely plied with liquor, sitting inthe best places, dressed far above their station, with plenty of money to spend, anddenying themselves no amusement or enjoyment, encumbered with no domesticties, and burdened with no children . . . this actual superiority of a loose life couldnot have escaped [their] attention . . . (24).

He observes that such a “mingling of vicious with presumably respectable women”will eventually “tend to the spread of immorality” (24). The passage, however, alsoimplies that wives who observe other women existing entirely outside the domesticsphere will become aware of their own subjugation.29 Thus, while Acton certainly ischallenging the stereotype of the prostitute as one who steadily progresses downward,he does so only in order to justify more rigorous control of both prostitutes andrespectable women.30 Because prostitutes were overflowing their typologicalboundaries, he suggests channeling them into regulatory systems; and, when theybecome troublingly conspicuous, literally containing them in lock hospitals.

For Acton, then, the problem is not that the public is unaware of the prevalence ofprostitution, but that it has become far too accustomed and comfortable with itsdiffusion. To counteract this tendency, Acton uses metaphors to illustrate graphicallyprostitution’s otherwise visually imperceptible threats to English society. His particularuse of the trope functions through both equivalence and extension, maintaining theresemblance between prostitution and the image while simultaneously breakingthe categorical boundaries of the metaphors themselves. For instance, in making theargument that prostitution be limited to specified resorts, he observes, “I rejoiceexceedingly that the volcano of prostitution, which now burns so briskly in St. James’sparish until three P.M., is not compelled to vomit a stream of lava upon every quietquarter of the town . . .” (119). Here, he equates prostitution with a precariouslycontained danger that threatens to expend its metaphoric energy in a particularlydisastrous way. Significantly, the metaphor eliminates a number of conceivableapproaches to the actual problem of prostitution: the volcano can either expel heatwithin its proscribed limits or “vomit a stream of lava upon every quiet quarter.” Itcannot, however, be removed or supplied with government assistance. The rhetoricalvalue of the metaphor rests both in the possibilities it forecloses and the constant stateof emergency it creates. The image of the volcano that “is not compelled” to “vomit astream of lava” in the present nonetheless implies that the natural disaster may becompelled to do so given a shift in circumstances. Acton’s metaphor thus creates asense of constant crisis, limits the range of possible solutions, and carries the veiled

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threat of disastrous future consequences. Acton removes this metaphor in the 1870sedition for the simple reason that in the intervening years the casinos and music hallsformerly allowed to “burn briskly” were compelled to close at midnight. Actonreplaces this metaphor with the narrative of his tour, led by four members of theMetropolitan police, of the now less centralized “haunts of prostitutes” (22–6). Hissurvey confirms his former suspicions of the spread of prostitution into formerlyuntouched corners, and he observes that the “mingling of vicious with presumablyrespectable women . . . exercise[s] a more evil influence on the public morals than thecasino, as to these last the notoriously profligate only resort” (24). Acton can afford toremove the metaphor only when the danger it stood for is realized and confirmed byauthoritative witnesses, revealing the way in which the figure formerly substituted forevidence of a threat that was only possible.31

The same dynamics of predictive metaphoric diffusion are at work in the mostelaborate and inconsistent metaphor of the book, which likens prostitution to anunsanitary “ditch” into which women haphazardly fall (206). Acton places the metaphornear the beginning of the eighth chapter, on the “Regulation of Prostitution,” in whichhe takes aim at religious objectors and those who favor a program of voluntaryamelioration through private philanthropy. The ditch is a “wide-spreading morass,which claims fresh victims yearly, and yearly encroaches on the honest soil around,”into which women “fall little by little, till they finally sink overwhelmed in the blackdepths of the treacherous swamp” that threatens to “extend as it pleases, and engulphall it can” (206–7). Much like the phenomenon Acton intends it to represent, themetaphor transgresses its own boundaries: a “ditch” widens to a “morass” and then to a“swamp.” The trope enables him to balance an argument based in essentialism with anargument for social action. By invoking a hazard that enlarges itself through the unrulyforces of nature, he attributes to prostitution the qualities of a poorly managed naturalsystem that requires large-scale human intervention at the institutional level.

In reference to the image of encroaching crisis he has just devised, Actonconstructs an elaborate analogy that allows him to create the limited criteria by whichhe can judge possible responses. Gillian Beer usefully characterizes analogy as“predictive metaphor,” explaining that the

speculative, argumentatively-extended character of analogy ranges it closer tonarrative than to image. As in hypothesis, the arc of desire seeks to transform theconditional into the actual. And again as in hypothesis, such a transformation isseen as changing fiction into truth (80).

In Acton’s analogy, the metaphor of the ditch provides the image, and its implicationsmobilize the potential narratives in relation to it. Analogy is not the tool Actonearnestly employs to work through hypotheses in order to arrive at explanatory models(in the way Beer suggests Charles Darwin uses it); instead, he appropriates analogy’sconditional structure to validate the appropriateness of the solution at which he hasalready arrived. He compares anti-interventionists to those who ignore the ditch by“gazing on the fertile plains around” (207), and those who support the voluntary systemof amelioration to bystanders who believe “that the unfortunates relieved by our charityare mere waifs and strays of society, instead of being integral parts of a wide-spreadsystem” (206). Acton constructs for himself and his readers only one logical position,

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which directs attention to managing the ditch itself. Analogy works, here, as arhetorical sleight of hand, reducing an array of possible solutions that range outside theboundaries of metaphorical equivalence to two untenable positions and one viableoption. In this way, he transforms “fiction into truth” by equating his solution withsimple observation. As he explains in relation to the swamp, “we must take itsmeasure, probe its depths, and accurately experience and understand its nature . . . wemust prescribe the method of treatment, appoint its limits, and subject it to rule”(207).

Acton also uses metaphor to make more perceptible the otherwise invisibletransfer of contagious disease to successive generations. Because he bases this argumentfor regulation on a hypothetical future resulting from clandestine encounters, he has noempirical evidence to support his claims. Nonetheless, following the section onprostitutes being reabsorbed into the population through marriage, Acton attempts toextend and emphasize the ultimately negative consequences of the career he has justmarked as temporary and benign. To do so, he makes a distinction between theprostitutes’ present circumstances and the moral and physical effects of prostitution infuture generations. He writes,

Prostitution diffuses itself through the social fabric, though it is perceptible for atime only, as is the moorland stream which stains for a space the bluest river . . .those who to the third and fourth generation may have a concern in the actualharlot of to-day, are by far too great and important that they or their interestsshould be ignored or set aside (48).32

By comparing a prostitute’s temporary occupation with a polluted stream that only “fora space” can be seen mixing with the larger river, Acton implies that prostitution’seffects range far beyond the scope of a temporary career. This diffusion works bothspatially and temporally, since the river runs to the distant future, allowing Acton todepict a causal relationship without evidence of its final effect or intermediateprogression. Much like the implications of the analogy itself, the exact nature of thisfuture threat surfaces much later in the text, in the chapter that addresses the “ExistingProvision for the Control of Prostitutes.” As he explains in yet another metaphor ofinfiltration, prostitutes are “spreading abroad a loathsome poison, the effects of whichare not even confined to the partakers of their sin, but are too often transmitted to hisissue, and bear their fruits in tottering limbs and tainted blood” (74). In this chapter,Acton argues that the existing system of police interference and legal control isinsufficient because it only addresses those instances that “obtrude into notice anddemand repression” (77). By using metaphors that emphasize prostitution’s diffusionand latent effects, Acton justifies the extension of state power from the observable tothe hidden, ostensibly in order to safeguard an as yet unknown future.

Taken together, Acton’s metaphors figure prostitution as a pervasive dangercontinually enlarging itself, whether as a diffusing poison, widening ditch, lava-spewingvolcano, or polluted stream. In response, Acton calls for a more comprehensive systemof regulatory control that can match the spread of prostitution through a correspondentextension of state power. This line of reasoning becomes clear in another suggestivemetaphor that equates the increase in state power over prostitutes with methods ofcapturing prey. The metaphor appears near the end of the chapter addressing the

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“Amelioration of Prostitution,” where Acton compares voluntary reformation with hisproposed system of enforced regulation. To emphasize the contrast between the twoapproaches, he explains,

We are drawing our bows at a venture instead of taking deliberate aim, fishing withlines when we ought to be using nets, leaving scattered individuals to perform asbest they can, duties which demand the care and concentrated action of theState (267).

By comparing private efforts with haphazard hunting and the passive activity of fishingwith a rod, Acton undercuts the effectiveness of the voluntary system by presenting itas lacking both a broad reach and a specificity of purpose. What the mixed metaphoralso reveals, however, is Acton’s support of a plan that replaces voluntary enrollmentwith mandatory compliance. The syllogistic structure of the metaphor suggests thatprostitutes are like fish that can only be caught intermittently and singly when allowedto respond to assistance on their own. As Acton explains in the sentence following themetaphor, “We have seen again and again that penitentiaries attract to their friendlyshelter those only who would of themselves relinquish a calling for which they havebecome unfitted . . .” (267; emphasis added). Acton’s plan, however, does not aim tolure, but to capture prostitutes with the “nets” of state-sanctioned control, and compelthem to submit to the authority of medical men. Removing agency from the womenthemselves and increasing the power of health inspectors and the police over them is, infact, the key difference between the two plans. As Acton himself admits at the end ofthe chapter, the “detention of numbers of these women” will “give to all the veryopportunities that now penitentiaries give to some” (270). The quality of the reliefoffered, then, is essentially the same, but Acton’s metaphor equates supporting thevoluntary system with an endeavor that is ultimately illogical and quixotic, whereas hisplan is efficient and comprehensive. Of course, all metaphors function throughsubstitution, replacing an abstract idea with a particular image. For Acton, however,this substitution is always doubled, since the metaphors also stand in for claims that hecannot prove because they have not yet happened. These images of infiltration andcontainment, then, give the possible future a definite form, encouraging readers tofiguratively “see” a disastrous future.

Communicative unreason

Assessments of Acton’s book often have an evaluative edge, with some scholarscategorizing his perspective as humane and reasonable, whereas others characterize it assupremely sexist.33 Those who take the former view tend to anchor their assessmentsin Acton’s intentions, viewing his book as an earnest and sincere attempt to solve apervasive problem that threatened the public’s health. I have little doubt that Actonwas sincere, and that he most likely wrote and revised Prostitution out of a genuineconcern for the welfare of the English population. It seems, however, a grave error tomistake private motivations for social and political implications. Acton’s agenda soughtat every turn to establish a precedent for the unbounded surveillance and control ofwomen. This perspective palpably emerges throughout the text in asides that are not

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directly related to his central argument, but which are inextricably connected to thepatriarchal ideology it supports.34 Viewed comprehensively, Prostitution is not aboutthe management of venereal disease, but about controlling women through widespreadregulatory practices.

Nevertheless, the primary focus of this study is not to show the degree to whichActon is misogynistic or a product of Victorian patriarchal values. Rather, it attemptsto show the mechanisms through which Acton successfully connected his scientificobservations to a persuasive argument for problematic political action. This is not tosay we should avoid applying an evaluative rubric to Acton’s methodology andconclusions. Perhaps, however, such assessments might be most effectively applied inexamining his use of language and engagement with the existing cultural discourse.Relevant, here, is Habermas’s concept of communicative reason, which he describes as“inscribed in the linguistic telos of mutual understanding and which forms an ensembleof conditions that both enable and limit” (4). Habermas optimistically viewscommunicative reason as a way to bridge the gap fruitfully between “facticity andvalidity,” which might serve as a “caveat against fixating on one disciplinary point ofview” (6). Acton’s text works in this way insofar as it employs rhetorical devices andliterary precedents to connect descriptive explanation to interpretive analysis. Wherehis approach crucially fails, however, is in applying what Habermas calls the “discursiveprinciple,” which makes the ethical qualification that “the only regulations and ways ofacting that can claim legitimacy are those to which all who are possibly affected could assentas participants in rational discourses” (458; emphasis added). This criterion gives the lie toActon’s earnest recommendations while simultaneously illuminating the illocutionaryeffectiveness of his discursive claims. Acton’s rhetorical strategies aimed at mobilizingdiscriminatory social practices through a shared fear among men – fear of disease, fearof infiltration, and fear of weakening national power – in order to justify delimitingwomen’s liberty. Whereas the effect of such an asymmetric privileging of one set ofinterests over that of another is inevitably bound to the specificities of the historicalmilieu from which it emerges, the mechanisms through which it achieves socialrelevance are not. In this sense, Acton’s text retains its significance, despite itshistorical inaccuracies and ideological misprision. It stands as an example of howeffectively cultural narratives can be created or reactivated in the service of delimitingthe rights of a disempowered group, and it illustrates the importance of subjecting evenscience to the careful critique of rhetorical analysis.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Richard Wolf for his generous help in identifying the moreobscure allusions in Acton’s text.

Notes

1. In terms of Acton’s professional reputation, Jeanne Peterson argues that Acton’sspecialization places him at the margin of respectable nineteenth-century medicine,whereas Ivan Crozier argues that these same qualities were both acceptable and typical

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of medical men who did not have “privileged access to elite networks” (6). Somewherebetween these two perspectives, Michael Mason characterizes Acton’s science as“unsophisticated” and “quackish” but nonetheless popular with the lay public (193). Interms of the representative nature of Acton’s view of Victorian sexuality, StephenMarcus (20), Judith Walkowitz (46), Mary Spongberg (46), and Mason (193–4)classify his writing as typical for the period, whereas F. B. Smith (“Sexuality in Britain”182–5), and Jeanne Peterson (571) classify Acton’s views as atypical of Victoriansocial thought. Claims about Acton’s motivations are more incidental, but distinct.Peter Fryer remarks that Acton attempted “to inculcate a more humane and reasonableresponse” toward prostitution (vi), Ivan Crozier argues that Acton’s stance onreducing prostitution and illegitimacy render him “much more compassionate” (14)and “not as misogynistic as he has been portrayed” (16), and Paul McHugh similarlycharacterizes Acton’s book as “an enormously influential argument for humanetreatment of prostitutes . . .” (17). In stark contrast, Frances Finnegan, JudithWalkowitz, and Mary Spongberg argue that Acton’s reputation for compassion isundeserved given that he was primarily concerned with protecting the rights of men—a perspective that rendered him “ignorant about and prejudiced against prostitutes”(Finnegan 8).

2. This quality of Prostitution is perfectly summarized in Mary Spongberg’s observationthat “If it bore any resemblance to the truth it was only by chance, as Acton’s researchcan only be described as slipshod and haphazard, yet it was very influential” (50).

3. Marcus uses Acton’s writing to illuminate medical anxieties about sexuality which hethen connects to a larger social and literary context. I assume the sameinterdisciplinary landscape Marcus established, but rather than moving from Acton’smedical writing to literature, I examine how Acton appropriated and deployed literaryand rhetorical techniques in his medical arguments.

4. According to Judith Walkowitz, Acton’s study largely reproduces the perspectiveprovided in Parent-Duchatelet’s De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836). Sheclaims that although Parent had already produced a sociological study of prostitution insupport of a system of regulation, “his British followers had simply chosen to ignore it”and embraced Acton’s study instead (46).

5. The second edition of Prostitution is better characterized as an expansion than arevision. The original is roughly two-thirds the length of the 1870s version, but thetext of the 1857 edition appears nearly unchanged in the second, with the addition ofthe aforementioned stylistic devices, along with substantial information pertaining tothe Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869. The formal techniquesanalyzed in this essay that also appear in the 1857 edition have been noted. All otherinstances appear only in the 1870s edition, with the exception of Acton’s allusion toHogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (4, 57–8) and his volcano metaphor (119), both of whichare removed in the 1870s text. Given that Acton rarely edited out anything from theoriginal edition, these tropes have received particular attention in the essay.

6. Unless otherwise noted, all references will be to the 1870’s edition of Prostitution,republished by Frank Cass in 1972.

7. This appears in the 1857 edition, in reference to a publication that cites the authorityof an unnamed physician to support the claim that nearly every house in Fleet Ditchwas a brothel.

8. Terrance Cave argues that as a rhetorical effect, recognition embraces both the objectof knowledge (what one recognizes) and the structural shift toward that knowledge

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(how one recognizes) (4). This double aspect of the recognition appears throughoutProstitution, as Acton strategically uses formal devices to structure the reader’sacceptance of the ostensibly self-evident nature of his foundational assumptions.

9. Making the path to vice easy was, in fact, one of the charges made in the 1869 “Ladies’Appeal and Protest” against the Acts which appeared in The Daily News with thesignatures of 124 women, including Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe,Josephine Butler, and Florence Nightingale.

10. Acton references Julien Francois Jeannel’s Memoire sur la prostitution publique.11. Briefly described, the harlot’s progress runs as follows: Mary Hackabout arrives in

London and is seduced by the compliments of the procuress, Mother Needham (Plate1); Mary appears as the mistress of a wealthy Jew and distracts her keeper from ayoung lover who attempts to leave undetected (Plate 2); cast out for her infidelity,Mary faces arrest for being a common prostitute (Plate 3); Mary beats hemp inBridewell Prison (Plate 4); Mary suffers from syphilis in a sickroom, attended by quackdoctors (Plate 5); Mary’s coffin sits amidst indifferent mourners at her funeral(Plate 6). Enormously popular in the Victorian period, A Harlot’s Progress wasfrequently reproduced with didactic commentary in collections of Hogarth’s prints.For a detailed description of each plate along with the series’ reproduction history, seeRonald Paulson’s comprehensive catalog of Hogarth’s Graphic Works.

12. Although her study does not extend to the discourse surrounding the ContagiousDiseases Acts, Anderson does note that Acton was the “notable exception” to thistrend (51).

13. Also in the 1870 edition (32–3).14. Also in the 1870 edition (44, 40).15. In complete disagreement with this perspective, Judith Walkowitz argues that Acton

only “appears to have made an imaginative break with past models,” but that in reality,his “observations did not represent a breakthrough in consciousness . . .” (46).

16. What Acton refers to as “plenty of corroborative evidence” is actually only statementsmade by two medical officers. The first claimed that 250 of 1,775 who wereprostitutes at some point in their lives at Devonport eventually marry (the span of timeover which this study was conducted is not given), and the second, when questioned ifprostitutes in Portsmouth marry respectably reportedly replied “Many do; it is myown statistics that tell me the fact” (quoted in Acton 49).

17. From “To a Lady” (II. xiv. 167–8) quoted in Acton 163.18. Acton suggests women can only enjoy intercourse if it appeals to the “threefold

organization of body, mind, and spirit” (162). Acton classes sexual desire as “love” if itappeals equally to the three components in men, and “lust” if bodily desirespredominate over the other two aspects. According to Acton, however, the womandoes not experience physical pleasure when engaging in sexual activity, but rather,experiences the “love of [a man’s] approbation” (272). Prostitutes, therefore, are“unnatural” because they have sex for money rather than for a man’s approval.

19. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is a paradigmatic example of the popularity of themedieval period in Victorian England. For exemplary work on the medieval revival,see K. L. Morris’s The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature(1984); Raymond Chapman’s The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (1986); andDebra Mancoff’s The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes (1995).

20. All quotations are taken from the 1859 Idylls, which includes the only version of“Guinevere” published before 1870. For a detailed account of the poem cycle’s

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publication history, see Christopher Ricks’s headnote to the Idylls in The Poems ofTennyson (1987).

21. See, for instance, Debra Mancoff’s “To Take Excalibur”; Dino Felluca’s “Tennyson’sIdylls”; James Eli Adams’s “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw”; and Carol Christ’s “TheFeminine Subject in Victorian Poetry”.

22. Acton changes Tennyson’s line “like a new disease, unknown to men” to “like a disease”– presumably so he will not risk the integrity of his etymological argument thatprostitution and its consequences have always existed (emphasis added).

23. As Arthur explains it to Guinevere, “‘Then came thy shameful sin with Lancelot;/Then came the sin of Tristram and Isolt;/ Then others, following these my mightiestknights,/ And drawing foul ensample from fair names/ Sin’d also, till the loathsomeopposite/ Of all my heart had destined did obtain,/ And all thro’ thee!’” (Tennyson,“Guinevere” 483–9).

24. Acton quotes Ford (Love’s Sacrifice, IV. i. 188–92) accurately with the exception ofsubstituting “casualty” for “carnality.” Given that there is no sense in which these wordsare synonyms, it is likely Acton made the substitution in order to emphasize the risk ofdisease from visiting such a house. This allusion also appears in the 1857 edition ofProstitution (92).

25. Ferentes calls them “wild whores” (III. iv. 53), the duke calls them “monstrousstrumpets” (III. i. 55), and Nibrassa calls his own daughter a “strumpet” and “infamouswhore” (III. i. 1).

26. Appropriately enough for a reading of allusions, the phrase can also be translated as “itis you who is alluded to in this story.”

27. Mary Spongberg convincingly argues that in the nineteenth-century debate onprostitution venereal disease was itself a “metaphor for male sexual anxieties andloathing” (11). Whereas Spongberg concentrates on the substitutive function of diseaseas a cultural metaphor, this essay concentrates on text-specific metaphors whichfunction structurally as tropes.

28. In complete disagreement with this perspective, Judith Walkowitz argues that Actononly “appears to have made an imaginative break with past models,” but that in reality,his “observations did not represent a breakthrough in consciousness . . .” (46).

29. Acton elsewhere observes, “If we compare the prostitute at thirty-five with her sister,who perhaps is the married mother of a family . . . we shall seldom find that theconstitutional ravages often thought to be necessary consequences of prostitutionexceed those attributable to the cares of a family . . .” (39).

30. Judith Walkowitz argues that by stressing prostitutes’ superior living conditions, goodhealth, and smooth transition into the mainstream working-class population, Acton“more easily rationalized their sexual exploitation” (46). This explanation accounts, inpart, for Acton’s positive portrayal of the prostitute’s career. I would add, however,that Acton’s depiction also encouraged men to police more rigorously the boundariesbetween prostitutes and wives or women destined for marriage. From bothperspectives, Acton posits women as existing for men, either for men’s sexualgratification, or for their domestic comfort. Acton’s plan enabled him to both de-emphasize the exploitive nature of prostitution while simultaneously ensuring that themajority of women would remain confined to the domestic sphere.

31. Acton appears to have taken some trouble in assembling his investigative team, whichhe proudly announces included “Captain Harris, Assistant Commissioner of Police . . .

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the Superintendent of the Executive Branch of the Metropolitan police, and twoInspectors” (22).

32. This metaphor also appears in the 1857 edition of Prostitution (72).33. For a summary of scholarship representing these polarized views on Acton’s

motivations, refer to note 1, above.34. To offer only a few examples: in recounting a visit to a lock hospital he observes that

the women are reduced to “a proper state of submission and obedience” (91); herecommends that the “national education of women” should aim to almost exclusively“TEACH THEM HOUSEWIFEREY”; in response to the problem of increasingnumbers of unmarried women, he supports a “judicious system of emigration” that willdirect women “into healthy channels” (297).

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———. Prostitution Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects. 2nd ed. London:Frank Cass, 1972.

Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in Tennysonand Darwin.” Victorian Studies 33 (1989): 7–27.

Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in VictorianCulture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.

Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Chapman, Raymond. The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature. London: Croom, 1986.Christ, Carol T. “The Feminine Subject in Victorian Poetry.” English Literary History 54

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Croom, 1987.Parent-Duchatelet, A. J. B. De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris consideree sous le rapport de

l’hygiene publique, de la morale, et de l’administration. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Paris, 1857.Paulson, Ronald. “Commentary on A Harlot’s Progress.” Hogarth’s Graphic Works. By Hogarth.

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Haven: Yale UP, 1963, 549–95.Ricks, Christopher. “Headnote to The Idylls of the King.” In The Poems of Tennyson, edited

by Christopher Ricks. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987, 257–62.Smith, F. B. “Sexuality in Britain, 1800-1900: Some Suggested Revisions.” A Widening

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Shalyn Claggett is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Mississippi State

University. Address: P. O. Box E, Mississippi State University, MS 39762-5505, USA.

[email: shalyn.claggett@msstate.edu]

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