Stead by his Peers 
W.T. Stead on sex & children (Jan. 20, 1889)
The "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon": W.T. Stead and the Making of a Scandal
Owen Mulpetre
..see what a pulpit the editor mounts daily, sometimes with a congregation of fifty-thousand within reach of his voice...And from what a Bible he can choose his text – a Bible which needs no translation, and which no priest-craft can shut and clasp from the laity – the open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine or destroying fire, the inspired Present is even now writing the annals of God! Methinks the editor who should understand his calling and be equal thereto...would be the Moses of our nineteenth century... "Pious Editor's Creed"[1]
On 27 October 1871, William Thomas Stead, the twenty-two-year-old editor of the Darlington Northern Echo, penned a controversial editorial on prostitution. It was, he wrote, "the ghastliest curse which haunts civilised society, which is steadily sapping the very foundations of our morality". Stead's outburst was in response to the growing number of prostitutes in Britain's industrial towns, and society's unhealthy indulgence in vice which, he asserted, was "rotting every circle of our land". It was the beginning of a lifelong campaign against sexual vice; or rather the "moral cowardice" and "careless indifference" which allowed the trade to flourish. [2]
The son of a congregational minister, the puritanical Stead saw prostitution as the "bitterest scourge of our race", "a contagion which pervades all classes" and a "monstrous plague spot of our social system". Yet, it was not the spectacle of a woman "staving off starvation by prostitution" which offended the young editor; even he conceded that most prostitutes were driven to the streets by sheer want, and even then, few could bear to "carry it on without the stimulus of alcohol". The real "social evil" lay in the men who frequented the brothels. "stylish houses of ill-fame", fumed Stead, "could only be supported by men of wealth and respectability". It was they who truly exacerbated "the prevailing laxity of morals", their "reckless passion" to which "the ruin of the poor unfortunate is due". [3]
In this, one of Stead's earliest articles, Victorian society got a tantalising glimpse of Stead's "New Journalism" which, in the years ahead, would propel the young Northumbrian to London and, as the implacable editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the height of journalistic notoriety. Stead believed newspapers should be both informative and entertaining, and not full of long, tedious passages of parliamentary debate. He regarded journalism as "a means of government" and "an engine of social reform"; he also saw it as "a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil". [4] In the case of prostitution, it was the "abandoned rake" who had assumed that role and his activities were an "infinitely greater crime" than those of the impoverished outcast women who walked the midnight streets. [5] For Stead, prostitution represented the ghastliest example of the social exclusion of women and the most pernicious form of upper-class exploitation of the poor. He especially abhorred the fact that many prostitutes were "on the verge of childhood, some having commenced the process of slow suicide involved in their dreadful calling at the age of fourteen". [6]
It was an issue which, in later years, would provoke the most successful and controversial story of Stead's entire career: the "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", published in the Pall Mall Gazette during the summer of 1885. The article would ultimately change the way Victorian society viewed both sex and childhood and would bring about a long overdue change in English law. But it would also place its crusading author behind bars on charges of abduction and result in his being reviled as a pornographer whose "deplorable and nauseous article in the Pall Mall Gazette [had] greatly lowered the English people in the eyes of foreign nations". [7]
Traditionally, historians have tended to view the "Maiden Tribute" as either a work of voyeuristic impulse or the journalistic hijacking and sensationalising of Josephine Butler's campaign against white slavery. Yet, closer inspection of Stead's earlier work at The Northern Echo suggests that the seeds of his infamous scandal were sown not in London but in Darlington, where the plight of working-class children, whether abused by sex fiends or by unscrupulous employers in Britain's northern factories, had sufficiently jaded Stead's view of the respectable ruling elite to make an exposé of upper class villainy almost inevitable. For Stead, the "Maiden Tribute" was deserved retribution for "a society which outwardly, indeed, appears white and glistening, but within is full of dead men's bones and rottenness". [8] Despite its all too obvious flaws, Stead's great exposé continues to demand our attention.
The "Maiden Tribute" began on Saturday 4 July 1885 with a dramatic "frank warning": "All those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who would prefer to live in a fool's paradise...will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days". The paper, Stead announced, was about to publish the report of "a Special and Secret Commission of Inquiry" that would "open the eyes of the public" to the ghastly realities of sexual criminality in the London Inferno. Based on his personal account of four "terrible weeks" with "the meanest of mankind", Stead's report, was "true, and its publication [was] necessary", especially since the government's Criminal Law Amendment Bill, aimed at dealing with prostitution and raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, had again been shelved and was now "threatened with extinction in the House of Commons". It was, therefore, in the public interest, to publish the case for the bill, to expose those "criminal developments of modern vice" which the bill was framed to repress. [9] What followed was a work of journalistic genius, and one of the greatest scandals ever to hit nineteenth century news-stands.
With the public appetite sufficiently whetted, Stead's "revelations" went on sale amid a storm of controversy and anticipation. The theme of the "Maiden Tribute" was child prostitution - the entrapment, sale and "ruin" of young English virgins and their abduction to continental brothels. An innovative writer, Stead constructed a matrix of Greco-Christian legend on which to weave his "infernal narrative". In the "Maiden Tribute", London was the iniquitous ancient Babylon mentioned in the Bible, while her streets were the Cretan labyrinth of Greek myth, into which, every nine years, the ancient Athenians were compelled to toss seven virgin maids as a sacrifice to the hideous Minotaur. In the "Maiden Tribute", the brothel-using aristocrat had assumed the role of Minotaur, but his victims were "not seven maidens only, but many times seven...served up as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich". [10]
Not surprisingly, the series was an instant hit. Within days of its publication the "Maiden Tribute" had become an international sensation. Stead wrote proudly of "telegrams from the United States begging for telegraphic information as to the progress of the great exposure", while demand for his revelations in London was so great that, by the third instalment, crowds of newspaper vendors ("gaunt and hollow-faced men and women") lay siege to the Pall Mall Gazette offices and "fought with fists and feet, with tooth and nail...for the sheets wet from the press". [11] By the end of the series, Stead had succeeded in throwing Victorian society into a state of mass hysteria over prostitution. London would not see the like again until the emergence of Jack the Ripper.
Yet, the white slavery hysteria manifested by Stead's exposé was by no means a new phenomenon; rather, it was largely a reawakening of the agitation of the 1860s and 1870s against the Contagious Diseases Acts. The first of these Acts, aimed at controlling venereal disease, was passed in 1864 (followed by the Acts of 1866 and 1869) and provided for the identification, registration and, if necessary, the incarceration of prostitutes in specific ports and garrison towns of southern England and Ireland. [12] Policemen were given wide discretionary powers to enforce the Acts' particulars, the most heinous being that prostitutes suspected of carrying a venereal disease had to submit to a humiliating medical examination by speculum. Those found to be diseased were placed in lock hospitals until cured. Repealers vigorously opposed the measures on both legal and moral grounds, maintaining that, because the Acts applied only to women, they were unfair, unworkable and amounted to little more than a state-sanctioned system of regulated prostitution. This view was also shared by Stead who, in 1872, dismissed the Acts as "practically useless, inasmuch as all the men, and a great proportion of the women, elude all regulation whatsoever". He also pointed out that "clandestine prostitution increases enormously the moment regulation is attempted" and that it was "scandalously unfair that laws which they detest and abhor, should be forced upon the weaker sex, while we dare not apply the same measures...to the male portion of the community". [13]
The Acts themselves were the result of a curious collaboration between the medical profession and the military - a knee-jerk reaction to the alarming spread of venereal disease in the British population and the recognition that, in Britain's military hospitals in the Crimea, more man-hours had been spent on the treatment of syphilis and gonorrhoea than on enemy-inflicted wounds. [14] Indeed, a War Office Committee charged in 1862 with investigating the extent of venereal disease among the ranks of Britain's far-flung regiments was so alarmed by what it found that its members "felt it a duty to press on the Government the necessity of at once grappling with the mass of vice, filth and disease which surrounds the soldier's barracks and the seamen's homes…which surely, however slowly, saps [their] vigour". [15] Such concerns had been growing since the cholera epidemics of 1831 and 1849, and military and medical authorities were convinced that another epidemic, that of venereal disease, would sweep throughout the armed forces, perhaps even the nation itself, if prostitution were not controlled by the state.
Their concerns, it seems, were not wholly unfounded; figures for 1864 revealed that almost a third of all sick cases in the army were venereal in nature, and admissions into hospitals for gonorrhoea and syphilis constituted 291 per 1000 of total troop strength. [16] The loss of service due to venereal disease, moreover, "was equal to that of the whole Force serving in the United Kingdom for an entire week". [17] Even in the navy, where venereal disease was less severe, statistics for 1862 revealed that it still accounted for a substantial percentage of all naval casualties:
The daily loss from venereal disease was about 586 men per day, or the ratio of 9.9 per 1,000, which may be looked upon as equal to the loss of the services of the whole compliment of such a vessel as H.M.S. Royal Oak (iron-clad). [18]
Of course, prostitution was nothing new in nineteenth century England; the "profession" had formed an accepted and substantial part of working-class economics for centuries. In the 1840s, however, Victorian society witnessed a conjunction of legal and medical powers that was to put prostitutes on the receiving end of a transformation of public health administration. As Ogborn remarks, "the law became the medium of action through which the public health movement operated", and doctors played a growing role in courtrooms as "specialists" in sanitary issues. By the 1850s, moreover, public health advocates increasingly influenced government legislators who, in turn, came to view both prostitution and the prospect of regulation in equally irrational terms. [19] It was the prostitute, not her male customer, who was the "virulent foci of infection", and only through sanitary regulation could society be protected from women who, if left to flourish, would "destroy thousands – hundreds of thousands of lives". [20]
The problem for the medical and military authorities in the 1860s, however, was how to effect regulation without appearing to erode the civil liberties of the prostitutes who would come under their power. The War Office Committee, charged with effecting such regulation considered two options: an existing European or colonial model, which involved the licensing of prostitutes by the state and heavy-handed police enforcement; or a milder system which combined all the powers of legal, medical and philanthropic institutions. [21] Of the two strategies, the former was considered to be more effective in the control of prostitution since it allowed for a greater degree of state intervention. However, the adoption of the Continental system was problematic; firstly, it involved "new and questionable principles of legislation…certain to be distasteful to a large portion of the public"; [22] and secondly, if police were given too much power over prostitutes, there was a danger that "the constant exercise of it over the despised and helpless would probably degenerate into tyranny and abuse". [23] Indeed, there had already been much public debate over whether prostitution was an appropriate sphere for state intervention to begin with. [24] Committee members were keenly aware of the sensitive nature of state intervention in the private lives of Britain's poorest subjects and, if only to safeguard the legislation against criticism, were reluctant to ride roughshod over even prostitutes' civil rights:
We have…to deal in this case with disease, and not prostitution; we have to protect men in the service of the State…These are distinct objects in which the operation of the law is less liable to failure than if it was attempted to be made more generally applicable. [25]
Thus the Continental system was rejected. It was crucial to the success of disease control that British legislation was not understood as a punishment for prostitution, nor lock hospitals seen as prisons for the correction of sinful women. State intervention in prostitution had to be justified purely on medical grounds, with the emphasis firmly on disease, not on prostitution itself. Thus, in July 1864, Parliament passed the first Contagious Diseases Act "as a partial measure of sanitary police, for the benefit of soldiers and sailors of the army and navy". [26] The first Act met with little public opposition, and was accepted by most on narrow medico-moral grounds. It was only when the amendments of 1866 and 1869 extended the Acts' geographical and legislative jurisdiction that public opposition mounted (most notably, Josephine Butler's Ladies National Association).
The Acts of 1866 and 1869 reinforced any areas of the first Act which the Skey committee (set up in 1864 to monitor the effectiveness of the legislation) considered to be "specially defective". The Committee's report condemned the first Act as "not going far enough" and questioned the "intelligence" upon which police based their arrests and detained their suspects. The Committee complained that "the evidence commonly obtained as to the existence of disease in women is bad…inconclusive, and the mode of obtaining it very objectionable"; brothel-keepers "will not declare a girl diseased until she is so ill as to be a burden", and the evidence of companions was "frequently actuated by "spite"". [27] Committee members concluded that only by subjecting all prostitutes to compulsory periodical examination could such "dubious sources" be avoided. [28] Compulsory examination would also be a welcome intrusion to the prostitutes themselves:
So far as opposing its operation, they appear to appreciate its value to themselves…Out of 752 informations laid, all the women attended voluntarily but 6; and there is evidence to show that they would tolerate even further interference, having their health for its object. [29]
Official propaganda such as this ushered in the Acts of 1866 and 1869, both of which implemented many of the Committee's recommendations. The new Acts were intended to close loop holes, tighten up the legal aspects of the legislature and reduce the authorities' reliance on unwilling and untrustworthy sources. What they actually did, however, was to introduce the very system which the War Office Committee had rejected in 1864 - that of Continental regulation. The new Acts mandated "a well organised system of Medical Police" [30] and decreed that all prostitutes, whether diseased or not, were subject to "the periodical medical examination by the visiting surgeon". [31] Moreover, women could be "taken into custody without warrant" if they declined treatment or left hospital without being discharged "and on summary conviction…[were] liable to imprisonment, with or without hard labour". [32]
The Acts of 1866 and 1869 also reduced significantly the role of the magistrate and vested the central power of the legislation in the medical profession. The legal and medical elements of the Acts had been uneasy bedfellows since 1864; magistrates frequently overturned medical decisions and hospital authorities, who viewed the law as an inconvenience that obstructed disease control, searched for ways "to avoid as much as possible any appeal to the local magistracy". [33] The Acts of 1866 and 1869 resolved this conflict with the introduction of the local Visiting Surgeon. He was appointed by the War Office and the Admiralty, could have a woman arrested and, so long as he had the agreement of the Chief Medical Officer or the Inspector of Certified Hospitals, could extend her detainment in hospital over the three month period. In almost all instances the magistrate was not even informed. [34]
By 1869 it was clear that the emphasis of the Acts had shifted from venereal disease to prostitution itself and regulationists faced increasing hostility from both the public and authorities within the medical profession itself. One such authority, Dr John Simon, the Chief Medical Officer of the Privy Council, denounced regulation in his report of 1868 as pathologically unsound, and dismissed evidence of any social improvements under the Acts as incidental to their operation. He also warned that any attempt to bring the civilian population under the legislation would be a violation of moral principles and an illegitimate extension of state authority. [35] Simon's report effectively destroyed any hopes of extending the legislation to the north. It was also a major blow to the Acts' rapidly diminishing medical credibility. Thereafter, regulation increasingly incurred the wrath of the public and faced growing criticism from the press.
This was certainly the case in north-eastern England, where the Acts were proving a particularly effective honing stone for W.T. Stead's "New Journalism". Like Simon, Stead dismissed regulation, "with all its loathsome details of police spies and medical inspection", as a "dead letter" which could not possibly "check the ravages of syphilis". [36] In the editor's mind, the Acts were laws which, "without preserving health...cynically sacrifice[d] the liberty and honour of English women in a futile attempt to save abandoned men from the consequences of their crimes". [37] Not that Stead was utterly opposed to government legislation for the control of venereal disease; even he thought that "considerable tampering" might be excused if the Acts were "applied to both sexes alike" and "achieved the end for which they were passed". [38] Under their existing structure, however, the Acts placed an unfair burden on "the sex that is unrepresented in Parliament" [39] and failed to make any significant headway in the control of venereal disease. Their failure was inevitable in that they targeted prostitutes but did not encompass the men who used the brothels. In addition, both military and medical authorities refused to restore the periodical venereal examination of soldiers and sailors, a practice which had been abolished in 1859, having been "distasteful to the men". [40] After 1869 the Acts began to lose touch with their sanitary origins and, until their suspension in 1883 and final repeal in 1886, increasingly resembled the apparatus of highly sophisticated social repression. As Stead put it: "No slavery which ever existed denied more absolutely the rights of humanity". [41]
It was not until 1870, six years after legislation had begun, that organised public opposition to the Acts at last began to mount. Central to this movement was Josephine Butler's "Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts" (LNA). As the daughter of the antislavery advocate, John Grey of Northumberland, Butler incorporated the rhetoric and fanaticism of the antislavery movement to redefine prostitution as "nothing else than...the protection of a white slave-trade...[and] the organisation of female slavery". [42] Instilled from an early age with a love of justice and a "horror of slavery and all arbitrary power", Butler proved to be a gifted and charismatic leader, and quickly established herself as the dominant force behind LNA policy. She dismissed the Contagious Diseases Acts as a "tyrannous injustice" whose "flagrant inequality and cruelty have probably never been equalled in the history of the world". [43] She also portrayed regulationists as vicious aristocratic villains who legitimised a system "by which protection is offered to vicious men...under the supervision of state officials for the greater convenience of the licentious". [44]
Under Butler, the LNA took to public platforms around the country to dismiss the Acts as the official sanction of the double standard and demanded their repeal. They described in vivid detail the cruel and humiliating speculum examination which inflicted pain and genital mutilation on prostitutes in the name of medical science, and denounced the injustice of a system by which men "imposed on women a stricter rule in morality than they [were] willing themselves to obey". [45] LNA propaganda, meanwhile, provided detailed accounts of the "instrumental rape" of registered women:
It is awful work; the attitude they push us into first is so disgusting and so painful, and then these monstrous instruments and they pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about; and if you cry out they stifle you. [46]
Harrowing accounts such as this were at the forefront of the LNA's attack on the medical men who embodied the Acts. To such men, the prostitute was both threatening and deviant - the evil seductress of moral man. She was, therefore, hardly deserving of gentle treatment, nor even (Butler and her co-workers alleged) sterilised instruments. [47] The surgeon and moralist, William Acton, an ardent supporter of regulation, most typified the medical profession's hostility towards its unworthy patients: "such women, ministers of evil passions, not only gratify desire, but also arouse it. Compelled by necessity to seek for customers, they throng our streets and public places, and suggest evil thoughts and desires which might otherwise remain undeveloped". [48] The idea that men were powerless to control their own sexuality and were thus led astray by the sexual harpies of London brotheldom, had considerable currency in the nineteenth century. In 1871 the Royal Commission thought that there was "no comparison to be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With the one sex the offence is committed as a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse". [49] Consequently, "experts" such as Acton, concluded that prostitution was a matter of choice rather than necessity, that female rather than male sexuality was the source of moral corruption, and that the Contagious Diseases Acts were a well-deserved nemesis of female sexual debauchery.
Butler, naturally, dismissed such misogynous views as lacking in the merest understanding of either prostitution or male sexuality. Yet, Butler and her supporters held an equally distorted view of prostitution. Butler misrepresented prostitutes by portraying them not as the wretched, often syphilitic jetsam of brutal working-class culture, but as saintly magdalens whose redemption required merely the gentle hand of Christian guidance. There was, of course, no place in this idyllic landscape for prostitutes who refused to change their ways; and LNA members displayed the same revulsion for unrepentant women as did their regulationist opponents. Ultimately, Butler, like Acton, looked to the forces of evil to explain prostitution and, in doing so, failed to make the link between prostitution and the chronic mal-distribution of wealth which afforded middle-class society its privileged position at the expense of the "unrespectable" poor.
Nevertheless, the LNA soon attracted the indignation of the male Establishment, whose earlier derisory response to the "shrieking Sisterhood" soon turned into a deep-seated sexually hostility. LNA were members were accused of trying to politicise females on subjects which were inappropriate for "respectable" women, as well as promoting female autonomy in both public and private spheres. To regulationists, moreover, the LNA came to signify everything that was dangerous in women's participation in the political arena. They were not only a threat to male supremacy in government, but to male domination on all levels. [50] Hence, as Stead wrote, "men whose central principle is to be earnest about nothing, are curiously earnest in defending the C.D. Acts, not because they care a straw about the Acts, but merely because they detest the principles upon which the agitation for repeal is based". [51]
The LNA's campaign against regulation attracted thousands of women to the political arena and encouraged them to challenge the male centres of authority - the police, Parliament and the medico-military establishments - which enforced the Acts. A strongly worded Ladies" Protest, published in the Daily News and signed by prominent proto-feminists like Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale, outlined the essential arguments of the LNA: Firstly, the Acts gave police too much power over women; secondly, they punished "the sex who are the victims of vice and leave unpunished the sex who are the main causes both of the vice and its dreaded consequences"; thirdly, they made vice safe and smoothed the "path of evil" for "our sons"; and finally, they failed in their ultimate aim of controlling disease. [52] For Butler, moreover, the regulation system doomed registered women to a life of vice, because it publicly stigmatised them and prevented them from finding alternative respectable employment. [53]
This view was also shared by Stead:
Whatever may be the object of such Regulation, its practical effects are to doom women who have once resorted to Prostitution to life-long servitude by placing an insurmountable barrier in the way of a return to a virtuous life. [54]
According to London Chamberlain Benjamin Scott, moreover, police corruption and harassment ensured that a registered prostitute found it impossible to have her name removed from the lists because the police were "loath to let go their hold upon a woman". She could not free herself, and "was allowed to give up a vicious life...by favour of the police only as a matter of indulgence". [55] The anti-regulationist Alfred Dyer, meanwhile, maintained that a system of brothel debt condemned prostitutes to a life of sexual servitude. Dyer observed that brothels ensured a woman's continued service by arbitrarily assigning debts to cover "expenses", and so kept women "deeply in debt and terrified with the threat of imprisonment if they dare[d] attempt to leave without paying". [56] Debtor laws were used to ensure prompt repayment of such debts. When, therefore, brothel escapees went running through the streets, it was not the brothel keeper who pursued them, but the police. [57] Thus prostitutes became brothel-bound, imprisoned by a state sanctioned system which, in effect, made them the chattel of the brothel keepers. This is what Butler called "white slavery".
The idea that working prostitutes were, in fact, slaves to their profession was first mooted by Victor Hugo in 1870. In a letter to Butler, Hugo wrote that the slavery of black women was abolished in America, "but the slavery of white women continues in Europe". [58] Butler, of course, at a time when harrowing images of black slavery were still fresh in the British imagination, was quick to see the symbolic potency inherent in the metaphor, not only in terms of her fight against regulation, but in all forms of male brutality against women. Nowhere did this manifest itself more grotesquely than in child prostitution; and following the suspension of the Acts in 1883, Butler and her supporters turned their attention to another, more forbidding front - the "traffic" in young English virgins to Continental brothels.
The problem of child prostitution had been growing in the public imagination since 1879 when Alfred Dyer claimed to have uncovered a traffic in British girls to the state regulated brothels of Holland, Belgium and France. The girls, he alleged, were fraudulently procured and held against their will, either through unlawful imprisonment or by a system of debt. With the help of Benjamin Scott, Dyer formed the "London Committee for the Suppression of the Traffic in British Girls for the Purposes of Continental Prostitution". The London Committee soon gained the support of Butler and together the aroused reformers put pressure on a reluctant government to introduce legislation to control the traffic. [59] The government responded by appointing a barrister named Thomas Snagge to investigate the allegations of the London Committee. Snagge was able to amass considerable evidence to substantiate Dyer's claims, discovering some thirty-three girls and young women who, during the period from 1879-80, had been inscribed on the police registers as inmates of licensed Continental brothels. [60] More alarming, however, was the 1882 report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords, appointed to investigate the domestic extent of child prostitution:
The Evidence before the Committee proves beyond doubt that juvenile prostitution, from an almost incredible age, is increasing to an appalling extent in England, and especially in London. The Committee are unable adequately to express their sense of the magnitude... of the evil thus brought to light, and of the necessity of taking vigorous measures to cope with it. [61]
The Lords" committee recommended changes in the law that would make the procurement of young girls for both foreign and English brothels illegal, and a Criminal Law Amendment Bill, containing a proposal to raise the female age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, was drafted. [62] To the dismay of reformers, however, the Bill, having passed through the House of Lords, met with utter contempt in the Commons. In the period 1882-85, members obstinately opposed the Bill, fearing that either they or their sons would be indicted under the new legislation. "Very few of their Lordships", said one member, "had not, when young men, been guilty of immorality", and warned against passing a measure "within the range of which their sons might come". [63] To such men prostitution was a necessary and inevitable evil, a sexual safety valve wherein middle-class male elites could thrash out their various sexual misdeeds which would otherwise trouble respectable society. Butler, of course, was outraged; and in the spring of 1885, with the Bill facing extinction in the House of Commons, the desperate reformers turned to W. T. Stead for assistance. Stead, now the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, reluctantly agreed to "look into the matter and see what could be done". [64] A few months later, the "Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" shocked the civilised world.
Stead had made good use of his time at The Northern Echo. Situated at the heart of the railway network, Darlington had proven the perfect place from which to launch the "New Journalism" because The Northern Echo was the only daily which could be on sale at 10 AM each morning in both London and Edinburgh. [65] As the editor of Britain's first "true" national newspaper, Stead soon caught the attention of important men such as Albert, Fourth Earl Grey (later Foreign Secretary) who was amazed to find that "this provincial editor… was corresponding with kings and emperors all over the world and receiving long letters from statesmen of every nation... the man was a sincere patriot, with a fervent desire to make things better". [66] Stead's relentless criticism of the government, meanwhile, over unpopular issues such as the Poor Law, child labour, the Contagious Diseases Acts, prostitution and Britain's apparent apathy over the Bulgarian Atrocities of 1876, even earned Stead the admiration of the future Premier W.E. Gladstone, who stated that "to read the Echo is to dispense with the necessity of reading other papers". [67]
By 1880, Stead's rampaging style had earned him the post of assistant editor to John (later Viscount) Morley at the Pall Mall Gazette. Three years later, when Morley was elected to the Commons, Stead took editorial control of the paper. He immediately set about transforming the Gazette from a then sedate chronicle to a dynamic, outrageous political organ which quickly became required reading for high society. By 1885, Stead had already guided the Gazette through a series of controversial, sometimes shocking exposés. None, however, compared in nature with the "Maiden Tribute", nor impacted with the same destructive force on the structure of Victorian society. Stead wrote later of the misgivings he had harboured on undertaking the investigation:
I, naturally, wanted to try... But a newspaper editor has to think of many things, and the risk was enormous. I was naturally loth to imperil a great position and influence in what seemed a forbidding and forlorn crusade...every instinct of prudence and self-preservation restrained me. The subject was tabooed by the Press. [68]
Tabooed or not, Stead was never a man to shrink from a challenge and "with the help of a few faithful friends... went disguised into the lowest haunts of criminal vice and obtained only too ample proof of the reality and extent of the evils complained of". [69] Aided by Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army and a reformed procuress named Rebecca Jarrett, who had been working with Josephine Butler, Stead faked the purchase and "ruin" of a girl named Eliza Armstrong. With remarkable ease, and with only a £5 payment to the child's drunken mother, Stead was able to buy the child's proposed defilement, have her virginity certified by a mid-wife, have her delivered to a London brothel and, finally, have her transported to France - all to show that it could be done under the nose of the then existing law.
His revelations went on sale on July 6 1885. Published in successive instalments, the "Maiden Tribute" was essentially a Gothic melodrama, a gruesome narrative that revealed to Victorian society a ghastly underworld trade that was "constantly and systematically practised in London without let or hindrance". With an unerring ability to tap into the middle-class psyche, Stead led his readers through lurid, midnight streets where a well-oiled human cattle market of child prostitution offered "daughters of the people" to "the vices of the rich". As the story unfolded, respectable Victorians gaped in horror at a world of stinking brothels, fiendish procuresses, underground chambers, drugs and padded rooms where vicious upper-class rakes could "enjoy to the full the exclusive luxury of revelling in the cries of an immature child". To such men, Stead claimed, "the shriek of torture [was] the essence of their delight, and they would not silence by a single note the cry of agony over which they gloat". In the first instalment, the innocent and oblivious Lily is procured, subjected to chloroform, and left in a locked room of a London brothel: "And then there rose a wild and piteous cry...like the bleat of a frightened lamb... "There's a man in the room! Take me home; oh, take me home!". The man was Stead, and the child (who was never in any danger) was Eliza Armstrong, sold into brotheldom by her drunk and dissolute mother. [70]
Through the "Maiden Tribute" Stead exposed in graphic detail the dark side of "Modern Babylon", implicating in the process a network of corrupt officials who either profited from or indulged in the procurement, sale and eventual abuse of young, under-privileged girls. The series revealed how the trade was "winked at by many administrators of the law", how it was "practised by some legislators" and even how one "well-known member of Parliament [was] quite ready to supply...100 maids at £25 each". Indeed, Stead claimed to have "heard much the same people in the house of ill-fame as those of whom you hear in caucuses [and] in law courts". Finally, the series exposed the corruption of those members of the medical profession who, for a price, certified the girls "virgo intacta", and thus increased their saleability in a trade where it was widely believed that sexual intercourse with a virgin could cure venereal disease. [71]
The sensation of the "Maiden Tribute" was, in the editor's words, "instantaneous and world-wide", setting London and the whole country alight "in a blaze of indignation". [72] Within weeks, Stead's revelations had provoked a massive outpouring of public feeling in a wide variety of reform groups and prominent individuals. Dozens of protest meetings were held throughout London and provincial towns, and local vigilance societies pushed for the enactment of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. The government was soon on the defensive, and legislators who had previously opposed the Bill, now understood that further resistance was tantamount to admitting that one not only turned a blind eye to the existence of child prostitutes, but regularly employed their services as well. On 7 August, 1885, therefore, the Bill was read for a third and final time in Parliament and passed into law a week later. [73] It was, wrote a somewhat immodest Stead, "one of the greatest achievements which any journalist single-handed had ever accomplished in the coercion of an unwilling legislature and a reluctant ministry". [74]
Stead's evidence, though sufficient to force a change in the law, was not, however, enough to save the editor from the wrath of the "opponents of the reform", who "exulted over the chance" to deal "a fatal blow to the man who had defeated them". [75] On October 23 1885, Stead was hauled before the court on charges of abduction and indecent assault. "The fact was", Stead later conceded, "that the first child of thirteen procured for me in my guise as an immoral man... was handed to me without the consent of the father, and without any written evidence as to the payment to the mother". [76] This was just one of the many mistakes which Stead had made during his investigations for the "Maiden Tribute", as was his misplaced faith in the honesty of Rebecca Jarrett. The ex-procuress, the prosecution revealed, had not only lied on the stand, but had lied to her employer as well. To make matters worse, Stead himself, having specifically stated in the Pall Mall Gazette that he could "personally vouch for the accuracy of every fact" [77] concerning the procurement of Eliza Armstrong, was forced in court to admit that he was, in fact, not even present at the sale. His account of the incident was based wholly on Jarrett's word and not written down until four weeks after the event. He could not, therefore, prove the mother's complicity in the crime and later conceded that the father (who, in the "Maiden Tribute", was described as indifferent to his daughter's procurement) had "never consented for her to go at all". [78] Without such evidence the jury's verdict of "guilty" was inevitable. [79]
Stead was jailed for three months. His "secret Commission" had been discredited as a fabrication, while he himself was branded "a disgrace to journalism". [80] News of his conviction caused almost as great a stir as his articles –"like setting a match to gunpowder". [81] His outraged friends and supporters called for a reduction of the sentence, while "avalanches of telegrams poured in on Queen Victoria, the Prime Minister and the Home Office". [82] Stead, meanwhile, having been "never a moment in doubt" as to the certainty of his conviction, took his punishment in typical flamboyant fashion. "I think", he later wrote, "that I was about the most unconcerned person in court". [83] He was sent to Coldbath-in-the-Fields prison and later transferred to Holloway as a first class inmate.
There were, inevitably, allegations of a conspiracy against the crusading Northumbrian; and Stead himself believed that his journalistic enemies, spitefully envious of his success at the Pall Mall Gazette, were behind Mrs Armstrong's decision to file kidnap charges against him. Nevertheless, Stead's exposé succeeded in its immediate objective - the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill - and put paid to any remaining hopes of reinstating the CD Acts.
Stead's conviction drew the curtain on the "Maiden Tribute"; though, its cultural consequences lasted well into the next century. Despite its imperfections, the scandal was a masterstroke of Victorian journalism. Stead shamelessly terrorised the middle-class imagination by presenting the impoverished street urchins who were the real victims of criminal vice, as the innocent, Goldilocked daughters of London's respectable elite. He dressed middle-class daughters in working-class clothes and shocked a hitherto unsympathetic public into utter panic over child prostitution. To say that the "Maiden Tribute" was a distortion of fact, based on suspect evidence and an ill-conceived experiment, is really rather missing the point. Like all journalists, Stead, as the editor of a paper which was to subsequently serve as the prototype for today's tabloid journalism, was concerned not with absolute truth but exposure, the exposure of a crime which, if modern-day concerns over paedophilia are anything to go on, existed in abundance. [84]
After serving his sentence, Stead emerged from prison a martyr to the cause and was no less exuberant for the experience. "It is not often", he later wrote, "that a man can look back upon his conviction and sentence as a criminal convict with pride and exultation. Such, however is my case... It was a great experience and one which I would not have missed for anything". [85] When Stead was standing trial, a dying girl in hospital asked that the only shilling she possessed be given to the editor's defence fund. Stead was handed the shilling on his release from prison. It was, he wrote, "The shilling which I most prize of all the pieces of money in my possession". [86] And when the controversial editor went to his fittingly dramatic death onboard Titanic on April 15 1912, so too did the shilling.
Like his idol, Oliver Cromwell, Stead might be remembered as a "brave, bad man". [87] Yet, few of Titanic's victims were more deeply missed or had greater influence over late nineteenth century society. Indeed, Lord Esher thought that no man "came closer to ruling the British Empire", and "no events happened to the country since the year 1880" which had not "been influenced by the personality of Mr. Stead". [88] A particularly fitting tribute to Stead's death came from his friend A. G. Gardiner, who wrote: "There has never been in English journalism a more versatile or bewildering figure, or one that challenged the judgement of his fellows in so many ways... The slow process of reform made no appeal to his impatient spirit... there was in him... a universal benevolence that make[s] him a noble memory. He did not belong to our narrow ways and our timid routines. The wide waters of the Atlantic are a fitting grave for his bones". [89]
As for the "Maiden Tribute",
historians will continue to debate the now infamous scandal. But, whatever
the truth of the story, whether an accurate depiction of London vice or
an audacious fabrication of its author's brilliant imagination,
the series nevertheless represented the explosive climax of a long and
hard-fought campaign to force the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment
Bill. It represented a high watermark in Victorian journalism and was
a far more objective lesson in how to sway public opinion than anything
the reform campaigns of the time managed to achieve. In a new industrialised
world, the traditional "respectable" elite were well aware
of their waning powers, and were equally aware that, in decades to come, the only thing
that would distinguish them from the "unrespectable" poor
was their high standard of moral conduct. When this was threatened, so,
too, was their fragile status as the masters of men. The moral panic over
child prostitution was symptomatic of such fears; fears which Stead shamelessly
brought howling to the surface. Ultimately, the "Maiden Tribute"
represented the coming of age of Stead's "New Journalism" and
was an early but potent symbol of the potential power of the press. 
Copyright © 2001 Owen Mulpetre
