Published in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon was one of the most sensational examples of late nineteenth-century investigative journalism. In stark and often shocking detail, it revealed the mechanisms of child prostitution in Victorian London, exposing how vulnerable, working-class girls were entrapped, abducted, and effectively sold into brothels.
It’s author and evangelical editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead (W.T. Stead), framed his exposé as both a moral outcry and a journalistic experiment, so as to provoke national outrage and legislative reform.
The resonance of Stead’s campaign extends into the present. While the Victorian context differs significantly from today, the underlying issues of exploitation, coercion and the commodification of young lives remain tragically relevant.
In this sense, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon can be read not merely as a Victorian scandal, but as an early chapter in the ongoing history and struggle against the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.
Who was W. T. Stead?
The son of a Congregational minister in Northumberland, Stead was a driven by an evangelical sense of mission, often referring to God as his “senior partner”. From childhood he’d absorbed the idea that life must be dedicated to a higher purpose: moral struggle and the cleansing of society’s sins.
For him, the press was not simply a chronicler of daily events but a fiery pulpit by which he could reach the masses.
Stead first cut his journalistic teeth as the young and inexperienced 22-year-old editor of the The Northern Echo in Darlington, where he campaigned with fiery zeal on education, temperance, foreign policy and human outrages such as the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Bulgarian Atrocities.
By mixing sensationalism with lurid detail to tell human stories in a new, uncompromising way, Stead transform the The Northern Echo into an “engine of social reform”, often tackling social issues that were traditionally tabooed by the press.
“What a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil”, he wrote to a friend.
Stead’s success at The Northern Echo brought him deserved notoriety and, in 1880, he accepted a job as assistant editor at the The Pall Mall Gazette in London, becoming full editor in just three years. Always believing that a newspaper should be reformative as well as newsworthy, Stead immediately set about transforming the PMG from a dull, pedestrian gentleman’s journal to a dynamic and fearless political organ that soon became popular reading in high society.
Exposing “the Virgin Trade”
Stead hated London, seeing it from the onset of his PMG career as a corrupt and decadent modern Babylon. This view was confirmed in 1885, when he was alerted by the then fledgling Salvation Army to a trade in child prostitution in the London underworld.
Stead was shocked to find high society turned a blind eye to this so-called “Virgin Trade” to protect the wealthy clients who indulged in it. Enraged by this festering trade in the very heart of the British Empire, Stead determined to expose the heinous affair to his respectable but largely ignorant readership.
He started by establishing a Secret Commission of Enquiry which, aside from himself, included a team of like-minded volunteers (such as Salvation Army leader, Bramwell Booth) whose task it was to infiltrate the London underworld and gather evidence.
Stead himself went disguised as an American tourist, visiting brothels, taking notes from prostitutes who worked in them, even conducting interviews with unsuspecting brothel keepers. At the end of these investigations, he had everything he needed to expose the whole, nefarious business under the sensational title, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.
The Maiden Tribute immediately opened respectable society’s eyes to the world of London vice — with its stinking brothels, fiendish procuresses, drugs and padded rooms, where upper-class men could enjoy the “the exclusive luxury of revelling in the cries of an immature child”.
Unfolding like a Gothic melodrama The Maiden Tribute series described, in graphic detail, the methods by which girls were lured into prostitution.
It exposed how traffickers targeted impoverished families, how parents were coerced to part with their daughters, how corrupt doctors were bribed to confirm the virginity of girls so as to fetch higher prices and how brothel-keepers strapped girls down in padded rooms to muffle the screams of the unwilling.
To respectable readers, already steeped in anxieties about urban vice, Stead’s revelations struck with a seismic force that was unsurpassed in Victorian journalism except for London press’ later graphic coverage of the Whitechapel murders.
The siege of Northumberland Street
Stead’s time at The Northern Echo had taught him the power of rhetoric and how important it was to the success of a story. To that end, he prefaced The Maiden Tribute series with a warning that read:
..all those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are passed in the London Inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days.. W. T. Stead (The Pall Mall Gazette, July 4, 1885)
Of course, this was a commercial hook that all but guaranteed that Stead’s exposé would be an immediate sell-out. And so it proved..
Within days the The Pall Mall Gazette offices on Northumberland Street were besieged by frenzied crowds of newspaper vendors who fought “tooth and nail” for copies still wet from the press.
As a result, The Maiden Tribute became the sole topic of conversation in clubs, parlours, chapels and pubs. Preachers thundered their indignation from pulpits, politicians engaged in heated debates in parliament and a then little known playwright called George Bernard Shaw helped to hawk copies of the The Pall Mall Gazette outside Charing Cross Station during the frenzy.
Stead had achieved exactly what he intended: a moral panic that it demanded political resolution.
The passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill
Within weeks of publication, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon became an international sensation. With crossheads, such as “The Violation of Virgins” and “Strapping Girls Down”, Stead threw London society into a state of moral panic and, in doing so, forced the government to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16.
For years, campaigners had unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament to strengthen the laws protecting young women. But, where they had failed, Stead had succeeded almost overnight, as MPs were inundated with petitions and letters, and newspapers across the journalistic spectrum demanded reform.
As a result, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 became one of the landmark reforms of the Victorian era:
- It raised the age of consent from 13 to 16.
- It gave police new powers to raid suspected brothels.
- It impose penalties for pimps and traffickers.
For reformers, this was a monumental victory. It proved that journalism, when combined with outrage, could bend the will of Parliament.
The case of Eliza Armstrong — A Child of 13 Bought for £5
In typical fashion, Stead basked in the celebrity his campaign had brought him. Unbeknown to him, however, the success of The Maiden Tribute had made him some powerful enemies in the corridors of power. Those powers now sought to prosecute the crusading editor over the methods he had employed to create his great scandal.
Stead firmly believed that some parents, for the right price, were more than willing to hand over their own child for immoral purposes. And to prove this point, he had arranged the purchase of a thirteen-year-old child called Eliza Armstrong for the sum of £1.
Eliza, the daughter of a poor chimney sweep in Marylebone, appeared in the articles as “Lily,” a tragic, composite figure who symbolised the many real-life victims that Stead believed the Virgin Trade consumed year in, year out.
But here, he went too far.. First, by subjecting Eliza to a humiliating medical examination. Second, by then taking her to a brothel and, third, by spiriting her away to France under Salvation Army protection. All without the permission of her parents.
For Stead, this was a necessary demonstration of how easily children could be procured for prostitution. But for the law—and Eliza’s parents—it was a case of abduction and assault.
The conviction and imprisonment of William Thomas Stead
A few months later, Stead, Bramwell Booth and several others were indicted for the abduction and assault of Eliza Armstrong.
The trial was itself a media sensation. Stead, the very man who had placed others in the dock of public opinion now faced judgment himself, with rival newspapers, often hostile to The Pall Mall Gazette, covering every lurid detail of the trial.
The jury acquitted Bramwell Booth but Stead’s other accomplices were all convicted:
- Rebecca Jarrett (six months without hard labour).
- Louise Mourez (six months with hard labour).
- Samuel Jacques (one month without hard labour).
Stead himself, though convicted of a lesser charge—arranging a medical examination without the father’s consent—was sentenced to three months in Coldbath Fields Prison. Later, after “strings were pulled”, he was moved to the more comfortable Holloway Prison where, with typical verve, he turned this sentence to his advantage, writing letters that presented him as a martyr for the cause. He was even allowed to continue editing the Pall Mall Gazette.
The legacy of the Maiden Tribute
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon left a complicated legacy. On one hand, it was a triumphant social crusade that delivered tangible reform, protected girls from abuse, while demonstrating at the same time that journalism could directly influence the law.
Nonetheless, Stead, whatever the merits of his campaign, was convicted for very serious ethical and criminal transgressions. Eliza Armstrong was abducted, was indecently assaulted and was treated as a prop in Stead’s political and journalistic theatre, wherein the line between exposing vice and exploiting it became dangerously blurred.
Moreover, for the gay community of the age, the same Act that now protected girls also contained a clause that criminalised all sexual acts between men—even in private. The so-called Labouchere Amendment, which had been hastily tacked onto the Criminal Law Amendment Act during the moral frenzy of 1885, became the basis for prosecuting gay men well into the next century, most notably Oscar Wilde.
Conclusion
Later generations of reporters variously looked back on Stead’s Maiden Tribute campaign as either an exercise in muckraking or as a beginning of a new age of journalism. Other observers, starting with Stead himself, branded his investigative style “the New Journalism”, a genre that he would define in greater detail in his article “Government by Journalism” in 1886.
Ultimately, the Maiden Tribute demonstrated the growing power of the press by the end of the nineteenth century and made Stead a pioneer of the essentially British popular journalism we have today.
