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

Late-Victorian London is a city of dreadful delight with the new pleasures of the music hall, spectator sports, the mingling of high and low life and also of sexual repression and the policing of women, of sexual scandal and danger, with W.T. Stead's famous expose of child prostitution and the tabloid sensationalism of the Ripper murders. In this study, the author conveys metropolitan life through myriad and often conflicting and overlapping perspectives, showing how the newspaper scandals, narrated to a spellbound public largely through the form of melodrama, influenced the language of politics, the writing of fiction, and the new journalism. Were women simply figures in the imaginary urban landscape of male spectators, or central actors in these stories of sexual possibility and adventure?