The Great Sin of Great Cities: Being a Reprint, by Request, of an Article, Entitled "Prostitution" from the Westminister and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July, MDCCCL. |
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9 April asylums authorities bad girls boys and girls brothels brutal caractère certain women chastity cholera common common lodging-houses condition consequences creatures decency degradation depraved desertion desire disease Duchatelet earn elles enforced England état evil feelings female fornication frequently frightful guilty haunts honour horror human illicit indulgence infection innocence justice language live loathsome lodging lodging-house London Magdalen Hospital maladies marriage married married couple means measures minister of religion mischief mistress mitigate mode moleskin moral moralists Morning Chronicle mother n'ont nature never night Paris passions police practice present prison procure prostitution puberty public health punishment qu'elles regulations religion repentance repression result sanitary seduction sexes sexual shame slave sleeping slept social society souvent speak suffering syphilitic Talbot tone town trowsers unfortunate women venereal disease vice victims virtuous week woman wretched young
Popular passages
Page 10 - ... education, the consequences would, we believe, be frightful. If the passions of women were ready, strong, and spontaneous, in a degree even remotely approaching the form they assume in the coarser sex, there can be little doubt that sexual irregularities would reach a height, of which, at present, we have happily no conception.
Page 12 - A vast proportion of those who, after passing through the career of kept mistresses, ultimately come upon the town, fall in the first instance from a mere exaggeration and perversion of one of the best qualities of a woman's heart. They yield to desires in which they do not share, from a weak generosity which cannot refuse anything to the passionate entreaties of the man they love. There is in the warm fond heart of woman a strange and sublime unselfishness, which men too commonly discover only to...
Page 46 - It is not uncommon for a boy or man to take a girl out of the streets to these apartments. Some are the same as common brothels, women being taken in at all hours of the day or night. In most, however, they must stay all night as a married couple. In dressing or undressing there is no regard to decency, while disgusting blackguardism is often carried on in the conversation of the inmates. I have known decent people, those that are driven to such places from destitution, perhaps for the first time,...
Page 17 - I may mention one: a man, his wife and child sleeping in one bed; in another bed, two grown-up females; and in the same room two young men, unmarried. I have met with instances of a man, his wife, and his wife's sister, sleeping in the same bed together. I have known at least half-adozen cases in Manchester in which that has been regularly practised, the unmarried sister being an adult...
Page 3 - Sexual indulgence, however guilty in its circumstances, however tragic in its results, is, when accompanied by love, a sin according to nature ; its peculiarity and heinousness consist in its divorcing from all feelings of love that which was meant by nature as the last and intensest...
Page 44 - At three years' end I stole a piece of beef from a butcher. I did it to get into prison. I was sick of the life I was leading, and didn't know how to get out of it. I had a month for stealing. When I got out I passed two days and a night in the streets doing nothing wrong, and then went and threatened to break Messrs, windows again. I did that to get into prison again ; for when I lay quiet of a night in prison I thought things over, and considered what a shocking life I was leading, and how...
Page 10 - In men, in general, the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous, and belongs to the condition of puberty. In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent, till excited; always till excited by undue familiarities; almost always till excited by actual intercourse...
Page 7 - To improve the respite of one serious hour. I durst not look to what I was before ; My soul shrank back, and wished to be no more. Of eye undaunted, and of touch impure, Old ere of age, worn out when scarce mature ; Daily...
Page 4 - York, or our other Northern cities. Take the picture given of the first from the author whom I have before quoted. "The laws and customs of England conspire to sink this class of English women into a state of vice and misery below that which necessarily belongs to their condition. Hence their extreme degradation, their troopers' oaths, their love of gin, their desperate recklessness, and the shortness of their miserable lives.
Page 11 - ... eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will his justice select them for punishment without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offences to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections.