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Judith R. Walkowitz
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City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society) Paperback – October 15, 1992

by Judith R. Walkowitz (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 56 ratings
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From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.

Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.

An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.

A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.
Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Women in Culture and Society
  2. Print length
    368 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    University of Chicago Press
  5. Publication date
    October 15, 1992
  6. Dimensions
    8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0226871460
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0226871462
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This treatise on fluctuations with regard to class and gender in late 1800s London both informs about the past and reverberates today. Walkowitz's style is sometimes thick but never impenetrable. She does however have a habit of needlessly ending each chapter by stating what will follow in the next. The author (a historian and director of women's studies at Johns Hopkins) analyzes such social phenomena as The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, a notorious four-part newspaper series published in 1885 that chronicled the lives of prostitutes, and the Men and Women's Club, a middleclass group organized that same year to discuss, among other topics, prostitution, the Darwinian evolution of women and what their proper roles might be. The most widely known sexual narrative of the time is the story of Jack the Ripper, and Walkowitz convincingly asserts that its circulation did not increase sexual violence but established a common vocabulary and iconography for the forms of male violence that permeated the whole society. The final chapter on the Yorkshire Ripper murders, committed between 1975 and 1981, ties Walkowitz's theories about backlash against women's freedom to the present day.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (October 15, 1992)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226871460
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226871462
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 56 ratings

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Judith R. Walkowitz

Judith R. Walkowitz

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
56 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Allison
5.0 out of 5 stars Purchased for my husband, who is a Victorian lit ...
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2016
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Purchased for my husband, who is a Victorian lit professor. And owns a shocking amount of material related to Victorian erotica, which I seem to keep buying for him. He needed it for a class he is teaching.
5 people found this helpful
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Nick Wood
5.0 out of 5 stars Turned out to be a good read regardless of the assignments
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2016
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Had to read this book for one of my college history courses. Turned out to be a good read regardless of the assignments.
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Huckleberry
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2013
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A brilliant and fascinating book that gives real insight into the hidden side of the Victorian Era. Even if you are well educated in Victorian Studies, this book is an eye-opener.
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Claire
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2016
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As advertised, prompt delivery.
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B. Docherty
3.0 out of 5 stars A Postmodernist Approach to Gender.
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2010
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In the series foreword by Catharine Stimpson it is proclaimed that Judith R. Walkowtiz identifies this period as "a crucial moment in which our feminist sexual politics and narratives of sexual danger were formed" (pg.ix). However by the book's end the reader may still be left wondering exactly what a narrative of sexual danger is, and why those of late Victorian London stand out today. This is because Walkowitz's has authored a complicated book eschewing traditional forms of linear narrative or conceptual opposition to discuss the dynamics inherent in narratives of sexual danger in late Victorian London. Indeed for a work so focused on analysis, at times to the detriment of narrative, the title is somewhat ironic. The dynamic approach is shown as the alternative to more common, simplistic static or binary notions in class and gender relations. Walkowitz's aim is to detail the common narratives of sexual danger of the period, then analyse how they arose and what they meant to different actors varied by gender, class and ethnicity, with an emphasis on the former two. By weaving together analysis of different people and their own adventures, Walkowtiz certainly identifies common themes such as prostitution, access to public space, treatment by the law and conflicting male/female/class attitudes, however as she constantly reminds the reader these are complex matters, and so they are left struggling to make sense of it all.

This is the main problem with the work, its structure, which even the author admits outright will not deliver closure in places where one would expect (pg.10). The emphasis on narratives of sexual danger, and the complexity of the overall work, stems from its post structuralist roots and aim to get at "how people represent and understand their world" (pg.7). Walkowitz's introduction does well to set out the reasons for the adoption of post structuralist methodology in her examination of the processes behind the production and organisation of practices and meanings such as "sexuality" and "narratives of sexual danger". She introduces among others, Michel Foucault's writings and then sets out to expose the patriarchal and sexist bias in the history of this period as evident in "the Ripper narrative" whilst demonstrating the similarities between contemporary and late Victorian feminism. This is clearest in the epilogue which compares the reactions to the Yorkshire Ripper of 1975-1981 to those events a century before in London. The letter to the Times from Bradford University condemning the media's portrayal of women in the moral panic surrounding Peter Sutcliffe (pg.234) mirrors exactly Walkowitz's own concern with "those elements that the Ripper story excluded and resisted, particularly those in which women were not silent or terrorized victims." (pg.2) So far so good perhaps, but her overall execution of this post structuralist critique and synchronic structure leaves the reader confused precisely because Walkowtiz abandons so many historical conventions without fully explaining or relating her alternative to them. Thus she is able to "convey a sense of the inequality of power - along class and gender lines - and of the unequal power of different stories amidst the proliferation of cultural meanings" (pg.8) but not a proper understanding, leaving the reader dissatisfied.

City of Dreadful Delight is divided between seven chapters with an introduction and epilogue. The latter is interesting to note for it is definitely not a conclusion but rather an updating of the themes and events discussed and the questions they pose for feminism in the contemporary as opposed to late Victorian setting. Though the book is not solely about Jack the Ripper, one does get the feeling that it is building to him in chapter seven, as he represents the "master narrative" of sexual danger of this period. Indeed Walkowitz says as much in her introduction, stating City of Dreadful Delight "examines the cultural dynamics and social struggles that informed these fantasies and originally produced Jack the Ripper in 1888 as a mythic story of sexual danger" (pg.2). Whilst this position makes sense given the shadow of the Ripper over the period, it means that chapters five and six appear thoroughly out of place. The "Men and Women's Club" seems tedious and irrelevant, whilst the spiritualism debacle is only helpful in that it introduces the concept of "mad doctors", but then perhaps this was why Walkowitz chose a synchronic narrative structure, to elude such criticisms?

It is far easier for the reader to identify the eponymous "city of dreadful delight" through chapters' one to three and then seven although even these are not without criticism. Chapter One: Urban Spectatorship, effectively introduces the reader to the squalor of late Victorian London, explaining the fascination which the impoverished east end of the city held for middle class male flaneurs. Through examples such as George Sims and Charles Booth, Walkowitz examines why they explored the city, what they found and why. Again the hand of post structuralism is evident in that the supposed scientific findings or dispassionate observations of the flaneur were filtered through their own class and gender prejudice, thus "the middle class reading public became emotionally invested in a set of representations about the poor that cast poor Londoners as central figures in narratives that divested them or any agency or ability to extricate themselves from their situation" (pg.30). Yet in terms of spatiality never mind activity, London was far more complicated than the east/west overworld/underworld dichotomy would suggest as Walkowitz makes clear. Chapter Two: Contested Terrain, New Social Actors, develops the picture of the urban environment by populating it with more actors, that is to say moving beyond the simple concepts of classes. The figure of the strong, independent, educated and unmarried "new woman" enters the scene as she attempts to take her place in the public space, and ironically she seems safer "slumming" as a reformer than shopping in affluent districts. Unfortunately the first half of this chapter reads like an extended list of the new actors, and one has to wait for these to be analysed in the form of the "glorified spinster and the manly woman", "Hallelujah Lasses" and the defiant Match Girls. It is clear through these examples though that Walkowitz's focus is on women and their attempts to secure their agency and place in public, often from reluctant or obstinate men.

Chapters' three and four discuss "one of the most successful pieces of scandal journalism of the late nineteenth century" (pg.81), the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. This investigation and expose of child prostitution and "white slavery" was led at the Pall Mall Gazette by W.T. Stead, and again shows the case of a middle class male flaneur delivering a narrative of sexual danger which would impact on childhood, class and the political economy of sex (pg.83). Yet Walkowitz's own focus is how Stead's narrative differed from that of contemporary Josephine Butler in their approaches to class and gender, with his arguably the more repressive. Chapter Four, on the cultural consequences of this landmark publication, which prompted public demonstrations, legislation and criminal proceedings begins rather helpfully with a typology of moral panic, one of precious few definitions offered the reader by Walkowitz (pg.121). However, though the nature and role of the tabloid press in propagating narratives of sexual danger seems a significant one, it isn't really explored in depth here and the book begins to lose its clarity. Instead the reader is treated to the very internal proceedings of Karl Pearson's Men & Women's Club and their discussions of sex, marriage, friendship and prostitution over four years.

Georgina Weldon's adventure with spiritualism and science in Chapter Six thankfully marks an actual narrative of sexual danger, as opposed to Pearson's club's abstract and at times torturous and stunted discussion of them. However it, like the rest of City of Dreadful Delight lies in the shadow of Jack the Ripper awaiting in Chapter Seven, and unlike the first few chapters, four, five and six are decidedly outclassed. Here the detail of the five killings in the ten weeks between August and November 1888 is gently probed, with Walkowitz's focus on the reaction of the press, social actors and especially the police. In the midst of the panic and given the powerful sexist hierarchies in existence, pre existing narratives of sexual danger; degenerate prostitution; violence and disease; impoverished, alien Whitechapel and "mad doctors" are all combined in the master Ripper narrative which prevails even today.

Walkowitz's treatment of sources appears in good order, for she has made extensive use of the relevant archives to produce parliamentary papers, personal correspondence and a tremendous variety of periodicals and newspapers. In a work that challenges dominant "representations" of sexuality and sexual danger she is clearly tackling the perceived misogynist bias in the Ripper narrative and those that accompany it. However she is careful to often include the initial narrative before subjecting it to critique or then offering the alternative contemporary versions that have till now been overlooked by history, and this protects her from allegations of bias herself. City of Dreadful Delight is not as it would appear at first glance simply a history of Late Victorian London or the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Instead it is a post structuralist analysis of the time, when feminism would have it, that narratives of sexual danger and female victim hood arose in modern urban society.
7 people found this helpful
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Jugor
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book! Sorry, made a mistake and gave only 2 stars before!
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2008
Excellent read!
This book has everything that we should know about the late Victorian era, especially--but not exclusively--East London.
In a nutshell, the writer develops her story of the exciting, but complex and fragmented city into a marvelous journey through the very late Victorian period, the journey that will [un]predictably end in a spate of heinous crimes perpetrated by an elusive killer who could well be--well, anybody. Walkowitz's culmination with the Jack the Ripper case will leave you wondering about the killer's motive as well as the rationale for his crimes.
2 people found this helpful
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A. L. Scott
5.0 out of 5 stars Fun! for Victorian culture discussion ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2008
This source is a wonderful discussion on the dark side of Victorian culture. It is easy to read, stays on topic, and makes the stark differences and similarities between our cultures clearly apparent.
3 people found this helpful
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P. S. Dills
4.0 out of 5 stars Great but "tough sledding"
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2008
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This book is a cultural examination of late 19th century Victorian London. Though this may be considered "tough sledding" in terms of style, it is nonetheless fascinating. The topics of study are: Social Darwinism, the dichotomy of East/West London, Women's organizations, the emergence of a well-read middle class, bourgeois charity towards the poor, liberalism, nationalism, sensationalism in the press, and the collective imagination of contemporary Londoners. Walkowitz's conclusion is both staggering and unexpected, explaining that the legendary Jack the Ripper may be nothing more than the embodiment of tabloid fancies and the overactive imagination of a well-read populace. This is one of my favorite historical monographs.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

fatima
5.0 out of 5 stars Great information about London in the XIX century
Reviewed in Spain on March 23, 2014
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This book gives detailed and complete information about how life was in different parts in London during XIX centur and how the stroy of jacke the Ripper and the fear that followed was developped. it is a really rich essay that is read as if it were a novel
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karen hayes
5.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing read.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2014
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Very erudite. This book offers narratives which make you question what you think you know while never losing your attention
3 people found this helpful
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Hypolyta Cosmopolita
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Must have' reading for Victorian studies
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2013
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A great book covering aspects of late Victorian crime and society. Has been an invaluable text at second year degree level.
4 people found this helpful
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Ellie Rose Walton
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2015
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Perfect book
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