City of Dreadful Delight

This isn’t a recent book, but it remains one of my favorite dives into the underworld! Who doesn’t like a salacious rag sheet or a grisly murder? It focuses on sexual danger in Victorian London and has everything: tabloid journalism, child prostitution, and narratives about Jack the Ripper and the “bad women” he killed!

All these stories uncover the ways that the general masses made sense of new sexual categories and illuminate how legislators and politicians used those categories to both challenge and push women out of public spaces and back into so-called traditional gender roles.

I remain fascinated by… show more.

This is Victorian London, a city of dynamic growth, extreme class divisions, obsessions with public sexual danger and pathology, growing anxiety in the face of so much that is unknown and uncertain, and moralizing campaigns for reform. Not least, and the book ends with this story, this is the city of Jack the Ripper. Sometimes Walkowitz is densely analytical, for she is skillful as both storyteller and theorist. In both genres, the experience of modernity is central, as are questions about the body and the self, ethnicity, class, and morality. The city that emerges, in all its dread and delight,… show more.