This study has demonstrated the complexity of Victorian attitudes to prostitution. It has not been my intention to deny that early Victorian studies of prostitution constructed and reproduced what would become a stereotypical and influential body of images and representations. I have sought rather to challenge the alleged codification and stability of these representations. The myth of the prostitute's downward progress and the tropes of disease and death that characterized her remained popular in much Victorian discourse on prostitution. But these features were not the only narrative, and they did not go unchallenged. One of the central themes of this book has been the ways in which contemporaries struggled to define the multi-faceted issue of the prostitution in their midst. The ambiguities and malleability of many of these definitions destabilize the notion of a singular or crystallized myth of the Victorian prostitute, and suggest the necessity of revisiting and refining our readings of even the most official and canonical texts. That traditional motifs and narratives of prostitution were present in many of the texts analysed here – yet were reformulated, challenged or directly rejected – also speaks to a larger fluidity of contemporary ideologies.