Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
All possible Care … has been taken to give no lewd Ideas, no immodest Turns in the new dressing up [sic] this Story, no not to the worst part of her Expressions; to this Purpose some of the vicious part of her Life, which cou'd not be modestly told, is quite left out, and several other Parts are very much shorten'd whatis left 'tis hop'd will not offend the chastest Reader, or the modestest [sic] Hearer; and as the best use is made even of the worst Story, the Moral 'tis hop'd will keep the Reader serious even where the Story might incline him to be otherwise.
Will you hear the story of Magdalen – in modern times?
Like the whore that dons her finery in hopes of emulating respectability before embarking on her trade, so too does the ‘whore story’ require ‘new dressing’ to attain a level of acceptable modesty and chastity in the face of its readers. Daniel Defoe no doubt imbued his concern for the reader with a hint of irony, given the direct ‘first-hand’ account his early eighteenth-century prostitute protagonist, Moll Flanders, related in her allegedly autobiographical tale. But anxiety over the reception of such subject matter survived well past Defoe's literary milieu. More than a century later another prostitute protagonist got to tell her story. Although there were no claims this time to factual history or autobiography, Mercy Merrick, from Wilkie Collins's The New Magdalen (1873), communicated the history of her fall into prostitution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Prostitute's BodyRewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain, pp. 99 - 124Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014