If the prostitute had become, as the Saturday Review termed it, ‘the most interesting class of womanhood’ in Britain in the Victorian period, what did she look like? How, and by what means, did her contemporaries depict her? Such basic questions raise further issues: What was (and perhaps still is) the significance of representations of prostitution and what role did they play in the production of myths and cultural narratives, the regulation of behaviour and the shaping of social attitudes? Historians (and others) interested in Victorian social and cultural history, and in perceptions of prostitution particularly, cannot avoid such questions and they continue to invite further analysis even after decades of innovative scholarship.

Studying contemporary representations provides a way of reading prostitution: the analysis and study of images and texts as discursive forms sheds light on the process of constructing social meaning.