City of Sin

While passing some time in the National Archives (in a break between staring at a computer screen and staring at awful courtroom handwriting), I happened upon Catharine Arnold’s City of Sin: London and Its Vices (2010). Since the second chapter of my dissertation is on sexual violence, I thought Arnold’s book would come in handy, providing me with a general outline of London’s sex scene, and I was right.

City of Sin starts with the Roman invasion and works its way through cybersex of the twenty-first century. Arnold includes many intriguing anecdotes that are worthy of further study. Particularly interesting to me were her discussions of Marlowe’s poetry, the history of individual prostitutes and bawds, why lesbians were not persecuted in Victorian England, and references to the English Collective of Prostitutes (still active in London). I also appreciated how she tracked “deviant” sexuality across the geography of London, showing how the hot-spots moved throughout history.

My main complaint was that certain areas lacked the thick description necessary to prove her points. Obviously, the later chapters have more information (likely due to better record-keeping and access to records). Chapter Two, for example, focuses on the Catholic Church’s link to prostitution during the middle ages. I found this illuminating and would have liked more discussion on this point. At times, her readings of literary texts also lack substance (this is probably my own hobby-horse as an English major, though). Her pairing of Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress—and the subsequent conclusions she comes to—needs more development, including discussion of purpose and genre. But, then again, this is a popular history overview, and not an “academic” article.

The only seriously troubling part of the text comes in her final chapter, where Arnold makes some sweeping generalizations about prostitution and women’s rights. She seems to claim that since prostitution has always existed, it should be legalized (or, at the least, not prosecuted) because it’s a business that provides a livelihood for many women who can’t make as much money elsewhere (here she cites modern examples, such as PhD students who strip to pay for grad school). She also shows how attempts to abolish prostitution only hurt prostitutes, as they are driven further and further underground into settings where they can be harmed (she also discusses this in her section on Jack the Ripper, where she argues that his attacks were predicated on the fact that Victorian culture pushed prostitutes out of the view of the public, away from help and surveillance of police).

Obviously, I take issue with this. While I agree that prostitution is a means of survival for many women, we have to question our cultural structure and ask why women can’t survive by other means. Of course, there’s no easy answer to this. But accepting prostitution seems to be a subversive way of empowering women within a flawed system, rather than a progressive shift in the system itself. Or maybe that’s just my radical feminism coming out.

Despite my qualms with its conclusions, City of Sin was an interesting, easy read that provided a great overview of sexuality in London. I learned a lot from Arnold and intend to read her other two studies on London, Necropolis and Bedlam, as soon as I can.