Customer Reviews

City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society)

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This is primarily a history of gender. And armed with the theme of sexual danger, Walkowitz is able to explore not just late-Victorian women, but late-Victorian relationships between men and women.

Walkowitz begins with the urban strollers of the 1880's, the flaneurs. Prior to this period, the primary urban female found in London is the prostitute. Following commercial development in late-Victorian London there is an influx of "shopping ladies" and the "working women" who serve them in "the new feminized world of department stores." (p.24)

Next, Walkowitz discusses the findings of Charles Booth's study of London poverty. Significant is the area of London known as Whitechapel where gender roles were somewhat reversed.

In chapter 2, Walkowitz further explores the characters inhabiting the urban terrain of London. There are "gents" or "swells", women in music halls(both performing and in the audience), shopping ladies, charity workers, and the Glorified Spinsters. These "actors" were constantly exploring new boundaries while re-inventing their roles.

In the chapter "Science and Seance", Walkowitz gives us the tale of Mrs. Weldon who makes the great leap from being nearly committed(falsely) to a lunatic asylum, to becoming a fixure on Pears Soap advertisements. Certainly, Mrs. Weldon's role reversal was socially significant, and due to her "succesful negotiation of urban spaces and cultural styles" and "her willingnes to make a spectacle of herself and to allow her image to be refashioned, circulated, and ultimately discarded by a fickle marketplace." (p.189)

The significance of Jack the Ripper is the effect the murders had on men as well as women, including boys and girls. The Ripper's legacy is the crystallization of "sexual fears and hostilities" and the creation of a "common vocabulary of male violence against women." (pp.227-228)

These gender roles all represent the theme of sexual danger because they are changing. Roles are being reversed or re-invented. Barriers, whether physical or social, are being probed.

Judith Walkowitz delivers a very engaging history of gender violence, prostitution, and good old Jack the Ripper. Her style is more reminiscent of a novel or short story collection than an academic history, and that works in the narrative's favor. One finds it very easy to go along with her argument, even though it does have some holes in it. The style she adopts makes it easy for her to squeeze events into her hypothesis, and it sometimes feels forced, especially in her repeated attempts to relate everything to "melodrama." The book is well researched, which is most obvious in her discussion of the men and women's club and Georgina Weldon's struggle against the male establishment. Overall, a feminist history that never becomes militant, and a piece of academic work that is accessible to a wider audience than merely women's studies faculty members across the U.S.

This source is a wonderful discussion on the dark side of Victorian culture. It is easy to read, stays on topic, and makes the stark differences and similarities between our cultures clearly apparent.

Excellent read!
This book has everything that we should know about the late Victorian era, especially--but not exclusively--East London.
In a nutshell, the writer develops her story of the exciting, but complex and fragmented city into a marvelous journey through the very late Victorian period, the journey that will [un]predictably end in a spate of heinous crimes perpetrated by an elusive killer who could well be--well, anybody. Walkowitz's culmination with the Jack the Ripper case will leave you wondering about the killer's motive as well as the rationale for his crimes.

This book is a cultural examination of late 19th century Victorian London. Though this may be considered "tough sledding" in terms of style, it is nonetheless fascinating. The topics of study are: Social Darwinism, the dichotomy of East/West London, Women's organizations, the emergence of a well-read middle class, bourgeois charity towards the poor, liberalism, nationalism, sensationalism in the press, and the collective imagination of contemporary Londoners. Walkowitz's conclusion is both staggering and unexpected, explaining that the legendary Jack the Ripper may be nothing more than the embodiment of tabloid fancies and the overactive imagination of a well-read populace. This is one of my favorite historical monographs.

In the series foreword by Catharine Stimpson it is proclaimed that Judith R. Walkowtiz identifies this period as "a crucial moment in which our feminist sexual politics and narratives of sexual danger were formed" (pg.ix). However by the book's end the reader may still be left wondering exactly what a narrative of sexual danger is, and why those of late Victorian London stand out today. This is because Walkowitz's has authored a complicated book eschewing traditional forms of linear narrative or conceptual opposition to discuss the dynamics inherent in narratives of sexual danger in late Victorian London. Indeed for a work so focused on analysis, at times to the detriment of narrative, the title is somewhat ironic. The dynamic approach is shown as the alternative to more common, simplistic static or binary notions in class and gender relations. Walkowitz's aim is to detail the common narratives of sexual danger of the period, then analyse how they arose and what they meant to different actors varied by gender, class and ethnicity, with an emphasis on the former two. By weaving together analysis of different people and their own adventures, Walkowtiz certainly identifies common themes such as prostitution, access to public space, treatment by the law and conflicting male/female/class attitudes, however as she constantly reminds the reader these are complex matters, and so they are left struggling to make sense of it all.

This is the main problem with the work, its structure, which even the author admits outright will not deliver closure in places where one would expect (pg.10). The emphasis on narratives of sexual danger, and the complexity of the overall work, stems from its post structuralist roots and aim to get at "how people represent and understand their world" (pg.7). Walkowitz's introduction does well to set out the reasons for the adoption of post structuralist methodology in her examination of the processes behind the production and organisation of practices and meanings such as "sexuality" and "narratives of sexual danger". She introduces among others, Michel Foucault's writings and then sets out to expose the patriarchal and sexist bias in the history of this period as evident in "the Ripper narrative" whilst demonstrating the similarities between contemporary and late Victorian feminism. This is clearest in the epilogue which compares the reactions to the Yorkshire Ripper of 1975-1981 to those events a century before in London. The letter to the Times from Bradford University condemning the media's portrayal of women in the moral panic surrounding Peter Sutcliffe (pg.234) mirrors exactly Walkowitz's own concern with "those elements that the Ripper story excluded and resisted, particularly those in which women were not silent or terrorized victims." (pg.2) So far so good perhaps, but her overall execution of this post structuralist critique and synchronic structure leaves the reader confused precisely because Walkowtiz abandons so many historical conventions without fully explaining or relating her alternative to them. Thus she is able to "convey a sense of the inequality of power - along class and gender lines - and of the unequal power of different stories amidst the proliferation of cultural meanings" (pg.8) but not a proper understanding, leaving the reader dissatisfied.

City of Dreadful Delight is divided between seven chapters with an introduction and epilogue. The latter is interesting to note for it is definitely not a conclusion but rather an updating of the themes and events discussed and the questions they pose for feminism in the contemporary as opposed to late Victorian setting. Though the book is not solely about Jack the Ripper, one does get the feeling that it is building to him in chapter seven, as he represents the "master narrative" of sexual danger of this period. Indeed Walkowitz says as much in her introduction, stating City of Dreadful Delight "examines the cultural dynamics and social struggles that informed these fantasies and originally produced Jack the Ripper in 1888 as a mythic story of sexual danger" (pg.2). Whilst this position makes sense given the shadow of the Ripper over the period, it means that chapters five and six appear thoroughly out of place. The "Men and Women's Club" seems tedious and irrelevant, whilst the spiritualism debacle is only helpful in that it introduces the concept of "mad doctors", but then perhaps this was why Walkowitz chose a synchronic narrative structure, to elude such criticisms?

It is far easier for the reader to identify the eponymous "city of dreadful delight" through chapters' one to three and then seven although even these are not without criticism. Chapter One: Urban Spectatorship, effectively introduces the reader to the squalor of late Victorian London, explaining the fascination which the impoverished east end of the city held for middle class male flaneurs. Through examples such as George Sims and Charles Booth, Walkowitz examines why they explored the city, what they found and why. Again the hand of post structuralism is evident in that the supposed scientific findings or dispassionate observations of the flaneur were filtered through their own class and gender prejudice, thus "the middle class reading public became emotionally invested in a set of representations about the poor that cast poor Londoners as central figures in narratives that divested them or any agency or ability to extricate themselves from their situation" (pg.30). Yet in terms of spatiality never mind activity, London was far more complicated than the east/west overworld/underworld dichotomy would suggest as Walkowitz makes clear. Chapter Two: Contested Terrain, New Social Actors, develops the picture of the urban environment by populating it with more actors, that is to say moving beyond the simple concepts of classes. The figure of the strong, independent, educated and unmarried "new woman" enters the scene as she attempts to take her place in the public space, and ironically she seems safer "slumming" as a reformer than shopping in affluent districts. Unfortunately the first half of this chapter reads like an extended list of the new actors, and one has to wait for these to be analysed in the form of the "glorified spinster and the manly woman", "Hallelujah Lasses" and the defiant Match Girls. It is clear through these examples though that Walkowitz's focus is on women and their attempts to secure their agency and place in public, often from reluctant or obstinate men.

Chapters' three and four discuss "one of the most successful pieces of scandal journalism of the late nineteenth century" (pg.81), the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. This investigation and expose of child prostitution and "white slavery" was led at the Pall Mall Gazette by W.T. Stead, and again shows the case of a middle class male flaneur delivering a narrative of sexual danger which would impact on childhood, class and the political economy of sex (pg.83). Yet Walkowitz's own focus is how Stead's narrative differed from that of contemporary Josephine Butler in their approaches to class and gender, with his arguably the more repressive. Chapter Four, on the cultural consequences of this landmark publication, which prompted public demonstrations, legislation and criminal proceedings begins rather helpfully with a typology of moral panic, one of precious few definitions offered the reader by Walkowitz (pg.121). However, though the nature and role of the tabloid press in propagating narratives of sexual danger seems a significant one, it isn't really explored in depth here and the book begins to lose its clarity. Instead the reader is treated to the very internal proceedings of Karl Pearson's Men & Women's Club and their discussions of sex, marriage, friendship and prostitution over four years.

Georgina Weldon's adventure with spiritualism and science in Chapter Six thankfully marks an actual narrative of sexual danger, as opposed to Pearson's club's abstract and at times torturous and stunted discussion of them. However it, like the rest of City of Dreadful Delight lies in the shadow of Jack the Ripper awaiting in Chapter Seven, and unlike the first few chapters, four, five and six are decidedly outclassed. Here the detail of the five killings in the ten weeks between August and November 1888 is gently probed, with Walkowitz's focus on the reaction of the press, social actors and especially the police. In the midst of the panic and given the powerful sexist hierarchies in existence, pre existing narratives of sexual danger; degenerate prostitution; violence and disease; impoverished, alien Whitechapel and "mad doctors" are all combined in the master Ripper narrative which prevails even today.

Walkowitz's treatment of sources appears in good order, for she has made extensive use of the relevant archives to produce parliamentary papers, personal correspondence and a tremendous variety of periodicals and newspapers. In a work that challenges dominant "representations" of sexuality and sexual danger she is clearly tackling the perceived misogynist bias in the Ripper narrative and those that accompany it. However she is careful to often include the initial narrative before subjecting it to critique or then offering the alternative contemporary versions that have till now been overlooked by history, and this protects her from allegations of bias herself. City of Dreadful Delight is not as it would appear at first glance simply a history of Late Victorian London or the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Instead it is a post structuralist analysis of the time, when feminism would have it, that narratives of sexual danger and female victim hood arose in modern urban society.

As someone who writes stories I like to get a perspective on literature and culture of stories that I try to reproduce, so this is why I would read a book like this.

To that end the book put in perspective and context some of my favorite works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde with relation to my own works. On the plus side the writing was pretty quality and all of that, but on the negative side sometimes it seemed like one of the Dickens passages that goes on and on about all the different types of people in London. And sometimes there was little structure. Like this happened and then this happened and this women did this and this woman did that, and somehow this relates to the birth of shopping? The part about the shopping I liked though because you can see that today.

I found the story of Mrs. Wheldon very compelling however, and a couple other stories where there was more prolonged focus on individuals and analysis of that in terms of the culture and other historical/economic and whatever factors.

The history is presented as a fluid social dynamic instead if chunks of events, which is kind of bad.

The crime hero was an interesting concept. I would like to have seen a more thorough condemnation of this personna, but maybe that's up to a psychology book I suppose. Like I was saying this should have been framed. It's hard to tell sometimes in this book in some parts if its just not an immersion in tabloid culture. In other parts it's clear that it's not, because something like Jack the Ripper is pretty big, but maybe you get my point.

you came to a point where the author pointed something out and I was like wow I'm glad I read this far, which kept me going and I'm glad I read the entire book!

This book was critical for me as I wrote a term paper. A wide range of subjects is covered, and each numerous topics of interest are addressed. The text is easy to read- not trivial of negligible, but accessable to almost everyone

Walkowitz masterfully unravels the mysteries of Foucault's periodization of the proliferation of gender discources. Backed by solid empirical evidence, we see competing discourses on gender, class, and race evolve as different groups fight to stake out access to discursive power. Read Foucault, then read this, for an epiphanous moment that unlocks the mysteries of technologies of power!

I really enjoyed reading this spectacularly written book.