The decision to build a new army camp in the small market town of Colchester in 1856 was well received and helped to stimulate the local economy after a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Before long the Colchester garrison was one of the largest in the country and the town experienced an economic upturn as well as benefiting from the many social events organized by officers. But there was a downside: some of the soldiers' behavior was highly disruptive and, since very few private soldiers were allowed to marry, prostitution flourished. Having compiled a database of nearly 350 of Colchester's nineteenth-century prostitutes, the authors examine how they lived and operated and who their customers were.

A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.

“As dangerous as if she stood on the corner of the street exploding gunpowder.” This was the view of ‘Miles’, a correspondent in the Bedfordshire Mercury, writing about the dangerousness of prostitutes in 1874. They were considered a scourge by the Victorians; a menace to society and a threat to the moral and physical wellbeing of a nation. Carrying disease, committing crime, corrupting others; prostitutes were the most feared ‘social evil’. These women were the focus of controlling and invasive legislation, designed to clear the streets. They were imprisoned and removed from their friends and family. They were scorned and shamed and deemed worthless by much of society. The contemporary view of prostitution in the nineteenth century is colored by years of Ripperology, a grim fascination with the lives of a few mutilated women living in London. However, prostitutes were far more than caricatures of sinners or inevitable victims and lived in every other part of England too. Searching through the plethora of newspaper, census, police, and local history records it is now possible to uncover the lives of prostitutes in greater detail than ever before and discover the real women behind the stereotypes. Piecing together these women’s movements from cradle to grave and from one side of the country to another builds a rich picture of what it meant to be a prostitute, including the lives of prostitutes living in small towns, villages, and islands that have all been previously over-looked. This book explores the lives of the women who were omitted from the genteel history books of the past, aiming to identify what they looked like, what life was like for them, and who the important people in their lives were. It also looks in depth at the lives of a select few prostitutes, examining what drew them into prostitution and what happened to them afterwards. From Whitehaven to North Shields, from Peterborough to Bloomsbury (via Paris), these women led extraordinary, richly textured lives that are still relevant today, and that we can continue to learn so much from. The perfect introduction to Victorian prostitutes for family and local historians, genealogists, and students of the Victorian era.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases. The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women’s rights campaigners. Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements – the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement’s sixteen year progress to victory. The book was originally publised in 1980.

Tracing the history of four English case studies, this book explores how, from outward appearance to interior furnishings, the material worlds of reform institutions for ‘fallen’ women reflected their moral purpose and shaped the lived experience of their inmates. Variously known as asylums, refuges, magdalens, penitentiaries, Houses or Homes of Mercy, the goal of such institutions was the moral ‘rehabilitation’ of unmarried but sexually experienced ‘fallen’ women. Largely from the working-classes, such women – some of whom had been sex workers – were represented in contradictory terms. Morally tainted and a potential threat to respectable family life, they were also worthy of pity and in need of ‘saving’ from further sin. Fuelled by rising prostitution rates, from the early decades of the nineteenth century the number of moral reform institutions for ‘fallen’ women expanded across Britain and Ireland. Through a programme of laundry, sewing work and regular religious instruction, the period of institutionalisation and moral re-education of around two years was designed to bring about a change in behaviour, readying inmates for economic self-sufficiency and re-entry into society in respectable domestic service. To achieve their goal, institutional authorities deployed an array of ritual, material, religious and disciplinary tools, with mixed results.

The dressmaking trade developed rapidly during the 18th and 19th centuries, changing the lives of thousands of British workers. Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid focuses on the trade and the people within it, from their working conditions and earnings to their training, services and relationships with customers. Exploring the lives of dressmakers in fact and fiction, the book looks at representations of the trade in the plays and novels of the time, while surveying the often harsh realities of the workers' lives. From the arrival of the sewing machine to the influence of the department store, it explores the impact of mechanization, commercialization and modernity on a historical trade. Pamela Inder illuminates a new world of dressmaking enabled by goods like paper patterns and magazines, and sets out to investigate the increasing monopoly of female dressmakers in an industry once dominated by male tailors. Drawing on a range of original and hitherto unpublished sources – including business records, diaries, letters, bills and newspaper articles – Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid reveals the untold story of the dressmaking trade. Beautifully illustrated with over 80 images, the book brings dressmakers into focus as real people, granting new insights into working class life in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.

Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people. Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities. Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.