Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren's Profession

Abstract

According to the critic William Archer,1 the great distinguishing mark of the Victorian Anglo-Saxon was his ability to be shocked. And shock was the prime weapon in Bernard Shaw's arsenal of rhetorical munitions. The play Mrs Warren's Profession, as the drama critic Clive Barnes remarked some years ago, is Shaw at his best, with his prejudices bared and his hatred rampant.2 It is a frontal attack on a smug, greedy society of prostitutes, not merely of whores who provide sexual gratification for a fee, but industrialists, politicians, clergy, press, country squires all reaping benefits from the working prostitute without sharing the labor, and earning knighthoods, baronies, and social prominence in the process. Some are active investor-partners; others cash in surreptitiously, or accept the profit without regard for the source. Harlotry, long recognized as the oldest profession, has throughout recorded time been encouraged, fostered, demanded by a profit-motivated economic system. And still is. When as recently as 1967 the city council of New York removed licensing requirements for massage parlors, many landlords in Midtown and on the East Side leased their property to whoremasters in the face of rising vacancy rates and foreclosures in a weak economy. By 1976 there were almost a hundred parlors in the area of Times Square alone. In a frustrated attempt to rid the city of a plethora of white slavers, the mayor's staff surreptitiously distributed to the press a list of respectable institutions and corporations that, through building rents, were gar-