Modern Babylon Research Articles

Religious Vitality in Victorian London by William M. Jacob (review)

Reviewed by: Religious Vitality in Victorian London by William M. Jacob Mary Heimann Religious Vitality in Victorian London. By William M. Jacob. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. viii, 348. £75,00. ISBN 978-0-19-289740-4.) Victorian London, like other great cities, has often been presented as a place where religion went to die. Contemporary sermons, pastoral letters, reports, newspaper articles and novels portrayed the capital sensationally, as a sink of immorality, heathenism, infidelity, religious indifference, the modern Babylon. Secularization and urbanization, popular theories of the 1960s which only began to be challenged by scholars in the 1980s, still exercise considerable hold over the popular imagination. In this densely packed survey of religious life in Victorian London, W. M. Jacob argues for the pervasiveness of religiosity—a term which goes well beyond formal church affiliation or attendance—at every level of society. Religious Vitality in Victorian London offers a useful service in bringing together two generations of scholarship on how the Church of England, together with a variety of Nonconformist and Dissenting traditions, fared in the Victorian religious marketplace. Like them, Jacob frames much of the discussion through the prism of social class and gender; the focus on London enables the study meaningfully to incorporate Judaism and Roman Catholicism into his analysis. Jacob's definition of "religion" follows trends in post-1990s scholarship in including nominal, tacit, or implicit faith. The monograph further builds on the work of others in bringing into "religiosity" what Jacob terms "quasi-religious" movements (including even ethical and humanist movements), and "parareligions" (including phrenologists, spiritualists, theosophists, and occultists). By bringing both supernaturalist and secularist organizations under the blanket term "religion," it could be argued that Religious Vitality in Victorian London expands the term "religion" so far as to invalidate comparisons with earlier works about the decline of religion, thereby weakening its revisionist claims. [End Page 417] Religious Vitality in Victorian London concludes that "in the context of the massive social disturbance of migration, urbanization and industrialization religion continued to be a vital core ingredient framing the nature of this great modern metropolis" (p. 308). While this statement might not come as news to specialists in Victorian religion, the message still needs to be heard by non-specialists and students, for whom W. M. Jacob offers a careful, detailed compendium and discussion of religious activity of all sorts which took place in London during the reign of Victoria. Mary Heimann Cardiff University Mary Heimann Cardiff University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

Metropolitan Songs and Songsters: Ephemerality in the World City

Metropolitan Songs and Songsters:Ephemerality in the World City Ian Newman (bio) and Gillian Russell (bio) introduction this special issue on "song and the city" attempts to open up the category of song for the study of the Romantic period by detaching it from associations with bards and minstrels and placing it within an urban context.1 One of our ambitions is to uncouple song from its near cognate, ballad—a term that has proven fertile ground for the discussion of literary Romanticism and its embrace of the popular, but one whose complex associations, including those of the popular itself, have become increasingly intractable. Our focus on song rather than ballads is, as we will discuss, partly an attempt to expand the purview of what gets included in discussions of popular literature, while also recognizing the global systems of commerce and imperialism that helped disseminate cultural products such as songs and other forms of literature.2 The relationship of songs to these systems, the essays in this special issue will argue, constituted a distinctive aspect of metropolitan culture in the Romantic period. By metropolitan we mean primarily London—and, as James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin have pointed out, by the turn of the 19th century, London was well established as a world city. In 1800 London housed nearly a million inhabitants, the largest city in Europe, with a population double that of Paris. In the next fifty years London's population doubled, despite death rates exceeding birth rates. It grew, that is, because of the vast movement of bodies to London from elsewhere.3 What resulted was a new form of [End Page 429] urban life, characterized by a fractious cosmopolitanism and a dizzying modernity. To contemporary writers, London was indescribable and cacophonous; a modern Babylon that was everywhere and nowhere.4 While other urban contexts are important in the history of song—the capitals of Edinburgh and Dublin as well as industrial towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield—London was unique in that its cultural representations continually insisted on its worldliness. Romantic London was a city that defined itself through its contact with distant others. London was also a city that understood itself through a particular relationship to song. Writers describing the metropolis defined the era as "this song singing Age."5 People living there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries recognized that they were part of a robust culture of song. Song emanated from churches, palaces, theaters, private drawing rooms, pleasure gardens, taverns, alehouses, brothels, boats, ships, carriages, markets, fairs, and streets. Until this basic fact has been more thoroughly digested, we cannot hope to fully understand what, for example, William Blake meant by naming his most famous collections "Songs of Innocence and Experience," or what John Keats meant by talking about his relationship with George Felton Matthew as a "Brotherhood in Song." Until we have apprehended the culture of song in the period, we cannot hope to understand any of the many references to poetry as song in the Romantic period, which have become so familiar as to be almost invisible.6 Nor for that matter will we be able to fully appreciate the scenes of singing in the novels of Jane Austen or Frances Burney, or the social function of song as it appears in the countless comic afterpieces performed in London theaters, or—in a different mode—the riotous presence of song in works such as Pierce Egan's Life in London (1820). In much scholarship of the period, particularly literary scholarship, song has tended to become subsumed into the category of ballad. And indeed, the relationship between the ballad and Romantic poetry has been the subject of frequent and lively interrogation, most notably with book-length studies by Steve Newman, and Maureen N. McLane devoted to the subject.7 It has frequently been observed that the ballad, operating just outside [End Page 430] the domain of the legitimately literary, has helped constitute the study of literature as a discipline, demarcating lines of inclusion and exclusion in often productive ways. Scholars have noted that Francis James Child, the first professor of English (as opposed to belles lettres) at Harvard, is best...

A fantastic fabrication of Weimar Berlin: Queer nostalgia, timeless memories and surreal spatiality in the film Bent

Abstract The extravagant opening sequence of the film Bent directed by Sean Mathias (1997) fabricates a promiscuous gay venue in the mythic 1930s Weimar Berlin. While Greta’s club is completely fictional, the megastar Mick Jagger’s drag show in this sequence queerly transcends spatiality and temporality. Greta/Jagger not only anticipates the persecution and annihilation of gay men in Nazi Germany but also elegizes modern queer subcultures and their often destructive self-indulgence. This sequence is a flamboyant return to the pastness of queer past that aesthetically represents a radically different queer contemporariness. The screening of queer nostalgia in this decadent opening sequence creates an allegorical space, a psychedelic modern Babylon or a sort of uncanny ‘thirdspace’, a physical and mental space at the same time. The fantastic venue is interrelated with displacement of cultural production, reinvention of collective memory, queer melancholy and, particularly, camp performativity and a new vision of nostalgia as drag show.

The Charity-Mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal, and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c.1870–1912

AbstractThis essay sheds new light on the supposedly familiar world of Victorian philanthropy by considering charity in relation to market regulation. Focusing on the “charity fraud,” we suggest that in the shaping of this exclusive and paradoxical marketplace, charities eagerly seized fraud denunciations to advertise and authenticate their legitimacy. This reflected the massive changes in the charitable world since the days of paternalist social relations and, paradoxically, illustrates the extremity of the problem facing the donating public: if one could not be entirely certain of a local charity, how could he or she discern between the national organizations that undertook fund-raising for international disasters? This contest for legitimacy and the exposure of fraud shaped a contested but oddly virtuous exchange market: by the turn of the twentieth century, charities not only published account sheets but debated them publicly, too.

Not of This Earth: Jack the Ripper and the Development of Gothic Whitechapel

Not of This Earth: Jack the Ripper and the Development of Gothic Whitechapel

Scandal work: James Joyce, the new journalism, and the home rule newspaper wars

In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siecle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work of James Joyce, a towering figure of literary modernism. Based largely on archival research, the first three chapters trace the legal, social, and economic forces that fueled an upsurge in sex scandal over the course of the Irish Home Rule debates during James Joyce's childhood. remaining chapters examine Joyce's use of scandal in his work throughout his career, beginning with his earliest known poem, Et Tu, Healy, written when he was nine years old to express outrage over the politically disastrous Parnell scandal. Backus's readings of Joyce's essays in a Trieste newspaper, the Dubliners short stories, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses show Joyce's increasingly intricate employment of scandal conventions, ingeniously twisted so as to disable scandal's reifying effects. Scandal Work pursues a sequence of politically motivated sex scandals, which it derives from Joyce's work. It situates Joyce within an alternative history of the New Journalism's emergence in response to the Irish Land Wars and the Home Rule debates, from the Phoenix Park murders and the first Dublin Castle scandal to The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon and the Oscar Wilde scandal. Her voluminous scholarship encompasses historical materials on Victorian and early twentieth-century sex scandals, Irish politics, and newspaper evolution as well as providing significant new readings of Joyce's texts.

W. T. Stead: newspaper revolutionary

Book synopsis: When William T Stead died on the Titanic in 1912, he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid newspaper. His advocacy of 'government by journalism' helped launch military campaigns. His expose of child prostitution in the 'Modern Babylon' of London raised the age of consent in 1885, yet his investigation got him thrown into jail. A campaigner for women's rights, he was unnerved by the rise of the New Woman. An advocate of World Peace, he promoted huge hikes in defence spending. A political radical and Christian, Stead was also a Spiritualist who took dictation from the dead. A mass of contradictions, he was a crucial figure in the history of the British press. This book of essays, marking the centenary of his death, seeks to recover the story of an extraordinary figure in late Victorian and Edwardian culture.

A Rhetoric of Pornography: Private Style and Public Policy in “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”

In 1885, William Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, printed an exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This incendiary article helped pass the Criminal Law Amendment bill, but also garnered accusations of pornography against the “Maiden Tribute.” Using Stead's four-part article as a case study, I develop a rhetorical understanding of pornography to account for the dynamic political energy and outrage generated by this text. I argue that the pornography of the “Maiden Tribute” managed to create a particular ignorance, one in which sexuality was isolated from material economic realities. Ultimately, Stead's mission proved politically deleterious to the very women he professed to help.

The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé

The Rhetoric of Revelation:Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé Gretchen Soderlund (bio) In Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, their humanitarian work of 2009, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn recount their experience working as foreign correspondents in China after the Tiananmen Square protests and realizing for the first time that news media ignore the everyday realities of millions of women worldwide. From the perspective of journalists, the everyday abuses women around the world suffered were not newsworthy: "When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and sold into brothels, we didn't even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen in a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen to girls every day." 1 In this account, sex trafficking—a practice also commonly referred to as modern-day slavery, sex slavery, forced prostitution, and, in earlier periods, "white slavery"—is taken to be the paradigmatic case of gender violence ignored by journalists. Yet positing sex slavery as the exemplary media blind spot is curious when one considers the history of journalism on this topic. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western news media offered extensive coverage of white slavery, making claims about the severity and ubiquity of the practice that had far-reaching and questionable legislative effects. Had Kristof and WuDunn dug deeper, they would have discovered that the advent of humanitarian campaigns against sex trafficking and the rise of investigative journalism share an intertwined history. In fact, the press played a critical role in producing now-familiar narrative conventions and rhetorical tropes commonly used to depict sex trafficking, as well as establishing methods for gathering facts and arriving at conclusions about prostitution and sex slavery. While there may have been a dearth of news reports of sex trafficking in the decades immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, stories of innocent women and girls held captive in prison-like brothels are not new. Rather, they have, in the last two decades, resurfaced as an object of journalistic attention. This article considers the phenomenon of the sex-trafficking expose´ at two moments, the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, in order to gain some purchase on the relationship between journalistic coverage and the construction of sex trafficking as a practice viewed by many policymakers, feminists, and evangelicals as among the most urgent of global humanitarian issues. A central premise here is that sex trafficking is not so much discovered as it is created as an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy. Indeed, episodes of heightened concern over trafficking have historically [End Page 193] relied on textual assertions that involve a set of interpretations that give substance and meaning to a phenomenon not readily available to public view. To explore the cultural construction of sex slavery as an object of human rights and humanitarian intervention, this article will focus on three journalistic exposés that brought a great deal of public attention to sex trafficking: "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," William T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette series in 1885 on London's trade in virgins; "The Girls Next Door," Peter Landesman's 2004 New York Times Magazine piece on domestic trafficking; and Kristof's New York Times series from the same year on sex slavery in Poipet, Cambodia. Sex Trafficking as a Cultural Construction In the late nineteenth century, journalists, vigilance movements, and evangelical women activists established a set of images and associations—the enslaved prostitute, the prison-like brothel, the mercenary procurer, and the monstrous client—to describe the players involved in the phenomenon of white slavery. These associations were first popularized in 1880s England, but by the twentieth century's first decade they became deeply embedded in the Western imaginary such that even today the term "trafficking" (and, increasingly, "prostitution") connotes sexual enslavement, captive innocents, and mercenary villains. Yet despite the current ubiquity of mass and activist media productions equating trafficking with sexual slavery and identifying women and girls as its primary victims, sex trafficking...

The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (review)

Reviewed by: The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 Karen Dubinsky (bio) Sarah Carter . The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915. University of Alberta Press. xvi, 384. $34.95 Sarah Carter starts her magnificent new book by taking aim at right-wing Alberta journalist Ted Byfield, one of many contemporary conservatives who extol the timeless stability of marriage as a 'fortress' that guards a way of life. Her meticulously researched response stands this argument on its head. Marriage is, historically, complex, convoluted, and all over the map. It defies definition, generalization, and thus sentimentalization. Anxiety-prone defenders of marriage, on the other hand, seem to be made of stone, timeless and unchanged. In the nineteenth century, argues Carter, Canada was awash in anxieties about marriage. The nation was thought to be under threat, from the 'pernicious, corrupt and immoral' influence of - wait for it - the United States. Relatively liberal divorce laws in the United States (relative to Canada's mate-for-life philosophy) made the United States a particularly sinister neighbour, but the bulk of this book is about a variety of domestic dissenters. The intimate life of nineteenth-century Canadians ranged dramatically. First Nations communities practised monogamy, polygamy, same-sex marriage, and divorce. Mormons practised polygamy, Doukhobors thought the state had no place in their bedrooms, Chinese immigrant women were discouraged by the head tax, and some socialists even set up free love communities. This is not your grandmother's Western Canadian history. Western Canada - the geographical focus of this book - features heavily in marital anxieties because it was a colonial outpost, on the 'edge of Empire,' as historian Adele Perry has described it. Remoteness from imperial centres of power often creates an especially jittery ruling class, but what was it about marriage customs that made some people so worried and so insistent on imposing a recognizable form of monogamy? Here Carter relies on some of the best of contemporary postcolonial theorizations about the intimacies of empire to show how the imposition of a single standard of gender and family life was a key feature of imperial expansion. As in other imperial contexts, this was a racialized process, but Carter has told a complicated story here that both highlights and de-centres race as the motor of the story. The imposition of the monogamous model on the First Nations of the prairies was, she argues, but one part of a broader program for the diverse peoples of Western Canada. 'The same cluster of laws, attitudes, and expectations . . . similarly applied to everyone else.' The difference, she suggests, was one of force, not kind; the colonial Canadian state was able to 'invade the domestic affairs of First Nations societies and impose these laws, attitudes, and expectations to [End Page 582] a much greater extent than was possible with other communities.' In places this could use more thought; it's more than 'ironic' - Carter's term - that the only person to be convicted under a Criminal Code amendment designed to prohibit Mormon polygamy was an Aboriginal man. However, that feminists and missionaries argued that Ukrainian girls should also be sent to residential schools is just one example of a detail that, though it has dropped off the historian's radar, contains important, potentially paradigm-altering insights about the relationships among race, ethnicity, and power in Canada's past. Also fascinating is Carter's exploration of how the famous 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' scandal in London resonated in Western Canada on the heels of the Riel Rebellion. The book is full of such untold stories, making it a must-read beyond the confines of 'regional' Canadian history. [End Page 583] Karen Dubinsky Karen Dubinsky, Department of Global Development Studies and Department of History, Queen's University Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

The maiden tribute of modern Babylon: the report of the secret commission by W. T. Stead - Edited by Anthony E. Simpson

The Economic History ReviewVolume 62, Issue 4 p. 1018-1019 The maiden tribute of modern Babylon: the report of the secret commission by W. T. Stead – Edited by Anthony E. Simpson STEFAN SLATER, STEFAN SLATER Open UniversitySearch for more papers by this author STEFAN SLATER, STEFAN SLATER Open UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 October 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00501_13.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume62, Issue4November 2009Pages 1018-1019 RelatedInformation

Iraq's last Jews: stories of daily life, upheaval, and escape from modern Babylon

Iraq's last Jews: stories of daily life, upheaval, and escape from modern Babylon

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon – By W.T. Stead

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 28, Issue 2 p. 333-334 The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon – By W.T. Stead DAVID STACK, DAVID STACK University of ReadingSearch for more papers by this author DAVID STACK, DAVID STACK University of ReadingSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 May 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-0206.2009.00111_18.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume28, Issue2June 2009Pages 333-334 RelatedInformation

BOOK REVIEW: Morris B. Kaplan.SODOM ON THE THAMES: SEX, LOVE, AND SCANDAL IN WILDE TIMES. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times Charles Upchurch (bio) Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times, by Morris B. Kaplan; pp. 314. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005, $35.00, £19.95. Morris Kaplan opens Sodom on the Thames with a first-person account of his decision to embark on this study of late-nineteenth-century homosexuality, interspersed with a discussion of the sources that he has brought together in order to make it possible. Many of the individuals, events, and themes touched on in these first pages will be familiar to scholars of the period and topic, but it is in their arrangement and interpretation that Kaplan stakes his best and ultimately successful claims for the originality and importance of his work. In the introduction Kaplan informs the reader that what follows will be a narrative history, and he expresses his hope that this "return to storytelling" will be welcomed by some readers "impatient with the obscurity of 'postmodern' theory" (7). The emphasis on narrative is evident in part one, which details the lives of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young middle-class cross-dressers arrested in 1870 and tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. Kaplan's account brings together almost all of the major themes and events described in the surviving trial documentation, making it the most comprehensive overview of this well-known case in the secondary literature. In the narrative, the reader is introduced to the extravagant behaviors of these young men and their friends, the dresses they wore on and off the stage, and their flirtations with other men. The central ambiguity that drove the court case is also explored: whether, without direct evidence of sexual acts, their behavior proved "unnatural" intent. In part two, Kaplan follows a similar narrative strategy, but with less well-known subjects. Primarily through the use of personal letters, Kaplan constructs a detailed look [End Page 769] into the lives of a group of public school men associated with William Johnson Cory, a master at Eton dismissed in 1872 under a cloud of suspicion. As with Boulton and Park, the question of whether sexual contact between men occurred cannot be definitively answered by the sources, and Kaplan refrains from reading into his evidence explicitly sexual relationships, as at least one earlier author has done. Instead Kaplan follows several of these men from the time they were at Eton through their careers, marriages, and involvement with younger men. While most interested in exploring the complex desires that link them long after their school days, Kaplan is also willing to introduce evidence that complicates any simple reading of their actions, such as the passion with which Cory also embraced the education of women later in life (152–53). Yet for all the engaging and valuable detail provided, this first half of the work has its limitations. Aside from a few pages at the start of part two, we learn little here about the public schools themselves, or about just how far from the norms of accepted masculinity were the behaviors of the men Kaplan describes. Greater attention to these and other areas of context would have helped to alleviate the occasional narrowness of the first half of the book, where the focus is dominated by primary sources and unwavering from details of either one trial or one circle of friends. No such criticism can be made of the remaining chapters, though. Part three, on the "West End Scandals," is not limited solely to the 1889–90 Cleveland Street affair, in which telegraph messenger boys were recruited for a male brothel patronized by well-connected upper-class men. Here Kaplan also includes scandals centering on heterosexual desire, including W. T. Stead's "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (1885) and several politically charged divorce cases from the following years. Citing the Cleveland Street affair within this larger frame allows Kaplan to bring into his analysis the feminists, working-class leaders, and radical journalists who campaigned against elite male privilege, "linking hostility toward the aristocracy to suspicion of deviant desires and practices" (179). Through Kaplan's analysis we learn how public reaction...

Ventanas de Manhattan: una reflexión metacultural

The paper considers Antonio Muńoz Molina's novel, {Ventanas de Manhattan}, and regards it as a reflection on culture. First, the structure of the novel is inspired by the topic of the "window" and the style of writing, basically description, conforms to an "art of looking" based on the narrator's habit of looking at art, which is considered to be one of the finest expressions of culture. In other respects, this narrative poetics fails when the narrator attempts to provide a description of the current reality of New York. This failure, a crisis of representation, is provoked, at the time, by a crisis of culture: the contemporary world does not harmonize culture as "art" with culture as a "way of life." New York appears in the book as a modern Babylon, where the narrator-protagonist seeks his identity and judges the way the world goes.

The Conversion of Rebecca Jarrett

Rebecca Jarrett (c.1850–1928), whose unpublished memoir appears in this issue, was a poor Londoner and a heavy drinker, who worked in the sex trade as prostitute and brothel-keeper, and occasionally did unskilled work such as laundry. Her decision to leave that life and join the Salvation Army led to her involvement in the sensational events of the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ case – an 1885 newspaper exposé of London’s vice trade. Jarrett was persuaded by journalist W. T. Stead and several leading members of the Salvation Army to stage the procurement of a young girl to demonstrate how easily this could be accomplished. Stead published his account of the event in the Pall Mall Gazette and the response was immense. Crowds clamoured for copies of the paper and Members of Parliament called for Stead’s prosecution under the obscenity laws. Stead, Jarrett, and four others subsequently faced charges in Central Criminal Court for the abduction of a child under sixteen from her parents’ home and for indecent assault. Rebecca Jarrett was now notorious: her likeness was reproduced in newspapers and crowds mobbed her outside court. Eventually jailed, she served six months with hard labour. After this she retreated into the Army’s rescue work where she remained for the rest of her life. Her autobiography, introduced by Pamela J. Walker, reveals the very ordinary aspects of her life as well as her memories of the tumultuous events she helped create.

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

RONALD J. BERGER, Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems ApproachREGINALD W BIBBY, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in CanadaBRUCE CURTIS, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875DAVID DAMAS, Arctic Migrants/Arctic Villagers: The Transformation of Inuit Settlement in the Central ArcticFAWZIA AFZAL‐KHAN and KALPANA SESHADRI‐CROOKS (eds.), The Pre‐Occupation of Post‐Colonial StudiesMICHAEL R. HAINES and RICHARD H. STECKEL (eds.), A Population History of North AmericaWILL C. VAN DEN HOONAARD (ed.), Walking the Tightrope: Ethical Issues for Qualitative ResearchersMEG LUXTON and JUNE CORMAN, Getting By in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on the JobHEATHER MONTGOMERY, Modern Babylon?: Prostituting Children in ThailandELIZABETH A. POVINELLI, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian MulticulturalismSTEPHEN E REYNA, Connections: Brain, Mind, and Culture in a Social AnthropologyLYN SCHUMAKER, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa

La Babylone moderne

Modern Babylon, usually identified with Paris, occupies a central position in opposing 18th-century visions of modern history. It is a symbol of the decline of Christianity and of changes in morals, and is linked to the threat of divine punishment which could take the form of a salutary revolution, or on the contrary to the provocative affirmation of a lifestyle freed from Christian discipline. Beyond the religious debate, the theme also reflects thinking about urban develop¬ ment which, to many contemporaries of the development of Paris or London, seemed tentacular and threatening ; it suggests a dramatised conception of the modern city, which is the source of many settings of novels. Thus the reference to Babylon indicates a debate within enlightened philosophy, and the idea of modern Babylon helped the century to think about and to dramatise a turning-point in Western civilisation.

Nongovernmental Organizations, "Grassroots," and the Politics of Virtue

n the course of conducting fieldwork in 1993-94 in Durban, South Africa, I attended a training workshop for Zenzele field-workers.' Zenzele was a black women's organization that focused on educating and uplifting black women living in rural and urban KwaZulu and Natal.2 There we were told a story of women's transnational cooperation that struck me as surprisingly reminiscent of colonial relations between European and "native" women. On June 29, 1994, Lyndsay Hacket-Pain, then vice president of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW), addressed a gathering of ACWW affiliate organizations the Federation of Women's Institutes (FWI) of Natal and Zululand and the Natal and KwaZulu Zenzele Women's Association (Zenzele). Hacket-Pain, from the head office in London, had been traveling around South Africa visiting various ACWW affiliate organizations and the projects they had undertaken. A

"The Maiden Tribute" and the Rise of the White Slave in the Nineteenth Century: The Making of an Imperial Construct

white slave burst upon the scene of moral and social reform at the centre of the British Empire in the summer of 1885, when Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead published The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, a week-long expos? of child prostitution in London that was to serve as the first official report of a sexual traffic, according to Stead, in English girls. By the first decade of the twentieth-century the white slave had become a major focus of the reform movement throughout the Empire, and, indeed, beyond it. white slavery panic which Mariana Valverde has traced in English Canada between 1885 and 1925 (77-103) was a global phenomenon, or, more precisely an imperial one. That is, white slavery as we still understand it?the sell [ing] or trap [ping of] (a girl) into enforced prostitution, especially] abroad {OED 1989 20: 268)?was a pre occupation of all the Western industrialized nations which, John Strachey has pointed out, [f]rom about 1870 ... with one accord, but in ferocious rivalry with each other, [had] turned to the annexation of the rest of the world (98). Britain, France, Germany and the United States, along with a cluster of smaller states (79), Strachey observes, all engaged in the late nineteenth-century land grab; they all likewise demonstrated a powerful fear, during the expansionist period, about a sexual trade whose commodity was young white women. Edward J. Bristow has noted a widespread anxiety in France about the trade that was called La Traite des Blanches and in Germany was known as M?dchen-Handel (37). Between 1885 and the 1920s, the United