Modern Babylon Research Articles

Sensational Stories, Endangered Bodies: Women’s Work and the New Journalism in England in the 1890s

The cry of labor has seized the world’s ear. The Press, the Legislature, and the world at large is listening to the voice of labor…. When this journal first resolved to secure a hearing for all working-class questions, there was scarcely a column of a leading London newspaper which was then open. Now, following our lead, every great daily paper has its labor section…. Nor is it only the press which is watchful. It is the readers of the Press….This self-promoting editorial in the Star in 1891 made a critical point: labor issues were becoming a standard feature in daily newspapers. Sweating, loopholes in factory legislation, and the famous Dock and Match Girls’ strikes were among the subjects found in the pages of papers such as the Star. This trend in reporting was part of the “New Journalism” that developed in England between the 1880s and 1914. In an attempt to cater to the tastes of mass audiences, there was a shift in emphasis from parliamentary and political news to sports, gossip, crime, and sex. Papers, for instance, reported on the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London. New journalists and editors, like W. T. Stead and Thomas P. O’Connor, also produced interviews, exposes, and political editorials in order to influence public opinion and promote what Stead called “government by journalism.” Stead produced what has been called the most successful piece of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which depicted young girls for sale to older men. Passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for sex to sixteen, was one of its political consequences.

Sensational Stories, Endangered Bodies: Women’s Work and the New Journalism in England in the 1890s

The cry of labor has seized the world’s ear. The Press, the Legislature, and the world at large is listening to the voice of labor…. When this journal first resolved to secure a hearing for all working-class questions, there was scarcely a column of a leading London newspaper which was then open. Now, following our lead, every great daily paper has its labor section…. Nor is it only the press which is watchful. It is the readers of the Press….This self-promoting editorial in the Star in 1891 made a critical point: labor issues were becoming a standard feature in daily newspapers. Sweating, loopholes in factory legislation, and the famous Dock and Match Girls’ strikes were among the subjects found in the pages of papers such as the Star. This trend in reporting was part of the “New Journalism” that developed in England between the 1880s and 1914. In an attempt to cater to the tastes of mass audiences, there was a shift in emphasis from parliamentary and political news to sports, gossip, crime, and sex. Papers, for instance, reported on the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London. New journalists and editors, like W. T. Stead and Thomas P. O’Connor, also produced interviews, exposes, and political editorials in order to influence public opinion and promote what Stead called “government by journalism.” Stead produced what has been called the most successful piece of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which depicted young girls for sale to older men. Passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for sex to sixteen, was one of its political consequences.

The Lusiads and the Asian Reader

THE LUSIADS AND THE ASIAN READER BALACHANDRA RAJAN University of Western Ontario I n M ARCH 1553 four ships set sail from Lisbon along the route that Vasco da Gama had pioneered for Western commerce. Three were lost on the way. The fourth ship, the Sao Bento, dropped anchor in Goa only to be lost on the way back. Among those disembarking from the Sao Bento was a common soldier, Luis Vaz de Camoens, the author-to-be of The Lusiads. Goa had been seized by Albuquerque in 1510, an event foretold by Jupiter in The Lusiads, who assures the importunate Venus that Goa will in time be the queen of all the East. Camoens had not arrived to savour the truth of this prophecy, regarding a city that he described elsewhere as a modern Babylon, or to enjoy the fruits of that paradise that Vasco da Gama had hailed, or even to conduct preliminary research for The Lusiads. He came because he may have had no alternative. In a street brawl on Corpus Christi day in 1552 the quarrelsome Camoens had wounded a court official, Garcalo Borges. He was cast into prison for eight months. Borges did not press charges and in fact forgave the poet after receiving an apology. The king’s pardon followed on 7 March 1553, presumably with a condition attached to it. A fortnight later Camoens embarked for Goa. “I set out,” he wrote dejectedly, “as one leaving this world for the next.” He continued on his colourful course, taking part in an expedition against the king of Chembe on the Malabar coast within six weeks of his arrival and, perhaps, in an expedition to Ormuz in 1554. In February 1555 he “can be located with some precision in what used to be Italian Somaliland (Lusiads, intro, xix). In the following year he appears a third of the way across the world in Macao as Trustee for the Dead and Absent. Opinion differs as to whether this was a promotion or a further degree of exile. In Macao Camoens once again displayed his customary talent for not getting on with authority. Relieved of his post, he was in some danger of providing his successor with an additional dossier, by himself joining the ranks of the dead and absent. The hospitable Vietnamese rescued him from a shipwreck in the Mekong estuary. Clutched to his heart was the waterlogged manuscript of The Lusiads. It is a story that seems designed to belong to literature rather than fact. Camoens endows it with a double legitimacy by incorporating it into his epic poem (x, 124). He also anticipates Milton here and elsewhere in The Lusiads in E nglish Stu d ies in C a n a d a , 23, 1, March 1997 his infiltration of the epic voice by the personal (Sims 374-84; Martz 45-59, esp. 58). From Macao, Camoens returned to Goa and was in and out of prison, once for not paying his debts and once, it is conjectured, because of the enemies he had made at Macao. He decided to return to Portugal, but languished for two years at Mozambique, unable to pay his passage further. It was not until 1570 that he reached Lisbon. The Lusiads was published two years later. The king awarded Camoens a pension of 15,000 reis, which is described as not magnificent but not a pittance (intro., xxv). It compares well with the payment of ten pounds that Milton received for writing Paradise Lost. A life that reads like a tale out of Conrad is reflected in a poem that is more robust than thoughtful. Innumerable and boastful accounts of Portuguese victories past and future remind one of that “tedious havoc” that Milton castigates (PL IX, 30), though only after indulging in a fair measure of it himself. Camoens courts comparison assiduously with Virgil through more than eighty allusions to the Aeneid and claims superiority over past epics in that his hero is actual rather than legendary. The machinery of the poem complete with Greek gods and Olympian squabbling is also lavishly emulative of the ancients. It becomes something of an embarrassment in a poem written under Christian...

Charity and Casework in Late Victorian London: The Work of the Charity Organisation Society

Previous articleNext article No AccessCharity and Casework in Late Victorian London: The Work of the Charity Organisation SocietyC. L. MowatC. L. Mowat Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 31, Number 3Sep., 1957 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/640277 Views: 10Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1957 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, Bertrand Taithe The Charity-Mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal, and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c.1870–1912, Journal of British Studies 54, no.11 (Jan 2015): 118–137.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2014.163