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Work from home song about prostitutes12/18/2022 Colquhoun concluded that there were 50,000, while the City Police put forth a figure of 7000-8000. Mayhew lists a range of earlier figures from 1792, half a decade before his book was published: the Bishop of Exeter claimed a figure of 80,000 in London, a police magistrate, Mr. However, the numbers are inconclusive when it comes to the prevalence of prostitution in Victorian London. Later attempts to penalize prostitution proved unsuccessful: 1766 lodgings (lodgings denoting places where prostitutes lived, not where they worked) were recorded to house prostitutes in 1857, while 1756 lodgings were recorded barely over a decade later, a very marginal decrease (Acton 7). Mayhew wrote that “legislature, by refusing to interfere, ha tacitly declared the existence of prostitutes to be a necessary evil” (212). Even after that, an editorial in The Times decreed that “we cannot import this offence as a crime into our Penal Code” (Thursday Feb 25, 1858). There was no well-defined legislation regarding the regulation or prohibition of prostitution, or even open discussion about such issues until 1858, when the “Chambers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice” met to discuss the issue and provide some outlines on how to manage “houses of entertainment” and the influx of foreign prostitutes into England ( The Times, Friday Jan 15, 1858). In fact, the subject was taboo to the point where even legislators refused and were unable to handle the issue: “the magistracy or the police allowed to enter improper or disorderly houses, unless to suppress disturbances” - they did not even have the capacity to make arrests of those distributing pornographic materials (Mayhew). Though prostitution was widely frowned upon and referred to as the “Great Social Evil” in the mid-nineteenth century, it was also a taboo topic for which the “liberty of the subject very jealously guarded in England,” according to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Wilde’s views largely echoed, even amplified, the sentiments at the time. A prostitute cannot be alive - she can only be “like a live thing.” Unlike some of the other poems that Wilde wrote in a decadent, “l’Art pour l’Art” style, “The Harlot’s House” instead carries heavy moral undertones that indicate Wilde’s strong condemnation of prostitution. In Oscar Wilde’s poem “ The Harlot’s House” (1881), he appears to dehumanize the subjects of his poem he portrays prostitutes as “strange mechanical grotesques” who are just empty and artificial “shadows.” Their existence seems almost tenuous, drifting “like black leaves wheeling in the wind.” To Wilde, these prostitutes are just “horrible marionette” that are hollow, emotionless imitations of real human beings.
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