City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

This treatise on fluctuations with regard to class and gender in late 1800s London both informs about the past and reverberates today. Walkowitz's style is sometimes thick but never impenetrable. She does however have a habit of needlessly ending each chapter by stating what will follow in the next. The author (a historian and director of women's studies at Johns Hopkins) analyzes such social phenomena as The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, a notorious four-part newspaper series published in 1885 that chronicled the lives of prostitutes, and the Men and Women's Club, a middleclass group organized that same year to discuss, among other topics, prostitution, the Darwinian evolution of women and what their proper roles might be. The most widely known sexual narrative of the time is the story of Jack the Ripper, and Walkowitz convincingly asserts that its circulation did not increase sexual violence but established a common vocabulary and iconography for the forms of male violence that permeated the whole society. The final chapter on the Yorkshire Ripper murders, committed between 1975 and 1981, ties Walkowitz's theories about backlash against women's freedom to the present day. (Oct.)