The essay I’m working on began its life in OmniOutliner in a dorm room in Limerick, Ireland, in the summer of 2005. We’d been living for a couple of weeks in a tiny room in London, I’d nearly been blown up in a terrorist attack, and it had been really rather warm. When we got to Ireland for Shelley’s conference, we found that compared to our tiny, tiny flat in Kensington, the dorm rooms were palatial. Huge. Bigger than our flat. And we each had one to ourselves. We looked at each other, said “See you later” and spent the next few days doing our own thing. Shelley would go off to her conference stuff for the day; I would write; we would meet up in the afternoon and evening for meals.
I had many pages of notes to cull through, and while all of it was fresh in my mind, I began composing an essay about it all in OmniOutliner.
This essay has now been to three journals, rejected by two (from one outright, one with bizarre comments, and one with excellent, excellent, feedback and an invitation to heavily revise and send it back in for reconsideration as a new submission). Another project intervened (an essay for a collection), and I taught a pile of courses that took all my time, so I’m only now getting back to it.
I had made changes here and there, mostly writing up a long discussion of the critical and theoretical discussions about Victorian prostitution specifically (mostly Walkowitz, Mahood, Nead, Armstron, and Foucault) and Victorian sexuality broadly. I also need to amplify some of my existing discussion, but I’m spending most of my time right now flailing about, trying to clarify the argument.
What I’m trying to do is, in some ways, simple. I’m dealing with a magazine that hasn’t been available to American scholars in its entirety, and so even though there have been two articles specifically about it and loads of references to it in the scholarship, most of that has relied on an incomplete look at the journal. As a result, some inaccurate assumptions—primarily about audience—have been made along the way. So on the simplest level, I’m trying to explain just why this magazine existed and who it was read by.
Additionally, I’m trying to explain how the magazine allows us to see a serious debate about how reclamation work could best be accomplished. There were nearly as many methods of reclamation as there were institutions of reclamation, and the magazine offers us a remarkably clear insight into just how and why they differed—and perhaps most importantly, it allows us to see them mounting arguments against one another. The result is that the magazine helps us to see the sheer complexity of this movement, its internal debates, and its competing philosophies. More importantly, it contains discussions of the real-world implications of those philosophies and raises interesting, practical, concerns about the reclamation movement (e.g. two-year periods of confinement are impossible for many women to accept; few options were available for women with children; as word spread about the rules of some of the harsher institutions, it prejudiced women against all institutions).
Additionally additionally, I’m focusing on a specific element of the magazine. Nearly every issue contained a report from what were sometimes called “midnight meetings” or “moonlight missions.” These were begun by a Lieutenant John Blackmore, and the idea was that roving bands of missionaries would descend upon the streets of metropolitan areas and invite prostitutes to attend meetings. The magazine contains the reports of these meetings, which often contain remarkable insights into the ways these workers perceived the women they were working with. Specifically, what we often see are these workers expecting to find prostitutes and fallen women who are vain, depraved, and addicted to various vicious substances but instead encountering domestic servants who have been dismissed from service without hope of other employment and forced into prostitution in order to support themselves. These moments of dissonance, and the ways in which the workers attempt to reconcile it, provide access to ways of thinking about prostitution that are otherwise unavailable to us.
The problem for me is that it is difficult to discuss these separately, and so structuring the essay has become a real nightmare. Today, I pulled the introduction back into OmniOutliner so I could really attend to structure. I think I’m going to try to force it into sections tomorrow.