The Death of Shame is the fifth book in our Raven and Fisher series, set in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh. It is a time and place where names and fortunes can be made, but where ruination is a constant threat, so the novel deals with dark secrets and the lengths some people are willing to go to protect their reputations. The story begins with an apparent suicide and a plea to find a missing relative, leading Will Raven and Sarah Fisher beneath the respectable veneer of Edinburgh society into the treacherous labyrinth of blackmail, pornography and prostitution that lurks beneath. As with previous novels in the series, The Death of Shame draws deeply upon real historical characters and events for its inspiration.
The story evolved and emerged from a number of sources, but mainly from the journalistic endeavours of WT Stead and the work of feminist and social welfare campaigner Josephine Butler. Research for the book also revealed some surprising details about the prevalence of sexual blackmail during the Victorian era, and the frequently disastrous consequences for those who fell victim to it.
William Thomas Stead was Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to1889. He has been hailed as the father of investigative journalism and but also as the man responsible for creation of the tabloid newspaper. He introduced modern journalistic techniques such as maps, illustrations and interviews, and ran the first 24-point headline in newspaper history. He published sensational stories, full of lurid detail, designed both to titillate and to provoke moral outrage in his readers.
He considered his methods necessary for the greater good, saw himself as a crusader on a moral mission and viewed his editorial position at the Gazette as ‘a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil.’
In 1885 he published a series of controversial articles about child prostitution entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, an expose of the ‘white slave trade’ in London and on the Continent, detailing the sale and violation of young girls, the procuration of virgins, the entrapment and ruin of ‘thousands of women’. Stead claimed to have found a mother who was prepared to sell her daughter into the trade, arranging for the girl to meet with a procuress and a gentleman who would verify her virginity. But this was a manufactured event – a pseudo-event – dreamt up by Stead so that he could report on it, and many of the details in the story were grossly exaggerated or untrue. This reckless act led to Stead being imprisoned for three months for endangering the girl concerned, and was described as ‘the death knell of responsible journalism’. Nonetheless, the articles scandalised the country and Stead’s work is credited with driving the government to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent to sixteen. A compelling factor in this might have been the fact that Stead threatened, if the Bill was not passed quickly, to release the names of significant persons (members of the aristocracy and ‘Royal patrons’) who frequented certain brothels in the city.
Stead was largely unrepentant about his methods. He claimed that ‘nothing can ever get itself accomplished these days without sensationalism’, and following his release from Holloway prison, he wore his prison uniform (adorned with arrows and badge number) every year on the anniversary of his incarceration.
Stead died in the sinking of the Titanic, reportedly having helped several women and children into lifeboats and having given his life jacket to someone else.
The English feminist Josephine Butler, was a political activist who tirelessly campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Introduced in the 1860s, the act gave authorities the right to subject suspected prostitutes to compulsory intimate medical examination in an attempt to mitigate the spread of venereal disease. She was appalled by ‘the shameful inequality of judgment concerning sexual sin in men and women.’ She publicly denounced the prevailing attitude that those who made use of a prostitutes were indulging a natural impulse while those providing these services were viewed as immoral and corrupt.
It took a great deal of bravery on her part to speak out about such subjects in such a morally censorious society where women’s roles were strictly circumscribed and policed. Public discussion of such contentious issues raised more than a few eyebrows. In her Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, she described how one campaign meeting was disrupted by opponents liberally coating the floorboards with cayenne pepper, and another by arson and the intimidation of a violent mob. In the case of the latter, Butler recounts her initial relief at seeing three policemen apparently come to their rescue, then adds: ‘We are safe, we thought. But no! These were Metropolitans who had come from London . . . They simply looked at the scene with a cynical smile and left the place without an attempt to defend it.’
It has been argued that Josephine Butler had much more influence in raising the age of consent than Stead, but Stead’s notoriety means that of the two he is perhaps the better known. The Contagious Diseases Act was finally repealed in 1886.
The morally upstanding Victorian era was a boom time for blackmail. As Angus McLaren puts it in his book Sexual Blackmail, ‘Nineteenth-century middle-class society made a fetish of the cult of sexual respectability . . . As legal and social disapproval of certain forms of sexual behaviour rose, so did the profitability and frequency of blackmail.’ In The Death of Shame, Dr James Young Simpson is depicted as the subject of a blackmail plot, and this is based on real life events. He was accused of fathering a child with a woman other than his wife, a charge he vehemently denied. He protested his innocence, refused to pay the sum demanded and emerged from this potential scandal largely unscathed. Others were not so fortunate. In 1822, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and Britain’s Foreign Secretary, died by cutting his own throat, reportedly driven to it by blackmail and it was only when sexual behaviour became increasingly destigmatised and less clouded in shame (in the 1960s!) did certain forms of blackmail became less prevalent. It could be said that in this respect, the death of shame was long overdue.
