Overview

This book makes an analysis of prostitution in Cambridge in the Victorian period based on different social and cultural discourses as well as on archival materials concerning institutions devoted to the control and regulation of promiscuity and venereal disease. Among them were the Cambridge Union Workhouse, the Cambridge Female Refuge, the Spinning House (Cambridge University Female Prison) or the town and county gaols. Also, data from the census and local and state regulations are of great relevance in the approach to the study of the «Great Social Evil» and its consequences for Victorian Cambridge. The city was divided into «town and gown» at the time, with the University having its power and regulation over all its premises through the Vice-Chancellor’s Court and its system of proctors, while the town council regulated the areas belonging to the city itself through the police. Therefore, University authorities, evangelicals and the middle-class joined their efforts to put an end to immorality, building Cambridge’s architecture of containment of sexual deviance.

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9781789977899

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Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (MA University of Southampton, PhD University of Granada) is currently a Lecturer in Social History and Cultural Studies at the University of Málaga (Spain). She has specialised in the social and cultural history of deviant women and the history of sexuality in Victorian England, although her research interests have since expanded to contemporary gender and sexual identity issues and postcolonialism in Neo-Victorian fiction. Her publications include numerous chapters of books and articles in journals, and she has edited and coedited several international volumes. She is also the author of the monograph The London Lock Hospital in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Sexuality and Social Reform (Peter Lang, 2014). Her most recent publication is the co-edition Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere (2022).

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