The Picture of Dorian Gray: Advanced York Notes

Crime and punishment

The links between crime and sexuality gave rise to a variety of new legislation, some of it counter-productive. Syphilis was becoming a serious problem and the government’s first solution was the Contagious Diseases Act of 1861, empowering the police to force suspected prostitutes to be examined for signs of disease. Given that walking alone in the street was considered viable grounds for suspicion, outraged women campaigned furiously for the Act’s repeal and demanded greater male accountability. One of most prominent champion of prostitutes, Josephine Butler, quoted one of the women in her care: ‘It is men, only men, from first to last that we have to do with … . I was flung about from man to man … we never get out of the hands of men till we die’ (quoted in Walkowitz, p. 92).

An important part of Butler’s platform was the raising of the age of consent from thirteen. Parliament stalled the issue for years, but in 1885 W. T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette published a four-part article called The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, detailing the trafficking of women on a vast scale and describing how Stead had been able to ‘buy’ a young girl for five pounds. Couched in sensationalistic terms, the articles whipped up massive public indignation. Though disgraceful views were expressed in Parliamentary debates (some MPs remarked that the girls had already been defiled so it didn’t matter what happened to them), the government had no choice but to act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act was swiftly passed.

The speed of the Amendment led to some poorly phrased measures which had problematic consequences. Regulations about what constituted a ‘brothel’ meant that many prostitutes were forced to work the streets, making them vulnerable to attack. Clause II, introduced by the Liberal Lord Henry Labouchère in an attempt to protect young boys as well as girls, criminalised even consenting homosexual acts between adults in private. Clause II meant that any man could now be accused of a ‘crime’ to which the only witness was his partner. The Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, when a member of the royal family escaped prosecution after a police raid on a brothel staffed by young Post Office workers (who did not escape prosecution), created a climate of prejudice that rendered homosexual men very vulnerable.

Rapidly, the Labouchère Amendment became known as ‘the blackmailer’s charter’. The practised way in which Dorian produces a letter written in advance in order to force Alan Campbell to get rid of Basil’s body suggests that he is all too familiar with the mechanics of this process. Wilde had been blackmailed by men of lower social standing, and had handled the situation so that nobody had been disgraced. However, the Cleveland Street affair had created the desire for a high-profile prosecution. Arguably, some of those who might have saved Wilde were willing that he should be sacrificed so that figures in the government and the royal family might be spared. As many gay critics have since pointed out, Wilde’s celebrity and the fact that he was one of the first to be prosecuted meant that the newly coined term ‘homosexual’ was irretrievably coloured by the image of Wilde, even though he had never applied it to himself.

The prisons to which Victorian convicts were sent were also changing. The emphasis of the Victorian penal code was on repentance, reform and hard work. In practice this could be worse than the punishments of the previous century designed to terrify the onlooker into obedience. Prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another, as they were supposed to concentrate on their sins. They were denied reading matter other than religious tracts. They worked at ‘picking oakum’ – the recycling of old tarry rope – which caused agonising pain in the hands or spent long hours walking on the treadmill, the whole point of which was that it achieved nothing. Flogging was the standard means of maintaining discipline.

Prisoners were also subjected to endless sermons and Bible readings. Wilde noted that the uniformly most hated aspect of prison life was this charade of Christian benevolence. It seemed that his fellow prisoners shared his opinion of Victorian hypocrisy and might well have found Lord Henry’s loathing of ‘philanthropy’ very much to their taste.