Victorian Horror Story

TRAFFIC IN INNOCENTS (230 pp.)--Charles Terrot--E. P. Dutton ($3.75).

One rainy evening in 1881 a weary, bewildered girl of 17 stood in the middle of London's bustling King's Cross Station. A moment before she had stepped off the train from Sheffield, and now she wondered how in the world she would ever thread the maze of the vast city to the house where she had taken service as a nursemaid. Just then an elderly, well-dressed woman with a kindly face stepped up to her. "Can I help you, my dear?" she inquired. Off they went--but not to the right address. They went instead to a dingy house in a dark street, where the girl was imprisoned, raped, beaten and tortured. Then she was shipped off to the flesh marts of the Continent, sold at auction to the highest bidder. She never saw home or family again.

This lurid episode may be a cliche of a thousand Sunday supplement stories about the "white slave" trade, but it actually happened innumerable times in the vociferously moralistic setting of Victorian England. The nature, extent and eventual destruction of the white slave trade in England are described in detail in this modest monograph by a British novelist, Charles (The Neon Rainbow) Terrot. Between mild beige covers, in mild beige prose, he has told a story that makes the ghastliest passages of Dickens read like a parish calendar.

Age of Consent. White slavery, says Author Terrot, was no problem in Britain before the 19th century. The French started the trouble. In 1804 the Code Napoleon, a writ that ran through Western Europe, raised the age of consent to 21, and any man who had sexual relations with a minor could be brought to trial (penalty: two years' imprisonment). Suddenly the Continental whoremongers found it convenient to get their fresh recruits from foreign fields, notably England, where, as Author Terrot puts it, "any child of twelve was legally competent to consent to her own seduction." (Exception: if she stood to inherit property, she was protected until she was 21.) In 1875 the age of consent in Britain was "with extreme difficulty" raised to 13.

During most of the 19th century, Continental procurers found more prospects in Britain than they could place. As the Industrial Revolution developed, the country's population exploded (from 10 million in 1800 to more than 20 million in 1850) and its living conditions collapsed. Anything, even a brothel, seemed better to thousands of working girls than a life in the "dark Satanic Mills" and unspeakable "padding kens" (poor lodging houses) of the urban slums.

Paradoxically, the most effective ally of the flesh peddler was the prude. As a French police official explained, "The education of English girls is usually of such a strictly prudish character that, in their ignorance of the world, they offer themselves the easiest prey imaginable."

Ladies & Gentlemen. Under these favorable conditions, says Author Terrot, white-slave traders managed every year to beguile or betray thousands of young English women into lives of commercial vice. Their methods of recruiting were many and ingenious. The proprietors of the padding kens were on the payroll, as were the managers of "baby farms." Procurers worked hand in glove with society dressmakers, who sent hundreds of girls from the sweatshops to the knocking-shops. The flesh merchants also posed as theatrical agents. One of them, a rogue named Klyberg, assured stagestruck beauties that in Brussels they would "become actresses . . . ladies . .. A lot of gentlemen will come and learn you to play the piano."

Dozens of girls were picked up in railroad stations with the sweet-little-old-lady routine. Immigrant girls from Ireland were scooped up in Liverpool, where they were met at the boat by procuresses dressed as Sisters of Mercy. Better-class girls were taken in by proper-sounding newspaper advertisements. Even upper-class children were not safe. Procuresses of good education proposed themselves as governesses and then abducted the children in their charge. The younger the victim and the higher her station, the better the price she brought. A teen-age girl of the working class was worth no more than -L-20 or -L-30, but a preadolescent of good breeding might bring as much as -L-500 on the block.

Crash Programs. Human contraband, says Author Terrot, was appallingly easy to smuggle out of the country. Small children were frequently doped and shipped across in coffins provided with air holes. Many of the teen-age victims, believing themselves bound for a pleasant position on the Continent, went willingly. The unwilling victim was first "broken in" at the London clearinghouse, where she was brainwashed by a covin of resident witches who subjected her to a crash program of sex education. If she did not cooperate, she did not eat. Then, auctioned off in Brussels or Antwerp, then the chief centers of the trade, the girl was whisked off to the brothel that had bought her.

How could Britain, which had abolished slavery half a century earlier, permit it to continue in this form? For one reason, the subject was "too horrible to mention" in polite Victorian society, says Author Terrot. "The very horror of the crime," wrote a London editor, "was the chief seat of its persistence." After one reform bill was "talked out" of Parliament in the spring of 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette's W. T. (for William Thomas) Stead, a brilliant crusading journalist, published a four-part study entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon that stunned the nation and appalled the world. The reform bill was reintroduced, rushed through Parliament, and became law in August.

Her Majesty's government feebly attempted to save face by railroading Editor Stead to jail on a technicality, but after a few months the law was enforced and the white-slave operation smashed in England. In other parts of the world, particularly in Asia, it continues on a vast scale. How vast? The prudish horror of the Victorian era is matched by the let-a-commission-do-it approach of unshockable modern society. No statistics are available.

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