![]() In "Christmas in Silver Street" the 17-year-old Sugar prepares for Christmas Day, after a night of entertaining clients. The Apple provides plenty more details of the Victorian prostitute's trade, but with an uncertainty of tone that seems the consequence of the short-story form. There are plenty of prostitutes in 19th-century English novels, but they are represented as "fallen women", tricked into an occupation they barely comprehend. On the other hand, it admitted to fiction the stuff of social history, and especially sexual history, that Victorian novelists themselves kept out. It filled its pages with the circumstantial detail lovingly collected from months of research. The Crimson Petal and the White managed to be both Victorian and anti-Victorian. ![]() ![]() His hypocrisy as a sex-obsessed Victorian patriarch brought him low in the novel, and this further punishment feels rather dismal. ![]() Unhappily remarried, sozzled in port and patent medicines, he fantasises woozily about his earlier amours. Sugar was bought out of the brothel by rich perfume manufacturer William Rackham, whose future is related in another tale. One of them shows her scheming to make her fortune by hooking a wealthy client - a disconcerting prequel when the novel strived to make you believe in her weird innocence. ![]() A couple of these new stories feature Sugar, the prostitute heroine of The Crimson Petal, before she had the adventures it narrated. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |