by Gary Dolman
When the R.M.S. Titanic floundered on April 15th, 1912, perhaps the most famous of the fifteen hundred souls who perished that night was the son of a clergyman from a tiny village in northern England. He was the great social reformer and pioneer of investigative journalism, William Thomas Stead, who was travelling on the Titanic to speak at a congress at Carnegie Hall, New York.
W.T. Stead was also the one who exposed what came to be known as the Defloration Mania, one of the greatest social scandals in recent British history.
In July 1885, as editor of the London newspaper The Pall Mall Gazette, Stead published a series of truly sensational articles he entitled, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. These exposed the widespread trade in very young, virgin girls who were procured for rape by so-called gentlemen of the wealthy classes. Stead’s, ‘Infernal Narrative,’ as he referred to it, revealed to a scandalised Victorian readership a seedy underworld of brothels, procuresses and padded chambers, where these gentlemen could revel, ‘in the cries of an immature child.’
Under such thunderous headers as, ‘Virgins, Willing and Unwilling,’ ‘The London Slave Market,’ and, ‘Strapping Girls Down,’ the articles threw Victorian society into a state of moral outrage and achieved as a direct consequence, the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (the Stead Act), whereby the age of consent for girls was raised from thirteen to sixteen years.
In order to demonstrate how easy it was to procure a young girl for prostitution, Stead arranged for the purchase of one Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen year-old daughter of a chimney sweep for £5. However, as a result of what were subsequently considered to be illegal investigative methods, (he had taken the girl away from her home without first seeking the permission of her 
father), he was arrested, tried, and convicted of the, ‘unlawful kidnapping of a minor’, and sentenced to three months in prison.
Thereafter, every November 10th (the anniversary of his conviction), Stead would dress in his prison uniform as a reminder of his ‘triumph’. That Stead was prosecuted under political pressure in an attempt to control the alarming growth of his influence cannot be doubted. He was indefatigable, however, even writing pamphlets from his prison cell, and he continued to harry the establishment right up to his death.
The RMS Titanic sank over a century ago but sadly the evils that Stead fought against through his ‘New Journalism’: corruption, vice, poverty and war have continued almost unabated. In 1871 he wrote about the society of his day which he regarded as being ‘full of dead men’s bones and rottenness’. Anyone who regularly reads this blog will recognise that very same description applies to much of society today. The latest research by the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children suggests that some one in nine children have been contact-abused sexually at some point in their lives. Sadly, The Maiden Tribute is being paid to this day.
Gary Dolman was born in the industrial North East of England in the 1960s but grew up in Yorkshire where he now lives with his wife, three children and dogs. He writes historical crime fiction which explores the very darkest places of the human mind.
