Victorians Unveiled: Some Thoughts on Mrs Warren's

Profession
Dan H. Laurence

SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Volume 24, 2004, pp. 38-45 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/shaw.2004.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173220

Access provided by Cambridge University Library (18 Mar 2019 13:36 GMT)
 Dan H. Laurence

VICTORIANS UNVEILED:
SOME THOUGHTS ON
MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

According to the critic William Archer,1 the great distinguishing mark of

the Victorian Anglo-Saxon was his ability to be shocked. And shock was
the prime weapon in Bernard Shaw’s arsenal of rhetorical munitions.
The play Mrs Warren’s Profession, as the drama critic Clive Barnes re-
marked some years ago, is Shaw at his best, ‘‘with his prejudices bared and
his hatred rampant.’’ 2 It is a frontal attack on a smug, greedy society of
prostitutes, not merely of whores who provide sexual gratification for a
fee, but industrialists, politicians, clergy, press, country squires—all reap-
ing benefits from the working prostitute without sharing the labor, and
earning knighthoods, baronies, and social prominence in the process.
Some are active investor-partners; others cash in surreptitiously, or accept
the profit without regard for the source. Harlotry, long recognized as the
oldest profession, has throughout recorded time been encouraged, fos-
tered, demanded by a profit-motivated economic system.
And still is. When as recently as 1967 the city council of New York re-
moved licensing requirements for massage parlors, many landlords in
Midtown and on the East Side leased their property to whoremasters in
the face of rising vacancy rates and foreclosures in a weak economy. By
1976 there were almost a hundred parlors in the area of Times Square
alone. In a frustrated attempt to rid the city of a plethora of white slavers,
the mayor’s staff surreptitiously distributed to the press a list of respect-
able institutions and corporations that, through building rents, were gar-

First delivered under the title Victorians Unmasked; or, Will the Real Prostitutes Please Stand
Up, at the annual seminar of the Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, 14 August
1997. Revised and expanded as a plenary address in the conference Shaw’s Brave New World
at Marquette University, Milwaukee, 19 April 2001. Further revised for present publication.
 victorians unveiled: mrs warren’s profession 39

nering enormous profit from the prostitution rings that leased the
properties. The list disclosed a number of highly embarrassed central pil-
lars, ostensibly including clerical dioceses and universities.3
Shaw, who resided for a dozen years in central London, just north of
Soho, was accustomed to being accosted by prostitutes in the street as they
plied their trade. Moreover, from his extensive daily perusal of newspa-
pers in the British Museum and from his committee involvements in the
St. Pancras Vestry and, later, the Borough Council, he was thoroughly fa-
miliar with the vastness of prostitution as an international venture for
profit, like any other form of commerce, enormously lucrative to the great
city estates in London as well as to the Church of England through rents
of houses in which it was practiced. In 1857, the medical journal The Lancet
estimated that one house in every sixty in London was a brothel, and one
female in every sixteen (of all ages) was a whore. 4 On this basis there would
have been more than 6,000 brothels in London and about 80,000 prosti-
tutes.
Prostitution flourished as well in London’s music-halls, notoriously in
the Empire, Leicester Square, a whoremarket patronized by young blades
and military cadets, where girls, who (if experienced) could earn no more
for factory and shop labor than the eighteen shillings a week set by the
London County Council (with novices lucky to earn more than five shil-
lings), could earn twenty to thirty pounds a week operating from the Em-
pire’s lounges: over a thousand pounds a year. When the authorities
shuttered the Empire in 1894 until the management agreed to eliminate
the wet bars by erection of canvas barriers, indignant young patrons of the
bars attacked the barriers, ripping down the canvas. Leading the assault
was a twenty-year-old Sandhurst cadet, who celebrated the victory with a
loud exhortation: ‘‘You have seen us tear down these barricades tonight.
See that you pull down those who are responsible for them at the coming
election!’’ The cadet, who six years later made his maiden speech in par-
liament, was the Honorable Winston Churchill. 5
The press, too, capitalized on prostitution. In New York in October
1905, when Mrs Warren’s Profession achieved a single performance before
being unceremoniously padlocked by the police, the most flagrantly abu-
sive newspaper among those calling for the suppression of the play was
the New York Herald, which, in a front-page review,6 scourged it as ‘‘Morally
rotten . . . and degenerate.’’ The only way one could expurgate it, the
editor harangued, was ‘‘to cut the whole play out. You cannot have a clean
pig sty. The play is an insult to decency.’’ The irony here is that a major
feature of this newspaper was a Personals column, profitably running each
morning to about half a dozen pages, identified by most New Yorkers as
the Whores’ Daily Guide and Compendium, with gaudy advertisements for
‘‘massage parlors’’ run by ‘‘chic Parisian ladies with cozy suite[s],’’ seeking
40 dan h. laurence

the company of ‘‘jolly sports’’ for their houses of assignation.7 A year later
the federal postal authorities demanded the Herald ‘‘cease and desist,’’
slapping the paper with a substantial fine.
Kitty Warren’s decision to join with her sister Liz in capitalizing on pros-
titution grew from the painful experience of a young half-sister, one of
the two ‘‘respectable ones’’ of the family, who died of lead poisoning after
toiling in a white-lead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week.
Other workers like this youngster developed phosphorous poisoning in
the Bryant & May match factory while earning five shillings a week, suc-
cumbing finally to a deterioration of cranial bones, known as ‘‘fossy jaw’’;
or from tuberculosis contracted in a sweater’s den while laboring misera-
bly for twopence an hour. In 1855 and 1856 (the latter the year of Shaw’s
birth), the House of Commons was offered a bill to regulate the labor in
bleaching factories where preteen girls worked eighteen to twenty hours
a day in a temperature mounting to 130 degrees.8 The House rejected the
bill. In 1860 Lord Brougham (former Lord Chamberlain) informed the
House of Lords that in these same factories youngsters of seven or eight
were worked for as many as four consecutive days and nights without
sleep. Again no action was taken. 9
Prostitution, Shaw reiterated in Everybody’s Political What’s What?, was
‘‘an economic phenomenon produced by an underpayment of honest
women so degrading, and an overpayment of whores so luxurious, that a
poor woman of any attractiveness actually owed it to her self-respect to
sell herself in the streets rather than toil miserably in a sweater’s den six-
teen hours a day for twopence an hour.’’10 ‘‘No normal woman,’’ he
stressed earlier, in the 1930 preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession, ‘‘would be
a professional prostitute if she could better herself by being respectable,
nor marry for money if she could afford to marry for love.’’11
Moreover, the luxurious superpayment of whores was related directly to
the Victorian social code of behavior created and dictated by the male of
the species to serve his domestic and social convenience and to gratify his
desire, abetted by laws that gave him total control of his wife’s person—
and her fortune. The prosperous Victorian male sought to marry not a
woman but an upholstered angel whom he could set on a pedestal. His
ideal was a female of delicacy and gentility, who would create a genial,
comfortable, and uncomplicated home for him; but a being of frigidity
and inaccessibility, cohabiting with him only for the purpose of impregna-
tion. The determined philoprogenitiveness of those who could afford to
cultivate large families (like the Barretts of Wimpole Street) became
known as the Cult of the Double Bed.’’ 12
Queen Victoria, with nine offspring, barely made the team. The average
was thirteen or fourteen. Lady Durham, who expired at thirty-five after
birthing thirteen children in seventeen years, was a typical sacrifice to Vic-
 victorians unveiled: mrs warren’s profession 41

torian fecundity. 13 For the wife there was no more sex than the Double
Bed cult provided. Until as late as World War I, medical opinion in Britain
persisted in viewing the genteel woman as devoid of sexual appetite. As
the celebrated gynecologist Dr. William Acton proclaimed, any woman
who achieved orgasm in intercourse with her husband was a whore. 14
For the husband, however, there was a second cult, ‘‘The Cult of the
Double Life.’’ And not even a secret life, for it was widely known. Dr. John
Chapman, distinguished editor of the Westminster Review, for one, domi-
ciled his attractive mistress in the same house as his spouse; the writer
George Eliot shared the home of her lover George Henry Lewes with his
wife, Agnes. In Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, as in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne,
Victorian gentlemen enjoyed the fresh air by driving in expensive car-
riages with the celebrated courtesans for whom they had purchased the
vehicles. Hundreds of husbands nightly poured into the classy bordellos
that had sprung up all over central London, from Mayfair to Bloomsbury,
each presided over by a notorious ‘‘soiled dove’’ like the ravishing madam,
Cora Pearl, while the wife, the epitome of ‘‘perfection,’’ sat quietly at
home, a model housekeeper and mother, gracing her husband’s table,
and providing evidence of a frightening distortion of natural desires and
inclinations.
Amid middle-class males, a harlot or mistress was, on economic
grounds, often preferred to a wife. The Lancet (again in 1857) informed
readers that ‘‘with the increase of . . . luxurious civilization, there is a
diminution of marriage, except in the patrician class,’’ noting that a pro-
gressive decrease between 1796 and 1845 approximated ten percent. ‘‘It
is thought impossible,’’ the article went on, ‘‘in a large class of society now
to marry unless you have a thousand to fifteen hundred pounds a year.’’ 15
The average workingman’s wage was at this time under a pound a
week—or one-twentieth of what society deemed necessary for a wedlock
status. This, even for professional men, shopkeepers, and skilled workers,
resulted in late and ultraprudent marriages—and the resort to whores for
gratification. Restraints on marriage among young men of the middle
class, wrote a correspondent to The Times (1857), were ‘‘the real cause of
our social corruption.’’ 16 Thousands of young men, he lamented, live in
sin. And ‘‘the mischief is on the increase with our increasing worship of
money,’’ which was good news for such capitalists as Mrs. Warren and
Crofts.
In Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw’s indictment is leveled not at prostitutes
but at the social system. It was crucial to Shaw that the play contain no
conscious miscreant on whom audiences could pin blame and thus absolve
themselves of complicity, for Shaw’s fundamental message was that ALL
members of society are blameworthy and must, accordingly, suffer their
consciences to be stricken before leaving the playhouse. Like Vivie in Act
42 dan h. laurence

III, the audience must ‘‘feel among the damned already.’’ To Shaw, com-
plicity of all members of society in the social crime was inescapable.
Further, there were degrees of guilt. Crofts is more guilty than Kitty,
for he, by investing in her, is reaping benefits without the slightest effort.
He is, as Vivie calls him, ‘‘a capitalist bully,’’ exploiting Mrs. Warren. Shaw,
however, neither defends nor condemns Kitty. Though Victorian morality
demanded in the theater that a prostitute either be a villain or be virtuous
at heart and merely weak-willed, thus sentimentalizing her, Shaw presents
Mrs. Warren as neither: she is created solely to reveal an end-product of
society’s guilt. And that guilt grows out of society’s greed for the material.
There is, it must be interjected here, a counterbalance, of course, to
Kitty’s success story, in the thousands of young women who escaped the
bleaching factories only to burn out and expire of disease, addiction, and,
eventually, of starvation—alone and miserable. As this did not relate to
Shaw’s agenda and was not relevant to the direction the play was taking,
he left it unmentioned.
It was Ibsen who inspired Shaw, and Shaw who inspired Granville
Barker, to capitalize in their plays on the materialistic instinct, which be-
comes the driving force of the most dramatic argument as it grapples with
moral imperative. And, parenthetically, after nearly a century, in Britain
at least, the political drama that Shaw and Barker espoused has re-
emerged victoriously in plays like David Hare’s The Secret Rapture and
Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money—and occasionally in America as well, as in
the witty comedy of the late Jerry Sterners, Other People’s Money.
The theme of Mrs Warren’s Profession is almost identical with that of
Shaw’s first and fellow ‘‘unpleasant play,’’ Widowers’ Houses. In the earlier
work Harry Trench, like Vivie Warren after him, passes through a spiritual
crisis of revelation. When he learns that Sartorius, father of his beloved
Blanche, is the worst kind of slum landlord, he piously refuses to touch
the filthy lucre that Sartorius would have settled on Blanche, and thereby
upsets the marriage arrangements, until Sartorius startlingly reveals Tren-
ch’s own complicity in the social crime, from the seven hundred pounds a
year he receives upon a usurious interest rate on slum property. ‘‘Do you
mean to say,’’ asks Trench, ‘‘that I am just as bad as you are?’’ ‘‘If, when
you say you are just as bad as I am,’’ replies Sartorius, ‘‘you mean that you
are just as powerless to alter the state of society, then you are unfortu-
nately quite right.’’ Trench acquiesces, finally, joining ranks with the vo-
luptuaries. Vivie Warren, contrastingly, firmly rejects her mother’s corrupt
earnings, hardening herself against the infected system to which her con-
ventional parent adheres.
Of interest, though unnoted, Trench and Vivie derive from a common
literary source. Just as Shaw drew on characters in Little Dorrit for Widowers’
Houses, he appropriated from one of his favorite Dickens novels the cata-
 victorians unveiled: mrs warren’s profession 43

strophic revelation to Philip Pirrip (better known as Pip) that he has lost
his ‘‘great expectations.’’ Pip, we recall, upon discovering that the source
of his good fortune is the escaped convict Magwitch, rejects further en-
dowment, snobbishly shrinking from his benefactor with loathing, much
as Frank Gardner in Mrs Warren’s Profession, who has been prepared to
prostitute himself by marriage to Kitty Warren’s daughter, withdraws
when he learns the source of her wealth because ‘‘I can’t bring myself to
touch the old woman’s money now.’’
Vivie and Pip are alike in many ways, sharing a lack of culture and of
religious or aesthetic sensibility to fall back on. Pip is, as Vivie defines
herself to Praed, ‘‘an arrogant barbarian.’’ At the end, their world is a
melancholy and desolate place—a world of expectation curtailed—more
cruelly for Pip, who is jilted by his adored Estella and never marries, than
for Vivie, for whom Frank’s abrupt exit fits comfortably in her plans, which
were decided upon before the rise of the Act I curtain and before her
discussion with her mother. Still, there can only be loneliness and isolation
in the individuation that Vivie insists on, ‘‘permanently single’’ and ‘‘per-
manently unromantic.’’
Many viewers or readers of Mrs Warren’s Profession, unable to distinguish
between disenchantment and disillusion, are left dissatisfied with Vivie’s
decision, for to them it appears to be a negation of life. But Shaw never
concerns himself with this. He is satisfied to take a pragmatic view of wom-
en’s search for self-identity, and as a dramatic psychiatrist he is rarely
concerned with what people do, but rather with why they do it. His concen-
tration remains focused on motivation.
Equally frustrating for his audience is the way Shaw introduces an ele-
ment he will then not explore or put to dramatic use. A good example of
this is the issue of consanguinity, which in the play creates questionable
relationships between Vivie and Frank, Crofts and Vivie, and Mrs. Warren
and Frank (the latter couple indulging at the opening of Act II in playful
flirtation), and Sam Gardner and Kitty. Why, the critics ask, does Shaw
introduce the subject of incest into the play if he is not going to develop
it as a theme? Because apparently he is not interested, as Shelley and
Ibsen were, in the dramatic possibilities of the subject, which might in any
event lead him into extraneous tangents. The presence of incest, as Shaw
slips it in, is just sufficient to remind the audience that incest is a natural
consequence of an iniquitous system tolerated by a profit-minded society.
Promiscuous sexual intercourse must inevitably result in the raising of in-
soluble questions of consanguinity, which, apparently, was all Shaw
thought it necessary to do.
More important, Shaw in his play had created his first significant
woman, Vivie Warren, defying Victorian pretensions, strong, determined,
and apart, as all Shaw’s great women will be, through Saint Joan and the
44 dan h. laurence

millionairess Epifania. From the first, Vivie has had to deal with life on
her own. Boarded at schools most of the year and, between terms, lodged
by foster families concerned only for income, occasionally receiving fleet-
ing visits from a woman who allegedly is her mother, Vivie has had to
survive by her own inner drive and by an ability to make her own deci-
sions, untainted by familial ties. Only once does she expose herself as vul-
nerable, when Kitty wins her admiration and sympathy. Ironically, Vivie
is saved from disaster because Kitty, who has rebelled against Victorian
inequities and insensitiveness and has survived by adopting instinctively
the Victorian capitalist morality of doing what pays best, loses her daugh-
ter by falling prey to the debilitating disease of conventionality, which
disenchants and alienates Vivie. One might make a case for the individual-
ist Vivie as the theater’s earliest existentialist.
When Shaw described Mrs Warren’s Profession as an ‘‘unpleasant’’ play,
he was doing so in the Victorian acceptance of the adjective, not just as
something nasty, or distasteful, like swigging a draft of ipecac, but some-
thing unspeakable, something not to be discussed in polite society or in
the presence of one’s wife. In that respect Shaw’s play is akin to Shake-
speare’s Measure for Measure, pervaded by a terrifying world of grotesques,
representing aristocracy, commerce, church, and art, all of them caught
up in their hypocrisies, greed, lust, perverted sense of values, and super-
ficialities—a world whose conventions demand unearned and undeserved
parental respect and obedience by children whose profit-motivated phi-
losophy debauches the sacrament of marriage into mere sex relations for
money and a conviction that one can commit almost any depravity so long
as one doesn’t ‘‘fly openly,’’ as Crofts puts it, ‘‘in the face of society.’’ Its
platitudes by Frank of ‘‘love’s young dream,’’ and by Praed as ‘‘the beauty
and romance of life,’’ reveal a pitiful dependence on illusion, a condition
invariably deplored in Shaw’s work, and one that very few of us face up to
unflinchingly. Not until the death of the Elderly Gentleman in Part IV of
Back to Methuselah will we encounter such unwavering resolve and moral
force in Shaw’s work as we find it in Vivie’s decision (whatever our personal
feelings), and her final moment in the play is certainly painfully Pintere-
sque.
Mrs Warren’s Profession no longer shocks an audience, though it can
make it, as Shaw hoped, ‘‘thoroughly uncomfortable,’’ despite there not
being a single word uttered that could put a strain on our sensibilities.
Considering the amazing increase of frank expression in his own time,
Shaw wondered what it would be like in another fifty years. As he wrote to
Frank Harris in 1931, in urging him not to emulate the tendency toward
obscene speech in the books of James Joyce and the plays of Eugene
O’Neill, ‘‘[E]ven George Moore does not imagine that force in literature
is attained by calling a spade a f——g shovel.’’17
 victorians unveiled: mrs warren’s profession 45

Most important, Mrs Warren’s Profession a century after its initial appear-
ance has not dated in ethical consideration, and still has the power to
overwhelm us with its forceful dialogue. Shaw, in fact, remains unique in
the English language in his skill of creating a play without visible action,
in which the dialogue becomes the action in the cut and thrust of vocal
rapiers and the mental wrestling of the Greek agon, as he creates with a
fine-drawn sense a series of individual temperaments in conflict, blended
in brilliantly orchestrated voices.
Happily, Mrs Warren’s Profession survives as one of Shaw’s most fre-
quently produced plays: not bad at all for the work of a man charged by
his contemporaries in the 1890s with incapacity to write creatively for the
theater.

Notes

1. In his article, ‘‘America and ‘Mrs. Warren,’ ’’ Morning Leader, London (4 November
1905), 4:6. Source supplied by Thomas Postlewait.
2. ‘‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession Is at the Beaumont,’’ New York Times, 20 February 1976,
15:1–4.
3. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995), p. 948. Gratitude to Jacques Barzun for his generous assistance.
4. Cyril Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p.
36.
5. Cited by Winston Churchill in My Early Life: A Roving Commission (New York: Scribner,
1930), p. 57.
6. ‘‘The Limit of Stage Indecency’’ (31 October 1905), pp. 1:6, 5:6.
7. Richard O’Connor, O. Henry: The Legendary Life of William S. Porter (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1970), p. 170.
8. See Hansard Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons (25 July 1855 and Debate
in vol. 139), pp. 1354–69; also 1362B.
9. Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat, p. 52.
10. Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What? Standard Edition, (London: Consta-
ble, 1944), p. 196.
11. Bernard Shaw, Plays Unpleasant (London: Constable, 1930), p. 151. (Collected Edition,
vol. 7.)
12. Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat, p. 88.
13. Ibid., 89.
14. Dr. William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (Philadelphia:
Blakiston, 1857), pagination undetermined. See also Judith R. Walkourtz, Prostitution and
Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 45.
15. Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat, p. 87.
16. The correspondence appeared under the pseudonym Theophrastus. The portion of
the letter reproduced here apparently was cited in The Lancet and quoted in Pearl.
17. Shaw to Frank Harris, ALS (21 April 1931), in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters IV, 1926–
1950 (London: Max Reinhardt, 1988), pp. 235–36.