Frank Mort

Striptease: the erotic female body and live sexual entertainment in mid-twentieth-century London ∗

On a rainy Friday evening in the autumn of 1961 a young policeman turned into Walker’s Court, off Soho’s Brewer Street in London’s West End, and went into a strip club, advertised from the street with a neon sign as the Raymond Revuebar. A narrow, early nineteenthcentury alley that was ‘busy by day, even busier and more garish by night’, Walker’s Court epitomized the compressed nature of Soho’s local economy, where cafes, hardware stores, and wine merchants co-existed alongside a thriving commercial sex trade. Dressed in plain clothes and acting under the alias of James Edwards, a draftsman from Fulham, Sergeant Derek Caiels was posing as a punter for sex. Caiels joined a sizeable queue of well-dressed men outside the club who included European and American tourists and London businessmen, as well as English provincials down for a night on the town. He showed his newly-acquired membership card at reception, paid 15/6d for a ticket, climbed the stairs to the club’s lounge bar and ordered a beer. Judged by the standard of many West-End strip clubs, the Revuebar was expensively furnished, hosting a restaurant, a fully equipped theatre, and a casino. The promoters promised

Transforming Metropolitan London 1750-1960

Charles Baudelaire, the lyric poet of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, reminds the urban historian that the metric for the rapidly changing form of the city is not simply the achievement of planners’ visions or the rise and fall of land values but the vagaries of the human heart. Canvasing both urban poetics and politics, but shifting the focus to London, the articles in this issue are all concerned with the transformation of the metropolis in the two hundred years from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. They seek to map out and exemplify new ways of approaching the cultural history of the English capital, as well as revisiting more well established questions about the nature of urban planning, environmental reform, and the experience of modern metropolitan life. The collection began as a symposium on histories of urban change, held in London in July 2002. This was one of a series of meetings funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council under the title ‘‘Transforming London: Rethinking Regeneration through Commerce, Planning and Art.’’ The discussions, involving both academics and practitioners, focused on the dynamic interaction between civic, commercial, and cultural programs that have shaped and continue to shape lives and landscapes in the

On Tour with the Prince: Monarchy, Imperial Politics and Publicity in the Prince of Wales’s Dominion Tours 1919–20

The stage managers of ritual and the media transformed the British monarchy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, consolidating its image as splendid and popular and also as more accessible and quasi-democratic. Historians have emphasized that these processes of modernization largely began in Britain. This article locates the origins of democratized royal ritual in the white dominions, especially after 1918. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were political and cultural laboratories where royal advisors and British and dominion politicians launched experiments in the practice of progressive empire and innovatory styles of informal ceremonial, which had a long-term impact on imperial and later Commonwealth relations. Focusing on the Prince of Waless early dominion tours, the article argues that though royal diplomacy followed earlier itineraries in efforts to consolidate the racialized British world, it also threw up new and unintended consequences. These registered the rapidly changing international order after the collapse of the European monarchies, together with the demands of the princes own modernist personality. Faced with republican and socialist opposition in Australia and Canada, the touring prince was drawn into competing forms of nationalism, as dominion politicians and journalists embraced him as representing domestic aspirations for self-government and cultural recognition. It is argued that modern royalty personified by the Prince of Wales problematizes the history of twentieth-century public reputations defined by the culture of celebrity. The British monarchy was forced to confront both the constitutional claims of empire and the politics of dominion nationalism, as well as the pressures of international publicity.

Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830.

Dangerous Sexualities takes a look at how our ideas of health and disease are linked to moral and immoral notions of sex. Beginning in the 1830s, Frank Mort relates his social historical narratives to the sexual choices and possibilities facing us now. This long-awaited second edition has been thoroughly updated to include new discussions of eugenics, race hygiene and social imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a new and extended bibliography, introduction and illustrations, this second edition brings a classic into the 21st Century.