Free Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster Page B

were mobbed as crowds fought to obtain sheets still wet from the press and the police had to be called in to maintain order. Secondhand copies sold at twelve times the normal cost. Soon public meetings and angry demonstrations in support of the Criminal Law Amendment Act took place all over Britain. The Salvation Army amassed 393,000 signatures on a petition a mile and a half long and marched with it in a giant roll to Westminster under a banner saying, [WE] DEMAND THAT INIQUITY SHALL CEASE . Parliamentarians quickly bowed to public pressure and the CLA Act (informally dubbed “Stead’s Law”) received royal approval on August 14, with Queen Victoria noting that she “had pleasure in giving my assent.”
    But Stead himself was soon to become a victim of “Stead’s Law.” One of the most sensational stories in the “Maiden Tribute” series was entitled “A Child of Thirteen Bought for £5.” It described how a Cockney girl named “Lily” had been purchased from her drunken mother, taken to a midwife to attest to her virginity, and then to a brothel where she was put to sleep with chloroform. As the story ends, Lily is awakened when her “purchaser” enters the room. “There’s a man in the room!” she screams. “Take me home; oh, take me home!” What the article neglected to mention was that Lily’s abduction had been engineered as a test case by Stead. He was the man who had entered the room posing as her “purchaser,” after which the girl had been spirited off to France in the care of Bramwell Booth, the head of the Salvation Army.
    Rival newspapers began to dig into the story and soon Stead’s enemies saw their chance. On September 2, 1885, he and those who had assisted him in “buying” the child were arraigned in court on charges of abduction and procurement. Stead defended himself ably but was convicted on a technicality—that he had not secured the permission of the girl’s father. The judge’s hostility to Stead was evident throughout the trial and his instructions to the jurors left them with little choice except conviction. The judge even told the jury that they should not be prejudiced “because in the streets some months ago were circulated … an amount of disgusting and filthy articles.” Yet it was Stead’s shattering of the language taboo that was perhaps the “Maiden Tribute’s” greatest achievement. What had formerly been “disgusting and filthy” could now be written about openly, allowing a widely ignorant public to glean useful information on sexual matters.
    On November 10, 1885, Stead began a prison sentence of two months and one week. On every November 10 after his release, he would don his prison uniform and proudly walk about the streets. Yet “Stead’s Law” would have wider-reaching consequences than the newsman himself had ever imagined. During the debate on the CLA Act in the House of Commons, a Liberal member named Henry Labouchère had questioned why sexual acts between men should not be included in the bill. The late addition of the Labouchère Amendment made any act of “gross indecency” between men punishable by two years in prison—thus criminalizing homosexuality in Great Britain for the next seventy-two years.
    Ten years after the passing of the CLA Act, the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde launched a libel suit against the brutish Marquess of Queensberry for a note he had left at Wilde’s club calling him “a posing somdomite [ sic ].” Queensberry was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and he had been stalking and harassing the playwright for months. When Wilde lost the case, he was charged and convicted of “gross indecency” and sent to prison for the two years of hard labor that the law required. W. T. Stead assailed the hypocrisy of Wilde’s conviction, noting that “if all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde’s offences were to be clapped into gaol [jail], there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow,