Scollay Square, Boston, in the late 19th Century. The neighborhood was a center of "sin'' for many decades. The square is long gone.
A version of this first ran in The Boston Guardian
Wicked Victorian Boston, by Robert Wilhelm (History Press, $21.99)
In this entertaining and well-illustrated, if sometimes repetitive, anecdotal survey of “vice’’ and efforts to control it in mid- and late 19th-Century Boston, Mr. Wilhelm looks at how the remnants of Puritan Boston sought to suppress the widespread prostitution, drunkenness, drug abuse, gambling and occasional murder and mayhem that you'd find in any large American city of that time – and ours.
All this titillated residents of other, more, er, relaxed cities given Boston’s reputation for straight-backed rectitude, which wentback to the 17th Century.
The author tries to put the behavior in the context of the city’s rapidly changing ethnic and socio-economic environment. For instance: “The changing ethnic complexion of Boston in the Victorian era was also altering the nature of vice in the city. The rapid influx of Irish immigrants was disconcerting for the old Yankees; they despaired at the newcomers’ fondness for hard drink and gambling and feared that the Catholic newcomers would owe their first allegiance to the pope….’’
But some members of the Yankee community, both Brahmins and middle class, also enthusiastically participated in the sin community, as “young debutantes dabbled in pornography; civic leaders were sued for domestic abuse and {mostly Protestant} clergymen were charged with adultery.’’
Mr. Wilhelm often focuses on such centers of sin and iniquity as “The Black Sea,’’ along the waterfront, and later, the West End. In these places illegal gambling, prostitution, drunks, violence and con men were thick on the ground. Later on, a thriving Chinatown offered such new services as opium dens. Gambling activities included such ghastly spectator “sports’’ as betting on how many rats a dog could kill in a “rat pit’’. Meanwhile, the “third tier’’ of theaters became venues for prostitution. Even such seemingly innocent (if bizarre) sporting events as “pedestrian races’’ would be tinctured with corruption.
Then there were such scams as spiritualists promising access to the dead and quack “doctors’’ selling their services to the gullible. I particularly enjoyed reading about the latter professionals, who provided “oxygenized air’’ (nitrous oxide) for all matter of ailments.
To confront the perceived moral collapse were such anti-vice crusaders as the Methodist minister Henry Morgan and the wonderfully named New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, later to be called the Watch and Ward Society. But, as Mr. Wilhelm writes, that “{The} lines of morality were becoming blurred, and social standing was not a solid indicator of righteous behavior’’ made the war more difficult to wage. (When and where was social standing a “solid indicator of righteous behavior”?)
The anti-vice community succeeded in driving some gambling establishments and brothels out of business, and temperance organizations, in which women had major roles, succeeded in closing some of the worst saloons. Still, human nature remained human nature and new criminal enterprises arose as Boston entered the 20th Century, especially what we now call “organized crime’’.
Now that Boston has become a much more secular and international city these battles over morality seem rather quaint.
Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary and president of the board of Guard Dog Media, which owns The Boston Guardian.
