In the mid-19th century, prostitution was at its height of popularity in Victorian England. A total of 8600 documented prostitutes was estimated by the Metropolitan Police Division during 1868, not including the number of those whom the police had not acknowledged (Acton 38). Many male scholars at the time such as William Acton and Henry Mayhew had scrutinized and perceived prostitution as the root of social corruption, despite the fact that it was initiated as an occupation that bestow the social power upon women. As demonstrated from Walkowitz’s many accounts, working women from lower classes received opportunities for better lives through prostitution. But when the casualty from the venereal diseases’ arrived, men in the early 1800s shifted
