Skip to main content

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey by Julia Laite review – a sex worker in Edwardian London

Her testimony brought a trafficker down ... the fate of a photographer’s assistant who was lured into prostitution is brilliantly pieced together

There is a moment in this study of Edwardian sex trafficking when the murk of history parts at the sound of a voice. It is a voice so arrestingly poignant that the hidden briefly becomes visible. Picked up for soliciting on the streets of London, Lydia Harvey explains to police why, months before, she failed to solicit a customer on her first night working as a prostitute: “I was thinking too much of home,” she tells them. And there she is, vivid on the evening that a grim reality dawned on her: a girl too far from home to hope for rescue.

Before she was trafficked to London via Argentina in 1910, Harvey was a photographer’s assistant in Wellington, New Zealand. She had come from a provincial home crowded with seven younger sisters and had already quit a position as a live-in maid. She was in search of the wider world. A fellow lodger in her boarding house offered to introduce her to people who could help her to travel. She was promised a job of “seeing gentlemen” and her glamorous new associates helped her compose a letter to her mother with news of work as a nursemaid abroad.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3sDWUny
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more