208
STEVEN MARCUS
remained impossible to form a reliable estimate of the number of
prostitutes in London-figures ranging anywhere from 6,000 to
80,000 and above were offered. Nor was the exchange or gathering
of knowledge from the private practice of physicians anything but
primitive. "There is in our profession very little interchange of notes
and statistics," he complains, "and no organized correspondence with
any body or society, and I fancy no medical man could draw a sound
deduction as to the greater or less prevalence of any particular disease
from the state of his own practice." Such remarks call to mind
Tertius Lydgate and George Eliot's description, in
Middlemarch,
of the state of medical practice in the England of an earlier genera–
tion. Indeed there are a number of correspondences between Lydgate
and Acton, and in a curious way acquaintance with Lydgate has
the effect so to speak of authenticating Acton, of filling him out, of
making him seem less strange or out of the ordinary-which demon–
strates how literature can sometimes help to retrieve the actuality of
an unknown or forgotten person from the dust-heap of history.
Both Lydgate and Acton studied in France, and it is to France that
Acton turns whenever he wishes to form a comparison. The question
of prostitution had received there consideration "which has been
denied to it at home; experiments have been tried on the continent
which we in England have hitherto declined to make." And he coun–
sels his readers to shake off national prejudice and extend to foreign
institutions the "patient and impartial examination that we would
demand for our own." And he turns first to France, he says, not only
as England's "nearest neighbor," but "as the country that has always
led the way in the advance of modem civilization and the growth
of modem ideas." Matthew Arnold's "note of provinciality" is not
being sounded here, however remote from sweetness and light Acton's
subjects may be. But it must be remembered to his honor, as Paget
said, that "he practiced honorably in the most dangerous of special–
ties," and that "he wrote decently on subjects not usually decent."
As
a writer, Acton has a kind of raw talent; his powers of
observation are often acute, but they, like his prose, are equally often
undisciplined and out of hand. Again the comparison with Lydgate
is in order. Here, for example, are some extracts from Acton's account
of a visit he made one "pleasant July evening" to Cremorne, the
famous pleasure gardens in Chelsea.
