Books: Underground Victorian

THE ABDUCTORS by Stuart Cloete. 429 pages. Trident Press. $5.95.

South Africa’s Stuart Cloete (rhymes with rooty) is the author of three arresting historical romances about the 19th century Boer settlers and a well-informed study of black Africa (The African Giant). Now his tribal milieu is Victorian England, where white slavery and prostitution flourished underground because a polite society pretended that sexual desire was sinful and disgusting. Cloete’s hero (or villain) is Edward Lenton, a hypocritical English country gentleman who seduces five of his children’s governesses, then ships the sixth off to be broken in at his favorite London whorehouse. Meanwhile, his two daughters, aged five and 15, are kidnaped and sold to a Paris bordello, after which a band of reformers, led by Lenton’s wife and the Salvation Army, cleans up Great Britain—never envisioning that Piccadilly and Soho would one day witness the blossoming of newer and gamier sex-traffic jams.

Cloete writes with a wagonload of wooden cliches, a compelling wealth of historical detail, and a too, too tumescent indignation. He is a leading member of Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society, and he provides an appendix showing that white-slave traffic is still surprisingly busy today. All the same, Cloete’s outrage would be a little more convincing if his rapes, orgies, flagellations and assorted other perversions were described with a little less prurience.