Illustration 1. Illustration 2. Illustration 3. Section and Elevation of Extension to Female Refuge, n. My deepest gratitude goes first to my dear friend and colleague, Professor Logie Barrow retired from Bremen University, Germany, who is an academic with a solid career and prestige in the history of the working-classes and the history of medicine in the United Kingdom.
Without his support and advice this monograph would have never seen the light. I also want to express my gratitude to the archivists at the Cambridgeshire Archives because they have always been helpful and supportive in the arduous process of dealing with archival materials and locating manuscripts for my research.
Finally, I would like to put in words my gratitude to my family, and especially to my parents, my children and my partner, who are my inspiration in life.
To all of them I dedicate this work. In this book, he covers the history of the Catholic Magdalene asylums in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries based on archival research in the first part, but in the second part he deals with the cultural representations of these places of confinement for women. The focus is placed on plays and fiction, visual representations like film, and monuments, memorials and art installations dedicated to the Irish Magdalenes.
Nevertheless, it was this idea of an architecture of containment that caught my mind. My aim is to cover some aspects of prostitution in Cambridge in the Victorian period together with all the institutions that dealt with the issue at the time.
