There are some things I will wink at...
- in the interests of an entertaining historical romance read.
E.g. you have given your aristo hero the title of an actual member of the House of Lords who was nothing like that. Really nothing like.
I will concede to overlook playing somewhat fast and loose with the laws of inheritance and the state of the laws matrimonial at the period -
I will refrain from being unduly nitpicky about anachronistic linguistic usages.
But, o dearie me.
I lately saw recommendations for a certain historical romance, and went and looked at the free preview.
Quite well-written, I thought. Perhaps the period was a leeetle fuzzy?
But, o dear, no, no, no.
The plot is kicked off by Our Hero, who is A Lord of Strong Religious Sentiments (I am not sure why the author felt obliged to make him a Methodist rather than of the Evangelical tendency within the C of E, though I wonder, on reflection, whether the present-day connotations of 'Evangelical' particularly in the US context might get in the way rather) having an official commission to investigate The Vice Trade.
NO WAI.
I would (perhaps) buy this if he was doing this for the Vice Society or similar: but not on behalf of The Gummint.
Though I would be also be going WOT??? at the extreme unlikelihood that he was going and interrogating actual participants in the Vice Trade, in particular the madame of an establishment offering special pleasures. Maybe he might be interviewing such unfortunates as had fetched up in Magdalen Asylums.
I would point out that even as late as the Wolfenden Committee (appointed 1954, reported 1957), there was no question of actually speaking to any practising sex workers (it did manage to bring itself to interview some educated upper middle class professional gay men), and as far as sex work was concerned, it was primarily bothered (as had been the earlier 1928 Street Offences Committee) by visible street soliciting 'nuisance' rather than the whole array of possibilities.
Yes, there were some accounts but they were undertaken by individuals or organisations with some medical or philanthropic or (by the 1950s) social scientific interest in the topic, and all tended to emphasise what a very difficult subject it was to research.
The idea of a earnest nonconformist British aristocrat doing a Parent-Duchatelet at the behest of Parliament was more than I could reasonably encompass.
So, hard pass.
(Plus, I think that central reversal of standard trope/conflict is not entirely Never Before Seen: I'm pretty sure Courtney Milan does it somewhere.)
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