Babylon

the ancient capital city of the Chaldee Empire; hence any great or luxurious city, in this case London

In the early 1900s perhaps the most famous use of this name for London would still have been in the title of W. T. Stead’s sensational articles in his Pall Mall gazette in 1885. ‘The maiden tribute of modern Babylon’ reported Stead’s ability to buy under-age (that is under 13 years old) girls for sex, in the East End of London, for £ 5 to £10. These sensational articles achieved the desired effect of influencing the new Parliament to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which had been ‘talked out’ before the fall of the Gladstone administration. This act made carnal knowledge of a girl under 13 a felony, and of one under 16 a misdemeanour. At a late stage the ‘Labouchère amendment’ (clause 11) made sexual acts between men, in public or private, misdemeanours also (the clause under which Oscar Wilde was tried after his failed criminal libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury).