Victorian painters and writers were to some degree obsessed with the image of the fallen woman. The antithesis of the virtuous ideal, the prostitute was deemed to have committed the 'greatest sin of all' and such women were outcasts from family and society. Victorian society saw the prostitute as a once-innocent victim, a pure creature seduced and degraded, who must welcome death as her only escape from an insupportable life of guilt and despair. There was pity - in art, if not in life - for these 'soiled doves'. The fate of the prostitute was usually shown to be poverty, disease, and death, a death chosen by the girl herself in preference to her unhappy life. Thomas Hood's poem The Bridge of Sighs (1844) became a classic stereotype of the harlot and her destiny. Dore's illustration to the poem shows the psychologically dramatic moment when the girl chooses suicide; minutes later she will jump from the bridge and drown in the river below.