By Katherine Cornell
Edited by Becky Ross and Mark Potter
‘The Victorians were far from repressed, but they were obsessed with policing sexual rebels and outsiders.’ Discuss.
A watershed in the history of British sexuality, the Victorian period was the era in which the
terminologies commonly used today that shape our understandings of love and sexuality were first coined. However, the rise of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century coupled with the reticence of those Victorians who failed to conform to archetypal patterns of sexual conduct have given rise to the assumption that nineteenth-century sexual practices were characterised by their prudery and conservatism. It is only recently in the historiography of Victorian sexualities that there has been an attempt to challenge this conventional narrative of repressive hypocrisy. Michael Foucault’s seminal text, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, galvanised the new approaches to examining the history of sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s, constitutes the first of these attempts.[1] Taking Foucault’s work as a starting point, this essay will adopt a more nuanced approach to nineteenth-century sexuality, arguing instead that far from being a taboo subject, the Victorians helped to advance many of the medical, judicial, and sexological discourses that legitimised sex as a topic worthy of serious consideration and debate. Discussion will then turn to the various methods used to police sexual rebels and outsiders in Victorian Britain, proposing that pre-existing prejudices about Victorian sexual moralism have distorted twenty-first-century perceptions of the policing of nonconformists. Whilst trials such as those of Oscar Wilde have historically been used as evidence of the obsessive repression of homosexual men, more recent literature suggests that, particularly in the case of female friendships and marriage, the Victorians adopted a far more liberal attitude.
First, however, it is necessary to consider the origins of the stereotypes of high prudery and
repressive sexual policing that dominate earlier writings on Victorian sexuality. Whilst
revisionist historians have attempted to contest these narratives, the circulation of texts such as gynaecological doctor and writer William Acton’s The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the
Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations, first published in 1857, are nevertheless an
indication of a certain reluctance to challenge the founding belief that men and women were
fundamentally different, both in terms of their physical and emotional capacities and their
sexualities.[2] In an oft-quoted passage, Acton claims that “the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” Whilst he does go on to acknowledge the existence of “some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men”, “there can be no doubt”, claims Acton, “that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance.”[3] Acton’s ideas find literary form in Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem, The Angel in the House, published in parts between 1854 and 1862. The ideal of the domestic ‘angel’ enshrined a sexual double-standard in Victorian Britain and was reflected in nineteenth-century conduct books and manuals that attempted to instruct young women on ‘proper’ moral behaviour. Arguably, however, the rapid proliferation of writings on ethical and religious subject matters in nineteenth-century Britain indicates that ultrafeminine behaviour was not innate if it had to be taught.[4]
Whilst the ubiquity of extreme views toward femininity such as Acton’s should not be
exaggerated, the rapid decline in births in Britain from 1820 is suggestive of some of the
barriers faced by those women who did enjoy sex, including sexual abuse and risk of
pregnancy.[5] Queen Victoria herself famously loathed pregnancy, as expressed in a letter she wrote to Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, regarding Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna’s desire to breastfeed her newborn son herself: “As long as she remains at home – and does not publish the fact to the world – by taking the baby everywhere...I have nothing to say (beyond my unfortunately – from my very earliest childhood – totally insurmountable disgust for the process).”[6] Victoria’s abhorrence of the idea of breastfeeding may be better understood when set in the context of a society in which female bodily functions were seen as a cause for embarrassment and shame. Such views reflect the stifled nature of both male and female sexualities in Victorian Britain more generally and were reinforced by the late nineteenth-century social purity movement. The campaign, which flourished between 1880 and 1914, sought to make society more moral by promoting sexual abstinence, condemning those practices considered unethical according to Christian doctrine.[7] Since Victorian morality was founded upon the separation of the domestic sphere from the public arena, prostitutes working on the streets of Britain’s towns and cities were the primary focus of the reform movement from the mid-nineteenth century. It was not, however, until the passing of the notorious Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs) in the 1860s that any serious attempt was made by the state to regulate prostitution, ostensibly to curtail the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men.[8] Whilst to legally prohibit prostitution per say was, according to Home Secretary Charles Ritchie, “out of the question – so long as human nature is what it is, you will never entirely get rid of it...”, the CDAs reflected a new enthusiasm for the sanitary reforms of the mid-nineteenth century and increased state intervention into the lives of the working classes on medical grounds.[9] In response to growing demands for the regulation of prostitution by organisations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the mid-nineteenth century bore witness to a police crackdown on entertainment venues such as the Argyll Rooms, a fashionable night haunt of prostitutes in London’s West End.[10] Lock wards designed specifically to provide compulsory treatment to prostitutes accused of carrying venereal disease in Britain’s major hospitals further enshrined this new gendered approach to the regulation of sexuality in contemporary medical discourses.[11]
Despite the intensification of sustained efforts to regulate public solicitation from the 1850s, in his discussion of sex work amongst the English aristocracy Michael Mason challenges the
stereotype of the sexually repressed Victorian, arguing instead that the traditional model of
nineteenth-century prudish conservatism was a middle-class invention.[12] Although aristocratic sexual practices became somewhat more refined from the 1830s in comparison with earlier eighteenth-century debaucheries, private brothels catering for the upper classes, contends Mason, were on an almost national scale.[13] There is evidence, too, of a tradition of radical literature in nineteenth-century Britain advocating for a single standard of sexual freedom for men and women, which surpass Acton in their circulation. A set of alternative sexual writing first popularised by radical Richard Carlile, Every Woman’s Book: or, What is Love? sold 10,000 copies in 1828 within five months of publication. In a similar vein, in 1878 Annie Besant’s The Law of Population: Its Consequences and Its Bearing Upon Human Conduct and Morals exceeded even Carlile’s work, selling 35,000 copies within a year of publication. Both texts promoted easier marital separation and contraception, with Carlile in particular proposing that “the passion for love” is for every healthy woman after the age of puberty “as natural a consequence as hunger or thirst.”[14] Developing alongside writings such as these, emerged a second set of literature that has previously received little attention in the historiography of Victorian sexuality. As demands for greater access to information relating to sexual practices grew, so did an underground trade of mainstream writings designed both to sexually arouse and to offer advice and remedies to readers experiencing an array of disfunctions and disorders, from menstruation to impotence and sterility. Advertisements for medical advice and remedies encouraged readers to write in with a brief description of their various ailments, often charging a fee of four shillings and sixpence, although sometimes as much as a guinea. The nostrums and advice sent out to readers upon receipt of payment were usually cheaply made compounds composed primarily of mercury. Judging by the recurrence of such advertisements in radical and sporting publications throughout the nineteenth century, the demand for sexual advice and remedies among readers was considerable.[15] This demand cannot, however, be understood when taken in isolation of the context of extensive sexual repression in which it was set. The growing public clamour for more information on sex-related matters can be seen as a counter to the stifling censorship of such issues by society at large. Nonetheless, the existence of this set of writings poses a challenge to traditional narratives about Victorian moral puritanism that have hitherto dominated the history of nineteenth-century sexuality. Pamphlets such as those
advertising two early nineteenth-century anatomical exhibitions in London’s fashionable West End [fig. 1] provided another supply-demand channel for sexual health-related information among Britain’s urban populations.[16]
Turning now to a discussion of lesbian subculture in Victorian Britain, despite the double
standards inherent in the regulation of prostitution, some women could escape such vigilant
sexual policing. Since the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, which replaced the
sixteenth-century Buggery Act, defined sodomy in terms of penetrative intercourse, lesbian sex was not a criminal offence. Although the authenticity of the claim that Queen Victoria refused to sign legislation prohibiting sex between women because she refused to accept the existence of such a practice is doubtful, it does reflect wider fears that any official attempt at prohibiting lesbian sex would draw attention to a possibility of which it was believed many women had hitherto been oblivious.[17] Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, or the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, are a case in point. Despite sharing a bed for more than fifty years, they were nevertheless perceived by most as nothing more than a charming tourist attraction. Moreover, those women who lived with one another in what were socially recognised as female marriages were able to retain the financial autonomy that wives in heterosexual marriages were denied under the practice of coverture.[18] To the extent that they kept many of the legal rights relinquished by the latter, women in female marriages enjoyed a greater amount of freedom than their legally married counterparts. As Butler and Ponsonby’s purportedly sexless relationship was sentimentalised by nineteenth-century observers, so romantic friendships between adolescent girls and young women were often seen as a good means of preparing for married life.[19] Ten-year-old Emily Pepys’s journal entry about her “extraordinary” dream, which involved “a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to!” presents a further challenge to traditional narratives about Victorian prudery.[20] Typical of a society in which female friendships were the cornerstone of domesticity, in her account Pepys appears less appalled by the prospect of marrying a woman than mildly bemused.[21] It should be noted, however, that female marriage was a practice reserved primarily for upper-class women. While many working-class women did still choose to cohabit, it was more common for one partner to live as a female husband.[22] Moreover, the latitude granted to women in female marriages hindered the growth of a lesbian subculture in Victorian Britain by rendering it somewhat invisible to the public eye. Nevertheless, the bonds, romantic and otherwise, many women could and indeed did form with one another in the nineteenth century present a direct challenge to the assumption that the Victorians obsessively policed all sexual rebels and outsiders.
Whilst it is true that homosexual subculture was not treated with the same level of tolerance as lesbianism, more recent scholarship has attempted to redress the assumption that the
comparative freedom afforded to women in female marriages was necessarily denied to all homosexual men. Indeed, male prostitution was widespread in Victorian Britain, and working-class men, in particular, were not always censured for having sex with other men if it meant that they could provide for their families. Moreover, by exerting physical domination over their partner, men were able to retain their masculinity. Despite gay sex first having been outlawed in 1533, it was often overlooked by the police in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, if not between men of different classes. Where arrests were made, they usually involved men who had engaged in gay sexual activities in more public spaces.[23] However, in part due to the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, which criminalised “gross indecency”. Sex between men was far more visible in Victorian Britain than lesbian sex. Sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing further promoted the idea that homosexuality was not a sin but a congenital defect causing a sexual inversion of the brain. Whilst legal trials for sodomy, such as the case of Oscar Wilde in 1895, deepened nineteenth-century suspicions that all close male friendships were necessarily sexual, such public exposure cemented the term ‘homosexual’ in the English language by 1900.
Thus, whilst the stereotypes of moral strictness and sexual conservativism prevailed in
traditional accounts of nineteenth-century sexuality are not entirely unsubstantiated, it is clear from a study of Victorian prostitution and sexual subcultures that Victorian society was in many ways far more progressive than has previously been assumed. Since the prevailing view of sex was phallocentric, lesbian subculture, in particular, escaped the heavy policing that many homosexual men were subjected to. However, in the case of the latter, the publicity generated by the persecution of gay sex, especially when it was cross-class, helped to inaugurate many of the discourses that have shaped our understanding of homosexuality today. Although sexual rebels and outsiders were by no means universally accepted by Victorian society at large, the conventional model of obsessive sexual repression and policing is outdated and misleading.
Figure 1: Leaflets advertising two nineteenth-century anatomical exhibits in the West End
Notes
[1] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976).
[2] William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1875); Jeffery Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1981), p. 48.
[3] Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations, pp. 162-163.
[4] Holly Furneaux, ‘How repressed were the Victorians?’, Romantics & Victorians, The British Library, 15 May 2014.
[5] Susie L. Steinbach, ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, in Susie L.
Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 243-244.
[6] Queen Victoria to Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, 27 January 1875, cited in Julia P.
Gelardi, From Splendour to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847-1928 (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 2011), p. 75.
[7] Steinbach, ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, p. 251.
[8] Weeks, Jeffery, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (Harlow:Longman Group Ltd., 1981), pp. 100-104.
[9] Charles Ritchie, Public Record Office: Home Office 45: B13517/35/41, cited in Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 104; Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 71.
[10] Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 42.
[11] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, pp. 231-232.
[12] Michael Mason, ‘Codes and Classes’, in Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 105-106.
[13] Mason, ‘Codes and Classes’, p. 110.
[14] F. Barry Smith, ‘Sexuality in Britain, 1800-1900: Some Suggested Revisions’, in Martha
Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 188-189; Richard Carlile, Every Woman’s Book: or, What is Love? (London: R. Carlile, 1828), p. 7.
[15] Smith, ‘Sexuality in Britain, 1800-1900: Some Suggested Revisions’, p. 193.
[16] Mason, ‘Codes and Classes’, p. 150.
[17] Steinbach, ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, p. 249.
[18] Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 157.
[19] Steinbach, ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, p. 250.
[20] Emily Pepys, cited in Marcus, Between Women, p. 11. For a fuller edition of the journal, see Gillian Avery (ed.), The Diary of Emily Pepys (London: Prospect Books, 1984).
[21] Emily Pepys, cited in Marcus, Between Women, p. 11.
[22] Marcus, Between Women, pp. 162-163.
[23] Steinbach, ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, pp. 247-248.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Acton, William, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood,
Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral
Relations. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1875
Carlile, Richard, Every Woman’s Book: or, What is Love? London: R. Carlile, 1828
Queen Victoria to Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, 27 January 1875
Ritchie, Charles, Public Record Office: Home Office 45: B13517/35/41
Secondary Sources
Avery, Gillian. (ed.), The Diary of Emily Pepys. London: Prospect Books, 1984
Bland, Lucy. ‘Marriage Laid Bare: Middle-Class Women and Marital Sex, 1880s-1914’, in
Jane Lewis, Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1986
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976
Furneaux, Holly, ‘How repressed were the Victorians?’, Romantics & Victorians, The British
Library, 15 May 2014
Gelardi, Julia P. From Splendour to Revolution: The Romanov Women, 1847-1928. New
York: St Martin’s Press, 2011
Harrison, Brian. ‘Underneath the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, 10 /3, 1967
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007
Mason, Michael. ‘Codes and Classes’, in Mason, Michael. The Making of Victorian
Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
Smith, F. Barry. ‘Sexuality in Britain, 1800-1900: Some Suggested Revisions’, in Martha
Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977
Steinbach, Susie L. ‘Marriage, Free Love, and “Unnatural Crimes”: Sexuality’, in Susie L.
Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Routledge, 2011
Walkowitz, Judith. Prostitution and Victorian Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982
Weeks, Jeffery. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. Harlow:
Longman Group Ltd., 1981
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