John Fowles's novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969
What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds--a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never--or hardly ever--have so many great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanised; and flagellation so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss, where Dr. Bowdler (the date of whose death, 1825, reminds us that the Victorian ethos was in being long before the strict threshold of the age) was widely considered a public benefactor; and where the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained--the flushing lavatory came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900--so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one was not constantly reminded of them. […] Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental.
At first sight the answer seems clear--it is the business of sublimation. The Victorians poured their libido into those other fields; as if some genie of evolution, feeling lazy, said to himself: We need some progress, so let us dam and divert this one great canal and see what happens.
While conceding a partial truth to the theory of sublimation, I sometimes wonder if this does not lead us into the error of supposing the Victorians were not in fact highly sexed. But they were quite as highly sexed as our own century--and, in spite of the fact that we have sex thrown at us night and day (as the Victorians had religion), far more preoccupied with it than we really are. They were certainly preoccupied by love, and devoted far more of their arts to it than we do ours. Nor can Malthus and the lack of birth-control appliances* quite account for the fact that they bred like rabbits and worshiped fertility far more ardently than we do. Nor does our century fall behind in the matter of progress and liberalisation; and yet we can hardly maintain that that is because we have so much sublimated energy to spare. I have seen the Naughty Nineties represented as a reaction to many decades of abstinence; I believe it was merely the publication of what had hitherto been private, and I suspect we are in reality dealing with a human constant: the difference is a vocabulary, a degree of metaphor.
[* The first sheaths (of sausage skin) were on sale in the late eighteenth century. Malthus, of all people, condemned birth-control techniques as "improper," but agitation for their use began in the 1820s. The first approach to a modern "sex manual" was Dr. George Drysdale's somewhat obliquely entitled The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, An Exposition of the true Cause and only Cure of the Three Primary Evils: Poverty, Prostitution and Celibacy. […]
The Victorians chose to be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and the way they expressed their seriousness was not to talk openly about sex, just as part of our way is the very reverse. But these "ways" of being serious are mere conventions. The fact behind them remains constant.
[…] We are not so frustrated as the Victorians? Perhaps. But if you can only enjoy one apple a day, there's a great deal to be said against living in an orchard of the wretched things; you might even find apples sweeter if you were allowed only one a week.
So it seems very far from sure that the Victorians did not experience a much keener, because less frequent, sexual pleasure than we do; and that they were not dimly aware of this, and so chose a convention of suppression, repression and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure. In a way, by transferring to the public imagination what they left to the private, we are the more Victorian--in the derogatory sense of the word--century, since we have, in destroying so much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden, destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. Of course we cannot measure comparative degrees of pleasure; but it may be luckier for us than for the Victorians that we cannot. And in addition their method gave them a bonus of surplus energy. That secrecy, that gap between the sexes which so troubled Charles when Sarah tried to diminish it, certainly produced a greater force, and very often a greater frankness, in every other field.
[…]
The vast majority of witnesses and reporters, in every age, belong to the educated class; and this has produced, throughout history, a kind of minority distortion of reality. The prudish puritanity we lend to the Victorians, and rather lazily apply to all classes of Victorian society, is in fact a middle-class view of the middle-class ethos. Dickens's working-class characters are all very funny (or very pathetic) and an incomparable range of grotesques, but for the cold reality we need to go elsewhere--to Mayhew, the great Commission Reports and the rest; and nowhere more than in this sexual aspect of their lives, which Dickens (who lacked a certain authenticity in his own) and his compeers so totally bowdlerised. The hard--I would rather call it soft, but no matter--fact of Victorian rural England was that what a simpler age called "tasting before you buy" (premarital intercourse, in our current jargon) was the rule, not the exception. Listen to this evidence, from a lady still living. She was born in 1883. Her father was Thomas Hardy's doctor.
The life of the farm labourer was very different in the Nineteenth Century to what it is now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place until the pregnancy was obvious... The reason was the low wages paid to the workers, and the need to ensure extra hands in the family to earn.*
[* An additional economic reason was the diabolical system of paying all unmarried men--even though they did a man's work in every other way--half the married man's rate. This splendid method of ensuring the labour force--at the cost cited below--disappeared only with the general use of farm machinery. It might be added that Dorset, the scene of the Tolpuddle Martyrdom, was notoriously the most disgracefully exploited rural area in England.
Here is the Reverend James Fraser, writing in this same year of 1867: "Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where, in one small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing girls--two and sometimes three generations--are herded promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and of nature, dressings, undressings, births, deaths--is performed by each within the sight and hearing of all--where the whole atmosphere is sensual and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine... Cases of incest are anything but uncommon. We complain of the antenuptial unchastity of our women, of the loose talk and conduct of the girls who work in the fields, of the light way in which maidens part with their honour, and how seldom either a parent's or a brother's blood boils with shame--here, in cottage herding, is the sufficient account and history of it all..."
And behind all this loomed even grimmer figures, common to every ghetto since time began; scrofula, cholera, endemic typhoid and tuberculosis.
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