First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
PEN & SWORD HISTORY
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Copyright Fern Riddell, 2014
ISBN 978 1 78159 286 1
eISBN 978 1 47383 727 0
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to the staff at the British Library, to Rebecca Storr and Rory Cook of the Science Museum for their help and support in tracing all manner of surprising Victorian sexual ephemera, and to Dr Chris Naunton and the Egypt Exploration Society for the eleventh-hour Flinders Petrie revelations. I am grateful to both the British Newspaper Archive and Queen Victorias Journals Online for allowing me to include quotations from their unique archives. Special thanks go to Beverley Cook of the Museum of London for her advice and knowledge, and my supervisor, Dr Paul Readman, for allowing me the precious time needed away from my PhD to complete this book.
To the community of historians around the world who have taken an interest in this book and who have continually sent me references and recipes my grateful thanks. Charlie Tanner, Johanna Gummet and Fflur Huysmanns your help and support were incredible. My gratitude also goes to John Gallagher and Maxime Ducrue for proofreading and translation. Any mistakes found in this book are my own.
I extend thanks to my brilliant editor, Jen Newby, to Steven Kirk for his beautiful illustrations, and to publishers Pen & Sword for being the first to take a chance on a new author.
I dedicate this book to my family.
The Society of Social Morality presents a selection of volumes
Taken from the accounts of its meetings
For the furthering of knowledge and
Human social understanding.
Introduction
The Victorians Societies and Their Purpose W.T. Stead and Modern Babylon The Contagious Diseases Acts Our Honest Narrators
Right from the start, lets get one thing perfectly clear. The Victorians really enjoyed sex. They wrote about it, they talked about it, they analysed it and they worried about it just as much as we do today. Until now, it seems as if most of our ideas about sex and the Victorians have been pretty one-dimensional. Its all prostitutes, porn and prudery, with very little left over for the everyday lives of your average Victorian.
But while the history books have fallen over themselves to ridicule a number of well-to-do ladies fainting at uncovered table legs, Queen Victoria, and a black-toothed erstwhile East End girl out for a good time, what was the actual reality of sex advice in the 1800s? Its very simple the Victorians wanted to know how to have sex, when to have sex and most importantly how to enjoy sex, not normally something history has taught us to associate with our great-great-great-grandparents.
From describing the morally dangerous anatomical museums to revealing the ingenious use of a gentlemans top hat in the Femme de Voyage , this book brings together the huge diversity of advice you can find in the pamphlets, literature, newspapers and medical books of the nineteenth century and presents it as if it is a single volume from the period. Written in the style of the age, each chapter has its own unique narrator to guide you through the weird, the wonderful and the occasionally warped ideas the Victorians had about sex. So, whether you are interested in a doctors view of the human body; the dating advice for single men and women; making your marriage a success; giving birth to beautiful children; or the practical elements, from contraception to STDs and sexual aids, everything that the Victorians wanted to know about sex is in the pages of this book.
So why have the Victorians got such a bad reputation?
Illustrated Police News , 18 September 1897. Image THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Image reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).
So why have the Victorians got such a bad reputation when it comes to sex? Why do we only think of them as sexually repressed or sexually explicit? The answer, I think, has to come from human memory. We have a tendency to remember only the very best of times, or the very worst, and history (or the writing of history) tends to follow the same rules. So the most extreme events, people and attitudes are the ones that have been written about and repeated. No one really cares that Mr. and Mrs. Smith of No. 24 were having an enjoyable and healthy sex life if their neighbours were either living a life of debauchery and sin or pious chastity. And this is how historical misinformation happens the extremes are repeatedly discussed and taken to be the attitudes of everyone who lived at that time. So what were peoples sexual attitudes, ideas and practices for the whole Victorian era? This is what I want to explore and the historical reality is really quite surprising.
The Victorians were dedicated to the idea of mutual physical sexual fulfilment, albeit within the boundaries of married life. Although sex outside marriage was seen in a negative light by the press and popular opinion, sex within marriage was hugely important. Finding the right person who would physically match you and with whom you could spend the rest of your life was driven by one single idea: True Love. That sounds pretty modern to me. The quest to find the right person with whom you can have a physically rewarding relationship and create a home and family is still argued about and discussed in great detail by our literature and society, although we tend to use blogs and TV shows whereas the Victorians used pamphlets and treatises.
Of all the surprisingly modern things the Victorians thought about sex, the one element that I never expected to find was their knowledge and understanding of the female orgasm. As far as the Victorians were concerned, especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the only way a woman could become pregnant was if she experienced an orgasm at the same time as her lover. So ideas of female sexual pleasure, and advice for getting it right, were written about and shared throughout the century, which really makes the Victorians just like us just as worried about how to find that right person, just as worried about married life and just as worried about how to have a happy and healthy sexual relationship.
