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As for hope that a more sexually mature society might emerge in the nineteenth century from the anarchy of the eighteenth, there was precious little. In 1821, a Massachusetts court found a Boston printer, Peter Holmes, who tried to publish an American edition of
Fanny Hill
, guilty of smut-peddling. It was the United States' first obscenity trial. The judge had refused to see the book, or let the jury see it, or to enter passages from it into the court record. To do so would ‘require that the public itself should give permanency and notoriety to indecency, in order to punish it'. Holmes appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, pointing out that the judge had not seen the book. The superior court was not swayed. The Chief Justice wrote that Holmes was, ‘a scandalous and evil disposed person' contriving to ‘debauch and corrupt' the citizens of Massachusetts and ‘to raise and create in their minds inordinate and lustful desires'.

In Britain too the retreat was being sounded for sexual liberation. The Wig Club closed for business in 1827. The Beggar's Benison died out in 1836, although rumour had it that as late as 1861, covert Beggars' groups were still meeting. But as Victoria was being groomed for the throne, it was simply no longer acceptable, even within the confines of a private gentlemen's club, to be overtly sexual.

‘Literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute'

Bracebridge Hemyng, quoted in Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor

Victorian prudery was not Queen Victoria's fault. It started before her time, and is argued by many historians actually to have been on the ebb by the beginning of her reign. The pious hope that the nineteenth century should be more ‘civilised' than the seventeenth and eighteenth was already forming during the eighteenth. It was in 1791 that the
Gentleman's Magazine
boasted, with no irony intended: ‘We are every day becoming more delicate, and, without doubt, at the same time more virtuous; and shall, I am confident, become the most refined and polite people in the world.' Neither was the disparaging of sex that is associated with Victorian Britain just a British phenomenon. As we will see in this chapter, some of the most enthusiastic ‘Victorians' were in Europe and the newly liberated American colonies.

Just as the Christian disavowal of sexual pleasure early in the first millennium was made in the name of progress and
modernity, the nineteenth-century trend towards a more sexually covert and sober society was informed by a mélange of the blossoming belief in science plus notions of moral ‘purity'. There was a specifically new twist in this anti-sexual ‘revolution', however – the placing of women on a pedestal, if a rather rickety one.

A new idea of women as pure and sexless began to be fostered. Very broadly speaking, the Victorians wanted to differentiate themselves from morally laxer days and to equate sexual abstinence or control with moral and religious purity – to assure the ascendancy, that is, of restrained ‘female' sexuality over dissolute ‘male' ways. The Queen herself, in so far as it matters, was by some accounts quite a bawdy soul, as exemplified by her flirtatious relationship with her servant John Brown.

One sexual legend about her is that she failed to give the Royal assent to an Act of Parliament outlawing lesbianism because she refused to believe such acts could occur between women. In fact, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 as it was sent for Queen Victoria's assent did not specify lesbian practices; whether this was because the government withheld mention of such things because it
might
offend the Queen is not known.

Nevertheless, history being the inexact study it is, the very idea of the sexually pure Victorian woman and her lascivious, cynical, whoring male counterpart is subject to frequent revisionism. No one scholar can alight on a single eternal truth; the best we can do in assessing the status of the orgasm throughout this period is to rely on informed generalisation and anecdotal detail – and to be suspicious of every new theory in case it is the scholarly equivalent of masturbation, the spinning of a new idea for the sheer pleasure of it.

As for the kind of material that could be regarded as evidence, some of the best-known is obscure in origin, while the clearest seems plain enough but needs to be understood in the context of a time when hypocrisy was as much in the ascendant as iron
smelting. Take, for instance, the most totemic of supposedly Victorian beliefs about sex, the idea that for women it was a matter of ‘lying back and thinking of England'. It is unclear if anyone ever said this, let alone believed it. Some sources suggest it was ‘a Victorian mother' instructing her daughter on her wedding night about the birds and the bees. Others say the phrase was coined by Queen Victoria on being asked how best to endure the pain of childbirth.

There is an abundance of source evidence for Victorian women being encouraged to adopt what has been called ‘the clinging-vine personality' – the art of appearing weak, anxious to lean on strong men and be dominated by them – to be very different, in fact, from Jane Austen's feisty women. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1842 stated how a woman being courted should develop a sweet, modest exterior; she ought to convey her feelings only by a ‘timid blush' or the ‘faintest of smiles'.

Mrs Sarah Ellis, who wrote a guidebook in the same year called
The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
, emphasised the importance for women of recognising ‘the superiority of your husband simply as a man'. Clergymen, teachers and journalists supported this consensus view.

Among the upper and middle classes, sexual desire was swept under the hearthrug (although not necessarily out of existence) by such a movement. By the mid-nineteenth century, the passionate, orgasmic Nature of women, which had been a given – regarded, indeed, as a threat – for thousands of years was missing, presumed dead. Not even marriage was permitted to liberate female desire; decent wives were expected to be willing but passionless sexual partners; ladies did not move during sex, and only consented to it at all to please their husbands and have children. It was not that women were passionless, but that their passion manifested itself in the superior maternal instinct rather than their sex drive. A French author, Auguste Debay, did suggest nonetheless that women
should fake orgasms since ‘man likes to have his happiness shared'.

There were other cultural influences, too, dictating that women's desire for orgasmic pleasure was muted. Staying indoors, out of the sun, and preferably reclining, as was the custom, certainly depleted well-to-do Victorian women's health and can only have nullified any sex drive that survived the propaganda onslaught against such unrefined thoughts. Some young women drank vinegar or forced themselves to stay up all night in the belief that one or the other would make them appear pale and interesting. The ‘ladylike' approach to pregnancy, which viewed it as a form of disability requiring ‘confinement', must also have played havoc with any desire by a woman to express herself as a sensual being.

The fashions of the time, too, seem designed to deplete female libido, even while increasing male desire. Corsets laced tightly to emphasise the (highly sexual) egg-timer figure frequently caused internal injury, lowering still further any chance of a woman consciously wanting sex. Women, according to some accounts, were also expected to wear bathing suits in the bath and remain mostly clothed during sex, which extinguished any last chance of their becoming aroused.

Ignorance of the female form on the part of men was endemic. The art critic John Ruskin, despite having seen the classical statuary of Paris and Venice, was allegedly so shocked when he saw his young wife Effie's pubic hair for the first time that he went into apoplectic spasms and later confided in the Queen herself that there was something wrong with his wife. It is hard to imagine Effie Ruskin's self-esteem, as we would term it now, let alone sexual desire, surviving her husband's horrified reaction to her body; he never consummated the marriage. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning short-circuited any such marital awkwardness by never seeing one another naked – a very common occurrence in nineteenth-century marriages. Theodore Watts Dunton, Algernon Charles Swinburne's literary agent, was treated to his first glimpse of
female breasts on his deathbed. Watts Dunton was married, but had never seen a woman naked; his nurse bared all at a kindly friend's request. (It is interesting, considering how visual men's orgasmic experience is, to speculate on how very frustrated Victorian men must have been when sex was entirely about fumbling in the dark.)

The Victorian anti-sex fashion reached ludicrous excesses. With female legs never seen in public and rarely in private, it became a mark of indelicacy to offer a lady a leg of chicken (‘dark meat'). She would automatically be given breast, or rather ‘white meat'. ‘Victorian' Americans took this level of refinement further still; just as they later invented ‘English muffins' that are unknown in England, they reportedly took the English habit of modesty regarding legs a stage further by fitting the piano legs in some homes with elaborate crinolines. Perhaps they were being ironic, or it was simply an amusing fashion statement. Perhaps not.

There was one important group of women, however, in Victorian cities who were considered by the intelligentsia to possess boundless sexual desire. This was the poor who despite bad food and living conditions and consequent ruinous health were regarded as being an indefatigable repository of sexuality, forever producing illegitimate children by their ceaseless demand for sex.

Here, we cut into the still darker meat of Victorian sexuality. For the middle-class male mind, sexually starved as a result of its own imposition of sexlessness on ‘respectable' women, could not stop dreaming of the terrifying but tempting forbidden treat that prostitution might provide. Poor urban women, rosy-cheeked country girls and cheap, plentiful female servants all appeared to the Victorian man as potential prostitutes.

They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the witches that frightened and fascinated the Medieval mind. Using prostitutes, fantasising about them, or simply harrumphing about their supposed ubiquity were all ways in which Victorian men seemed to get in touch with their libidinous self. Street girls
had been plentiful enough a hundred years earlier, but now pretty much any attractive single woman was regarded as a prostitute. Respectable working- or clerical-class courting couples in places like Clapham Common in London would be mistaken by outraged middle-class residents for prostitutes with their clients and reported to the police.

This moral panic, a rank mixture of obsession and repulsion, led to hugely exaggerated figures for the real numbers of prostitutes operating in cities (50,000 according to one contemporary estimate in London in 1850) as well as a disastrously confused notion of what genuine street women's motivation was. Whereas today prostitutes and other ‘sex workers' happily – proudly, often – acknowledge that they are motivated primarily by economics and are no more or less likely than the average woman to enjoy sex, in the Victorian world view, if a woman enjoyed sex, it was a sure sign that she was a ‘prostitute'.

Any amount of speculation can be entered into as to the below-the-line machinations in the male mind that led to this bizarre conclusion. It would not be far off the mark to suggest that men found themselves caught between the expectation that they should be strong, dominant and initiate sexual activity, and the often embarrassing reality that they were rather incompetent at it. In such a bind, it would be all too easy, rather than try to satisfy a critical wife, to buy sex from a seller who was not bothered how competent the purchaser was, so long as he paid up. It is tempting, but untrue nonetheless, to assert that all middle-class Victorian men used prostitutes. Equally, to argue that many women colluded in their respectable husbands' obsession with prostitution is bound to be a distortion of reality; yet we have Sarah Ellis arguing in her book that a woman should consider herself lucky if her husband saw prostitutes, because it meant she herself would not have to endure endless pregnancies.

The really damning charge that can be levelled against the Victorian man is that of prurience rather than the use of prostitutes. The prohibitions and restrictions of the age fostered a
spirit of unhealthy, even grotesque, obsession over precisely what was going on under ladies' (or, in America, even pianos') crinolines. For instance, a single mother hoping to leave her baby at London's Foundling Hospital had to give the male admissions panel a detailed record of her sexual relationship with the child's father. The panel would want to know every detail – where the trysts had taken place, the Nature and intensity of her feelings and desire. She would also have to give names and details of those who could corroborate her story such as doctors, relatives, employers, and even provide ‘proof such as love letters. The pious hope was that the woman would be able to show her good faith had been betrayed, that she had succumbed to sexual passion only after a promise of marriage had been made, or else been taken advantage of totally against her will. Her conduct since falling pregnant had to be unimpeachable, her means non-existent, and the child under the age of one.

An ‘official' myth of generalised male degeneracy accompanied the porcelain-skinned, sexless archetype of the middle-class Victorian lady. The idea, at least, of the fornicating Victorian bogeyman is supported by popular literature of the time, particularly that of Dickens, and by British legislation. The 1857 Divorce Act, according to Joan Smith, provided that a man could divorce his wife on the grounds of her adultery. A husband, however, who was ‘a little profligate', in the words of one of the act's sponsors, could not be penalised by divorce.