The Other Victorians

A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-nineteenth-century England

Steven Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351477758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Taking as his point of departure the authors, the audience, and the texts of Victorian writings on sex in general and of Victorian pornography in particular, Steven Marcus offers a startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian culture. The subjects dealt with in The Other Victorians are not only those to have been "shocking" in the Victorian period. The way these subjects were regarded--and the way our notions of the Victorians continue to change, as the efforts of contemporary scholarship restore them to their full historical dimensions--are matters today of some surprise and wonder.

Making use, for the first time, of the extensive collection of Victoriana at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Marcus first examines the writings of Dr. William Acton, who may be said to represent the "official views" of sexuality held by Victorian society, and of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the first and most important bibliographer-scholar of pornography. He then turns to the most significant work of its kind from the period, the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life. There follows an analysis of four pornographic Victorian novels--an analysis that throws an oblique but fascinating light on the classics of Victorian literature--and a review of the odd flood of Victorian publications devoted to flagellation. The book concludes with a chapter propounding a general theory of pornography as a sociological phenomenon.

With the publication of The Other Victorians, understanding of this period took a giant stride forward. Most of the writers and writings discussed by Marcus belong to Victorian sub-literature rather than to literature proper; in this way the work remains connected to a consideration of the exotic sub-literature. A brilliantly written book in its own right, this work transformed the study of the Victorian period as did no other.

Chapter I: MR. ACTON OF QUEEN ANNE STREET, OR THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS

I

SINCE this is a study of human fantasies, it may be useful to begin it by considering that official fantasy which in the mid-nineteenth century went by the name of scientific knowledge. I use the word “fantasy” not in a belittling or deprecatory sense but to describe the quality of thinking or of mind that one meets with in scientific or medical accounts of human sexuality in the English nineteenth century. This thinking, one soon learns, rests upon a mass of unargued, unexamined and largely unconscious assumptions; its logical proceedings are loose and associative rather than rigorous and sequential; and one of its chief impulses is to confirm what is already held as belief rather than to adapt belief to new and probably disturbing knowledge. And as we shall see it shares all these qualities in common with pornography itself. No doubt most people think this way about most things most of the time—that is to say, a good deal of our thinking consists of fantasy cast in the form of opinion or assertion; or, in another context, such thinking has the characteristics of what in the social sciences is called “ideology.” Furthermore, no subject has had anything like the power to elicit such prepared responses as the subject of sexuality.

On the other hand, the Victorian era is very likely the earliest period in history for which such a study is easily possible. There is, in the first place, the question of the availability and extensiveness of published material. Then there is the fact that pornography and especially pornographic writing became an industry during this time—following, as it still tends to do, the course of development traced by the novel. In addition, the scientific spirit of the age found major expression in advances in the biological sciences and in medicine; and this, coupled with the strong social and reforming temper of the times, made for a situation in which considerable public discussion of sexual matters took place. Like ourselves, the Victorians were inclined to regard important issues as “problems.” Behind this attitude, of course, is an assumption that “problems” are there to be “solved” and have a “solution”; conversely, one suspects that if so many things are held in the mind as problems, a certain problematical quality will be given to the whole. Sex has always been a problem in human civilization, but not until sometime during the nineteenth century, I think, did there emerge as part of the general educated consciousness the formulation that it might in fact be problematical—it is an idea that forms part of our inheritance. I can think of no more instructive illustration of these manifold tendencies, attitudes, contradictions and confusions than the writings of William Acton.

Though his name has long since been forgotten, Acton was something of a figure in his own time. In his virtues he was a truly representative Victorian: earnest, morally austere yet liberally inclined, sincere, open-minded, possessed by the belief that it was his duty to work toward the alleviation of the endless human misery and suffering which sometimes seem to be the chief constituents of society. Acton was born in 1813, at Shillingstone, Dorsetshire, the second son of a clergyman. In 1831 he was enrolled as apprentice to the Resident Apothecary to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, where he worked until 1836. He then traveled to Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of what was to become his life’s work, diseases of the urinary and generative organs. In Paris he studied under and became a permanent disciple of the well-known American genito-urinary surgeon Philippe Ricord; during this period Acton also served for some time as an extern in the Female Venereal Hospital. In 1840 he returned to England, was admitted a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and began practice in his specialty. He was for some time, as well, Surgeon to the Islington Dispensary; and in 1842 became a Fellow of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London.

As a physician, it was said of him, Acton “was careful and safe . . . and had much technical skill,” and it was not long before his practice became large. Sir James Paget, in his obituary notice of Acton, rather primly remarks that he “never used the opportunities of his large practice for an independent inquiry into the questions still remaining in the pathology of syphilis, and in the parts of general pathology which the study of syphilis may solve.” He chose instead to become a writer, taking as his subject not only the diseases in which he was expert, but the social questions that were allied to them, such as illegitimacy and prostitution. (One of his papers, which I have not been able to obtain, is about “Unmarried Wet-Nurses”—the possibilities of this title seem positively Joycean.) His first book, published in 1841, was called A Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Urinary and Generative Organs in Both Sexes, and was successful enough to have gone through four editions by the time of Acton’s death in 1875.

Acton first came before the public eye, however, through his writings on prostitution. He was one of the pioneers in the agitation, investigation, and discussion that finally led to the passage of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1866; this legislation provided that in certain areas where there were army encampments or naval stations or depots—such as Canterbury, Dover, Gravesend, Woolwich, and Aldershot—prostitutes be subject to periodical medical examination. Any woman who was found on examination to be diseased was hospitalized and treated at government expense; refusal to conform to the provisions of this act made her liable to be punished by imprisonment—this latter provision appears to have been largely unenforced or unenforceable. The first edition of this work was published some eight years before the Act was passed; the second, which came out in 1870, was much enlarged and revised, and incorporated Acton’s observations on the workings of the new law. Its full, ringing title reads: Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, in London and other Large Cities and Garrison Towns, with Proposals for the Control and Prevention of its Attendant Evils. And it is a very good book, certainly the best piece of work of its kind from the period that I have read. A brief examination of it will serve to introduce us to the quality of Acton’s mind—at least to the quality of one side of it.

Acton’s position can be straightforwardly outlined. Prostitution, he believed, was an inevitable, almost an organic, part of society. Efforts to repress or extirpate it have always ended in failure. At the same time, he argues, it would be “equally irrational ... to imagine that this irrepressible evil can exist without entailing upon society serious mischief; though incapable of absolute repression, prostitution admits of mitigation. To ignore an ever-present evil appears a mistake as fatal as the attempt to repress it.” The English habit of dealing with prostitution had been until then largely to ignore its existence; prostitution as it was practiced in England was, in the terminology of the times, free, private and clandestine, while on most of the Continent it was public, regulated, and licensed. Acton is too English himself, and too acutely aware of what the social possibilities in England were, to recommend the adoption of any system in which society through the agency of the State should appear to sponsor “immorality” by means of legalizing or licensing it. Yet he believes that it is “necessary to recognize its existence, and to provide for its regulation.” Opposed by a combination of Podsnappery and religious extremism, by, as he puts it, “the dull stupidity that shuts its eyes to well-known evils, and by refusing to recognize accomplished facts and actual circumstances, endows them with a tenfold power of mischief, and which, while it justifies its inertness by religious theories, forgets the first practical duty of the Christian,” Acton feels it necessary to come out strongly as “an advocate of RECOGNITION”—in capitals. (Which leads to the reflection that prostitution in Victorian England was the Red China of its day.) Acton’s position then may be thought of as generally realistic, liberal, and Benthamite, a typical constellation of attitudes. He is concerned with the amelioration of a social evil, and for the intervention of government in a regulatory but minimal capacity. At the same time he feels it necessary to tip his hat toward the principles of personal liberty and laissez-faire, which had inevitably gotten involved in the discussion, and to “admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her own person, and that the State has no right to prevent her.” Such an admission, of course, merely sharpens the horns of the dilemma on which this question—not to say Acton himself—is impaled, but we should recall that Acton is quite aware of the fact that it is a dilemma, and that all his choices are lesser evils.

One of Acton’s chief purposes in this book is to humanize the prostitute, to educate or persuade his respectable audience to regard her not as some alien and monstrous creature but as a fellow human being. To this end he explodes the popular myth of the harlot’s progress, demonstrating from his own professional experience that “such an ending of the harlot’s life is the altogether rare exception . . . that the downward progress and death of the prostitute in the absolute ranks of that occupation are exceptional also, and that she succumbs at last, not to that calling, nor to venereal disease, but in due time, and to the various maladies common to respectable humanity.” Moreover, he reports it as the general medical opinion “that no other class of females is so free from general disease” and that as a rule prostitutes are endowed with “iron bodies,” with extremely resilient and resistant constitutions. He then goes on to institute this surprising comparison.

If we compare the prostitute at thirty-five with her sister, who perhaps is the married mother of a family, or has been a toiling slave for years in the over-heated laboratories of fashion, we shall seldom find that the constitutional ravages often thought to be necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those attributable to the cares of a family and the heart-wearing struggles of virtuous labor.

These remarks may help to illuminate another side of the complex hostility which all the respectable classes of society directed toward the prostitute. Still worse, he shows that “by far the larger number of women who have resorted to prostitution for a livelihood, return sooner or later to a more or less regular course of life.” The major part of London’s army of whores were, in other words, transients, and Acton asserts that “prostitution is a transitory state, through which an untold number of British women are ever on their passage.” Their re-entrance into decency took place in a variety of ways: from finding work of some other kind, to opening small shops or lodging-houses, to emigration, and to marriage. This last route of escape seems to have been increasingly in use, and Acton calls attention to the frequency with which “the better inclined class of prostitutes become the wedded wives of men in every grade of society, from the peerage to the stable”; in addition, “as they are frequently barren, or have but a few children, there is reason to believe they often live in ease unknown to many women who have never strayed, and on whose unvitiated organization matrimony has entailed the burden of families.” It stands to Acton’s credit that, having said this, he goes on to assert that it is both the social duty and the social interest of the nation “to see these women through that state, so as to save harmless as much as may be of the bodies and souls of them.” And all his recommendations for the treatment of prostitutes are in the direction of humanizing and rehabilitating them—though he is perfectly aware of how imperfect a success such efforts have achieved. As for those religious persons who opposed preventive and sanitary measures on the grounds that syphilis was “the penalty for sin,” and that therefore syphilis should go unchecked and uncured because the chance of contracting it “is the strongest means of deterring men from being unchaste,” he dismisses them with something less than the contempt they deserved, arguing instead—and characteristically—that like other deterrents before and since it didn’t finally deter, which is true enough.

Acton is a rather gifted social observer. He notes, for example, that the world of prostitution is a “microcosm” of society at large, and that, chastity aside, it “exhibits, like its archetype ... all the virtues and good qualities, as well as all the vices, weaknesses, and follies.” Prostitutes, he remarks, “maintain their notions of caste and quality with all the pertinacity of their betters. The greatest amount of income procurable with the least amount of exertion is with them, as with society, the grand gauge of position.” There is a nice edge to that last sentence. He also offers some shrewd observations on the reciprocal relation between prostitution and the demand made in the respectable classes for money and position as the requirements for marriage. And there is no doubt in his mind that the chief cause of prostitution is “cruel biting poverty” and “the lowness of the wages paid to workwomen in various trades … unable to obtain by their labor the means of procuring the bare necessaries of life, they gain, by surrendering their bodies to evil uses, food to sustain and clothes to cover them. Many thousand young women in the metropolis are unable by drudgery that lasts from early morning till late into the night to earn more than from 3s. to 5s. weekly. Many have to eke out their living as best they may on a miserable pittance for less than the least of the sums above-mentioned.” Is it any wonder, he asks, that “urged on by want and toil, encouraged by evil advisers, and exposed to selfish tempters, a large proportion of these poor girls fall from the path of virtue ? Is it not a great wonder that any of them are found abiding in it?” It is a question that was asked by Henry Mayhew and others before Acton, and that was asked repeatedly during the age. And it is a question that takes a good deal of answering—involving as it does the larger question of respectability and its social meaning. Acton reserves some of his harshest comments for the respectable classes, although there is never any doubt of where his own allegiance lies. And of course he disapproves of prostitution on moral grounds, reasoning that it offers satisfaction to only one part of man’s inclinations at the expense of the rest. But he also—unlike many of his contemporaries—does not morally confuse prostitution with other kinds of illicit sexual relations, and asserts the need to “distinguish the indulgence of unlawful love from commerce with prostitutes; the one is the ill-regulated but complete gratification of the entire human being, the other affords gratification to one part only of his nature.” However ambiguous the force of that term “ill-regulated,” and however inadequate we may judge the vocabulary available to Acton, it seems clear that an effort to make the right kind of distinctions is going on.

Acton is also concerned for the state of the medical profession in England. When the first edition of this work was published in 1857, the London hospitals printed no statistical tables of their patients; by 1869 things had considerably improved, though it still remained impossible to form a reliable estimate of the number of prostitutes in London—figures ranging anywhere from 6,000 to 80,000 and above were offered. Nor was the exchange or gathering of knowledge from the private practice of physicians anything but primitive. “There is in our profession very little interchange of notes and statistics,” he complains, “and no organized correspondence with any body or society, and I fancy no medical man could draw a sound deduction as to the greater or less prevalence of any particular disease from the state of his own practice.” Such remarks call to mind Tertius Lydgate and George Eliot’s description, in Middle- march, of the state of medical practice in the England of an earlier generation. Indeed there are a number of correspondences between Lydgate and Acton, and in a curious way acquaintance with Lydgate has the effect, so to speak, of authenticating Acton, of filling him out, of making him seem less strange or out of the ordinary—which demonstrates how literature can sometimes help to retrieve the actuality of an unknown or forgotten person from the dust heap of history. Both Lydgate and Acton studied in France, and it is to France that Acton turns whenever he wishes to form a comparison. The question of prostitution had received there consideration “which has been denied to it at home; experiments have been tried on the continent which we in England have hitherto declined to make.” And he counsels his readers to shake off national prejudice and extend to foreign institutions the “patient and impartial examination that we would demand for our own.” And he turns first to France, he says, not only as England’s “nearest neighbor,” but “as the country that has always led the way in the advance of modern civilization and the growth of modern ideas.” Matthew Arnold’s “note of provinciality” is not being sounded here, however remote from sweetness and light Acton’s subjects may be. But it must be remembered to his honor, as Paget said, that “he practiced honorably in the most dangerous of specialties,” and that “he wrote decently on subjects not usually decent.”

As a writer, Acton has a kind of raw talent; his powers of observation are often acute, but they, like his prose, are equally often undisciplined and out of hand. Again the comparison with Lydgate is in order. Here, for example, are some extracts from Acton’s account of a visit he made one “pleasant July evening” to Cremorne, the famous pleasure gardens in Chelsea.

As calico and merry respectability tailed off eastward by penny steamers, the setting sun brought westward Hansoms freighted with demure immorality in silk and fine linen. By about ten o’clock, age and innocence . . . had seemingly all retired, weary with a long and paid bill of amusements, leaving the massive elms, the grass-plots, and the geranium-beds, the kiosks, temples, “monster platforms,” and “crystal circle” of Cremorne to flicker in the thousand gas-lights there for the gratification of the dancing public only. On and around that platform waltzed, strolled, and fed some thousand souls—perhaps seven hundred of them men of the upper and middle class, the remainder prostitutes more or less pronouncées. I suppose that a hundred couples … were engaged in dancing and other amusements, and the rest of the society, myself included, circulated listlessly about the garden, and enjoyed in a grim kind of way the “selection” from some favorite opera and the cool night-breeze from the river.

The extent of disillusion he has purchased in this world comes forcibly home to the middle-aged man who in such a scene attempts to fathom former faith and ancient joys, and perhaps even vainly to fancy he might by some possibility begin again. I saw scores, nay hundreds, about me in the same position as myself. We were there—and some of us, I feel sure, hardly knew why— but being there, and it being obviously impossible to enjoy the place after the manner of youth, it was necessary, I suppose, to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancies; and then so little pleasure came, that the Britannic solidity waxed solider than ever even in a garden full of music and dancing, and so an almost mute procession, not of joyous revellers, but thoughtful, careworn men and women, paced round and round the platform as on a horizontal treadmill. There was now and then a bare recognition between passers-by—they seemed to touch and go, like ants in the hurry of business . . . the intercourse of the sexes could hardly have been more reserved. . . . For my part, I was occupied, when the first chill of change was shaken off, in quest of noise, disorder, debauchery, and bad manners. Hopeless task! The pic-nic at Burnham Beeches, that showed no more life and merriment than Cremorne . . . would be a failure indeed, unless the company were antiquarians or undertakers. . . . The gratus puellae risus was put in a corner w...