In you resides my single power.

Of sweet continuance here.

—Hardy, “Her Immortality”

At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years of age, have been brought in pregnant to be confined here. The girls have acknowledged that their ruin has taken place ... in going or returning from their (agricultural) work. Girls and boys of this age go five, six, or seven miles to work, walking in droves along the roads and by-lanes. I have myself witnessed gross indecencies be-tween boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age. I saw once a young girl insulted by some five or six boys on the roadside. Other older persons were about 20 or 30 yards off, but they took no notice. The girl was call-ing out, which caused me to stop. I have also seen boys bathing in the brooks, and girls between 13 and 19 looking on from the bank.

—Children’s Employment Commission Report (1867)

What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thir-teen-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 humanized; 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 bene-factor; 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 it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate 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 sublima-tion, 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 prog-ress and liberalization; 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 differ-ence is a vocabulary, a degree of metaphor.

[* The first sheaths (of sausage skin) were on sale in the late eigh-teenth century. Malthus, of all people, condemned birth-control tech-niques as “improper,” but agitation for their use began in the 1820s. The first approach to a modern “sex manual” was Dr. George Drys-dale’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. It appeared in 1854, and was widely read and translated. Here is Drysdale’s practical advice, with its telltale final parenthesis: “Impregnation is avoided either by the withdrawal of the penis im-mediately before ejaculation takes place (which is very frequently practiced by married and unmarried men); by the use of the sheath (which is also very frequent, but more so on the Continent than in this country); by the introduction of a piece of sponge into the va-gina . . . ; or by the injection of tepid water into the vagina im-mediately after coition.

“The first of these modes is physically injurious, and is apt to produce nervous disorder and sexual enfeeblement and congestion . . . The second, namely the sheath, dulls the enjoyment, and frequently pro-duces impotence in the man and disgust in both parties, so that it also is injurious.

“These objections do not, I believe, apply to the third, namely, the introduction of a sponge or some other substance to guard the mouth of the womb. This could easily be done by the woman, and would scarcely, it appears to me, interfere at all in the sexual pleasures, nor have any prejudicial effect on the health of either party. (Any pre-ventive means, to be satisfactory, must be used by the woman, as it spoils the passion and impulsiveness of the venereal act, if the man has to think of them.)”]

The Victorians chose to be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and the way they expressed their serious-ness 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.

I think, too, there is another common error: of equating a high degree of sexual ignorance with a low degree of sexual pleasure. I have no doubt that when Charles’s and Sarah’s lips touched, very little amatory skill was shown on either side; but I would not deduce any lack of sexual excitement from that. In any case, a much more interesting ratio is between the desire and the ability to fulfill it. Here again we may believe we come off much better than our great-grandparents. But the desire is conditioned by the frequency it is evoked: our world spends a vast amount of its time inviting us to copulate, while our reality is as busy in frustrat-ing us. 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 plea-sure 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, de-stroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. Of course we cannot measure comparative degrees of pleasure; but it may be luc............