Victorian Age
Victorian , like many historical terms in English, has both a referential sense, to the reign of one of the great icons of English history, Queen Victoria (1837–1901), and a socially descriptive sense. Throughout her long reign Victoria symbolized the increasing power and prestige of the British Empire, but also epitomized the dignity and family values of the monarchy. From her formidable personality derived the secondary sense, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Resembling or typified by the attitudes supposedly characteristic of the Victorian Age; prudish; strict; old-fashioned; out-dated.” However, groundbreaking studies by Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (1966), and Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (1969), have emphasized the schizophrenic quality of the age, pointing out the sordid realities behind the façade of respectability, especially the vices of prostitution, pornography, “perversion,” and homosexuality, all then regarded as crimes. Many studies have followed—for example, Maynard 1993—showing that Victorian attitudes toward sex were complex and not really monolithic. Michel Foucault begins his History of Sexuality with an allusion to Steven Marcus (“We ‘Other Victorians’”), before questioning “the repressive hypothesis” which, it is commonly argued, derives from the period.
However, the Victorians themselves were well aware of “the Two Nations” alluded to by Benjamin Disraeli in the subtitle of his novel Sybil (1845): the rich and the poor, the child labor and extreme poverty of the slums, as well as the riotous hedonism and decadence behind a repressive bourgeois façade. (As the entry for Jews shows, Disraeli himself was one target of the open anti-Semitism which was also a feature of the age.) In contrast to the traditional view of decorous Victorian order, the novelist George Gissing wrote in a letter of 1882 that on a typical Bank Holiday, “Places like Hampstead Heath and the various parks and commons are packed with screeching drunkards, one general mass of dust and heat and rage and exhaustion.” The Haymarket (the garish hub of prostitution in Victorian London) is described in detail in an article published in Household Words (edited by Charles Dickens) in 1857. The social reformer Henry Mayhew was especially shocked by the young: “The precocity of the youth of both sexes is perfectly astounding. The drinking, the smoking, the blasphemy, indecency and immorality that does not call a blush is incredible” (1983, 50). These powerfully impressionistic sketches were endorsed by pioneering sociological studies, such as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851–1862), Dr. William Acton’s Prostitution (1857), and Charles Booth’s Labour and Life of the City of London (17 volumes, 1889–1903).
Many of the idols and icons of the period led double or scandalous lives. Some, like Dickens and Thomas Hardy, died with the unedifying secrets of their lives intact; others, like Oscar Wilde, Charles Dilke, and Charles Parnell, were publicly ruined in sensational sex scandals. Some were strangely open in their behavior: the great statesman William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister, was in the habit of accosting prostitutes, attempting to reform them, and indulging in self-flagellation (Marlow 1977). The Boulton and Park case of 1871 brought to light bizarre and comic transvestite behavior, explaining the suicide of Lord Arthur Clinton. The Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 publicized not only a homosexual brothel frequented by a number of high-society gentlemen, but a new meaning of the word gay . Lesbianism, however, remained off the statute books, essentially because no one was brave enough to explain its nature to Queen Victoria. Yet the young queen and her consort, Prince Albert, exchanged mildly pornographic prints. Her son Edward the Prince of Wales led a life of notorious luxury and had a number of public affairs, most notably with the celebrated beauty and actress Lillie Langtry, as well as Mrs. Alice Keppel. It is thus hardly surprising that some of the most emphasized features in Victorian fiction were hypocrisy and double standards.
Of many such examples, two notable Victorians epitomize the moral divide of the age. The intrepid explorer of Muslim lands, Sir Richard Burton (1821–1890) commented: “For thirty years I served her majesty at home and abroad without acknowledgement or reward. Then I publish a pornographic book [his translation of The Arabian Nights ] and at once earn £10,000 and fame. I begin at last to understand the public and what it wants.” His privately published translation of The Kama Sutra (1883) was followed by The Perfumed Garden (1886), but an expanded version under the title of The Scented Garden (1890) containing a long section in homosexuality was burned by Lady Burton after his death.
The other was Henry Mayhew (1812–1887), the principal and driving force of a team of diligent researchers exploring the Victorian underworld, concretized as the monumental study London Labour and the London Poor (published in seven volumes, 1851–1862). Although evangelically motivated, the work itself derived from meetings and interviews with hundreds of prostitutes, “fallen women,” thugs, thieves, swindlers, vagrants, tramps, and paupers. With sociological precision distinctions are made between, for example, the various grades of prostitutes, categorizing them as convives, prima donnas, ladies of intrigue, chères amies , and even female operatives . The juxtaposition of Mayhew’s moralistic Victorian analysis conducted in proper gentlemanly style, and the coarse verbatim accounts of his subjects is a sociolinguistic study in itself. The swearing and foul language are comparatively mild, but edited according to the norms of the period: “I’m a drunken old b?if you like, but nothing worser than that”; “[Life’s] as sweet for the w?as for the hempress” (Vol. 4, 247); “D?d plucky thing, by Jove to strike a woman” (Vol. 4, 253) Astonishing maps detailed the regional statistics for such offenses as “persons committed for carnally abusing girls,” “for keeping disorderly houses,” “for attempting to procure the miscarriage of women,” for “assaults, with intent to ravish and carnally abuse,” for bigamy, and so on. Thus not all sexuality was taboo.
The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the period “if not the most moral, certainly the most squeamish.” Unlike the verbal robustness of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods, the public language of the Victorian era was celebrated for its propriety and its euphemisms. As the entry for Charles Dickens shows, evasions of such words as damn, hell , and even trousers were very typical of the age, but like Laurence Sterne, he enjoyed using obvious euphemisms, actually developing a conniving relationship with his readers. Similarly, Anthony Trollope, whose novels have mainly ecclesiastical settings, shares with the reader the quintessentially Victorian spectacle of self-righteous anger struggling with decorum in Archdeacon Grantly: “‘Why not!’ almost screamed the archdeacon … ‘why not!—that pestilent interfering upstart, John Bold—the most vulgar young person I ever met!’… And being at a loss for an epithet sufficiently injurious, he finished his expressions of horror by muttering ‘Good Heavens!’ in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese” ( The Warden 1855, chapter 2). In a very different style Thomas Hardy concluded the tragic story of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) by referring not to God or Fate, but by the provocative comment that “The President of the Immortals … had ended his sport with Tess.” Although technically a euphemism, Hardy’s divine title is actually blasphemous, amounting to a snub to the Almighty and to notions of Christian Providence.
The Victorian era is famous for its multitudinous sexual euphemisms, preferring “in an interesting condition” to pregnancy , “white and brown meat” of a chicken to the leg and breast , even referring to the limbs of a piano. One of Mayhew’s informants categorized under the heading of Bawds , describes her “fall”: “The ‘night-cap’ was evidently drugged, and during my state of insensibility my ruin was accomplished” (Vol. 4, 247). The use of opaque Latinisms and ingenious metaphors, already developed in the eighteenth century, continued to flourish:
The tree of Life, then, is a succulent plant, consisting of one only stem, on the top of which is a pistillum or apex , sometime of a glandiform appearance, and not unlike a May-cherry, though at others seasons more resembling the Avellana or filbeard tree. Its fruits, contrary to most others, grow near the root; they are usually two in number, in size somewhat exceeding that of an ordinary nutmeg, and are both contained in one Siliqua, or purse, which together with the whole root of the plant, is commonly beset with innumerable fibrilla, or capillary tendrils. (from The Exquisite 1842)
Not every reader would recognize this as a description of the penis. Those perusing Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights (1886) would come across this learned description of the dildo: “Of the penis succadaneus, that imitation of the Arbor vitæ,… which the French [call] godemiche” (X, 239).
Within the thriving genre of Victorian pornography the division of registers between rarefied Latin, foreign terms, and frank bawdy is frequently apparent, quintessentially revealed in this description: “I could see the lips of her plump pouting cunny, deliciously feathered, with soft light down, her lovely legs, drawers, stockings, pretty boots, making a tout ensemble , which as I write and describe them caused Mr. Priapus to swell in my breeches.” The title itself contains the same linguistic mélange: Sub-Umbra, or Sport Amongst the She- Noodles (1879). Other titles were openly salacious: Lady Pokingham: Or They All Do It (1880). However, the most notorious work, My Secret Life (1890), an extended erotic memoir in eleven volumes by the unidentified “Walter,” has all the standard “four letter” words and some unexpected terms like randy, bumhole , and uncunted set against love staff and spermatic injection (Mills 1993, 272-73).
There were some notable breaches of decorum by major figures of the age. A composer enthused to Alfred Lord Tennyson: “That’s an awfully jolly stanza.” “Don’t say ‘awfully,’” admonished Tennyson. “What shall I say, then?” asked the composer. “Say ‘bloody,’ replied Tennyson” (Pearsall 1969, 500). (As the entry for bloody shows, the word was then extremely improper.) More astonishing is the wild, prurient fantasy found in this letter from Algernon Charles Swinburne to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, dated March 1, 1870:
This is a dildo the Queen used
Once in a pinch in an office,
Quite unaware that it had been used
First by a housemaid erratic.
Soon, though obese and lymphatic,
Symptoms she felt all that month as it went on
What sort of parties had used it and spent on.
The spiciness of this wicked scenario is enhanced by office being a euphemism for “lavatory” and spend including the sense of “ejaculate.” Pearsall’s study contains a great volume of underground material involving popular bawdy lyrics, obscene puns, and dirty stories involving everybody from the Royal Family down the social scale. Some were obviously designed for the printed page:
C ome love, and dwell with me
U nder the greenwood tree,
N one can more happy be,
T han I shall be if blessed with thee!
(Quoted in Pearsall 1969, 495)
Victorian schizophrenia is symbolized in The Yellow Book (1894–1897), a quarterly review containing distinguished literary contributions from Henry James, Max Beerbohm, and Professor George Sainstbury, but also notorious sensual and decadent illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), famously for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893). Beardsley had worked for one of the major publishers of pornography, Leonard Charles Smithers, to whom he wrote from France where he was dying: “Jesus is our Lord and Judge. I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings … by all that is holy all obscene drawings” (cited in Pearsall 1969, 479).
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