The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes

The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes is the second volume in Michael Mason’s 1994 study of sexuality in Victorian England (the first volume being The Making of Victorian Sexuality). The first volume was intended to deal with the actualities of sex in the Victorian era. This second volume deals with the ideological roots of attitudes towards sexuality.

The 19th century was as far as sex is concerned a battleground between what he describes as pro-sensualists and anti-sensualists. Mason tries his best to be as impartial as possible, describing the motivations of both camps and the ways in which their positions evolved. Obviously this was a culture war in which religion played a major rôle (although secular forces were much more heavily involved than one might think

On the whole, according to Mason, medical opinion tended to favour the pro-sensualist position. Victorian doctors were in fact surprisingly realistic about sex and were very sceptical of the chances that either male or female sexuality could be suppressed.

Mason does not deny that hostility towards sexual pleasure (the anti-sensual tendency) was immensely powerful and influential. He does however make it clear that things were more complicated than one might suppose. There were for example  a great many Christians in the anti-sensualist movement but there were also very many Christians who embraced the pro-sensualist position and saw sexual pleasure as a gift from God and therefore as a very good thing. And modern readers might well be surprised to learn just how heavily dominated the anti-sensualist camp was by political progressives, socialists and feminists (it’s easy to forget just how rabidly anti-sex 19th century feminism was).

The prostitute rescue craze is one of the odder and more interesting features of the 19th century, one to which Mason gives a great deal of attention. It has to be said that the more one learns about about this craze the more unattractive it seems. Hysteria about prostitution was on the rise and on the face of it the idea of high-minded (mostly but not exclusively Christian) missionaries attempting to save unfortunate young women from such a lifestyle sounds well-intentioned and philanthropic (if possibly naïve). In practice however the intentions of the prostitute rescuers was almost always either partially or entirely to punish the women.

Having been “rescued” the prostitutes were forcibly confined in institutions which were more often than not little better than prisons, often subject to brutal treatment. If they were lucky enough not to be physically “disciplined” they were subjected to what really does sound like a program of ritual humiliation. Prostitute rescue was particularly popular among Evangelicals (with women apparently being especially keen on the punitive aspects). There were a few attempts to undertake more purely secular efforts at prostitute rescue with Charles Dickens being heavily involved in one of the better known examples, Urania Cottage. Ironically the girls at Urania Cottage were treated no better, and perhaps worse, than those unlucky enough to end up in one of the religious penitentiaries (which was what many of them were actually called).

Even sadder is that many of the women who ended up in these penitentiaries were not even prostitutes, merely women who had had pre-marital sex. But any kind of fallen woman was apparently still in need of the strict discipline offered by these institutions. The prostitute rescuers come across as a mixture of well-meaning do-gooders, pious humbugs and those who took an almost sadistic pleasure in the humiliation of these unfortunate women. Prostitute rescue was the result of what we would today describe as a mortal panic, and moral panics do not bring out the best in people. And prostitute rescue was widely regarded at the time with scepticism, scorn and even outright hostility.

What’s also interesting is that while the anti-sensualists grudgingly admitted that a variety of factors could cause a woman to become a prostitute they held an obsessive belief that a very significant proportion of the girls took up their trade because they enjoyed sex. Whether there was any truth to this is irrelevant. What matters is that those engaged in prostitute rescue believed it. That seems to have been the driving force behind the moral panic and the thought that many of these girls might actually be enjoying their work presumably accounts for the desire to punish them rather than offering them economic assistance to find other employment.

Mason also has a good deal to say about the Owenites, probably the most well-known and most significant of pre-marxist socialists. The Owenites were all over the map when it came to sexuality but they certainly had a definite pro-sensualist tinge, which earned them a great deal of hostility from other socialists.

Mason tries to be even-handed although it’s obvious that he has considerable sympathy for the anti-sensualist position (I suspect that like most academics in the ’90s he was a bit too much under the influence of feminism).

The value of this book is that the author tries to do more than present us with a series of anecdotes (which is what you get in many other books purporting to explore this subject). While admitting that the evidence is incomplete and often ambiguous he really does try to amass as much hard data as he can, and to give us both sides of the story. In doing so he provides the reader with some remarkable and often surprising insights into a truly fascinating epoch, and a truly fascinating subject. Recommended.