Introduction
A quarter of a century after the striking thesis aired in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, we have gradually become used to the idea that, far from maintaining an earnest silence on the subject of sex, Victorian culture witnessed a proliferation in the production of sexual discourses, a veritable incitement to discussion. Since then much work has been done in recovering such debates and constructions of sexual identity and sexual practices in their original terms. Material has been gathered in readers and monographs which has allowed lines to be drawn connecting very diverse kinds of writing, and diverse motivations, so that a more composite portrait of Victorian ideas on sexuality can emerge. These involve not only the classificatory and diagnostic works of medical doctors and psychiatrists, and the early sociological study of prostitution with the accompanying criminological and political debates, but also the theorization of sexual instinct carried out by biologists and natural historians in the wake of Darwin. This is, of course, besides the varied attempts at self-investigation – autobiographical, psychological or otherwise – pursued by novelists, artists and diarists, attempting to fathom, for themselves as much as for posterity, the nature of their sexuality. Alongside these, in turn, one must consider the active response to sexual issues from radicals and free thinkers, male and female alike, who sought to redetermine prevailing attitudes to marriage and the division of labour, or to legitimize kinds of desire hitherto considered, at best, deviant, at worst, criminal and pathological.
At the simplest level, such an expanded panorama of sexual phenomena presents itself to the historian through a perusal of the contemporary output in journalism and popular literature, reflecting ‘life on the ground’. One example here might be the sociological research pioneered by Henry Mayhew, the first editor of Punch, whose documentary articles on London poverty, expanded into the monumental London Labour and the London Poor, provide the more prosaic counterpart to Dickens’ sentimental visions of penury The section written on ‘Prostitution in London’, by Mayhew’s investigative collaborator Bracebridge Hemyng, yields a striking portrait of the thriving London trade in sex, from the bustling gaiety of the Haymarket to the impoverished back streets of the East end, often reporting the women’s own stories verbatim.
Alternatively, the historian of sexuality might turn for material to the notorious scandals which intermittently stirred up the Victorian decades, raising threatening landmarks above the more diffuse and concealed undercurrents of nineteenth-century sexual life. These might be the heated arguments that mushroomed around the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s [document 1 , document 2 ], scandals such as that surrounding the homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street [document 1 , document 2, document 3], or causes celèbres such as the trial of OscarWilde in 1895 [document 1 , document 2]. This is, as it were, another way in which sexuality comes to light for the historian, impacting on political life, but also leaving behind a lurid trail that for a few months would dominate the dinner parties of the middle classes, would glare from the cover of Penny Dreadfuls, would impel free thinkers to pen letters to editors or would inspire cartoons and parodies in the pages of Punch.
One might attempt to draw a map of Victorian sexual culture, then, using the varied representations that emerge within the sensationalistic ebb and flow of contemporary media. However, at the same time, doctors and scientists were, in a different way, attempting to chart the nature of sexuality itself. One key manifestation of this is that confluence of medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy that, as Foucault noted, solidified in nineteenth-century sexological figures such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. Whether the intention was, as in Krafft-Ebing’s case, to categorise pathological deviations from the norm , or in Ellis’, to celebrate the energy and variety of sexual manifestations [document 1 , document 2], each was concerned to trace the roots of sexual behaviour and compiled remarkable collections of contemporary case histories to this end.
However, the scientific attempt to command the sexual also manifested itself within a different framework, which was that of the evolutionary theory that emerged via the traumatic impact of Darwin’s thought on the Victorian world view. Here, too, a host of psychologists, biologists and natural historians of the human were concerned to delineate the sources of sexual instinct and to map the experience of the human body and its emotions in relation to a much longer history that would include the development of apes, birds and molluscs. Moral and religious guidance in affairs of the heart (still also the preserve of quaint manuals for the married couple, such as that produced by Lyman Beecher Sperry has become supplemented by a potentially more vicious natural historical guidance on the function of sexual selection, or the principles restricting female intelligence and conditioning the nature of motherhood. The setting for arguments, such as those put forward here by George Romanes, J Arthur Thompson and Edith Simcox , is no longer the familial bedroom but the broader struggle between the sexes played out in the domains of work, education and political suffrage.
As much as such works might attempt to naturalise contemporary limitations on gender identity – setting the ‘New Woman’ into conflict with the millennially evolved wife - the kind of empirical research on which the burgeoning investigation of sexuality based its evidence was as likely to be the conduit for, rather than the barrier against, certain representations of transgression. William Acton, a practising gynaecologist who wrote both a textbook on The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs and a more polemical work on Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspect, is an example of how scientific knowledge in the field of sexuality can be drawn into a practical and professional relationship with ‘vice’ [document 1, document 2]. But in the complex relation of sexology to its object, the scientist himself, rather than organ of legitimation, was liable to become a source of scandal. Thus the counter-instance to Acton's respectable mediation of knowledge and transgression is the trial of George Bedborough in 1898. The secretary of the Legitimation League which campaigned for the reform of laws on marriage and divorce, Bedborough’s crime had been to sell a copy of Havelock Ellis' 'scandalous' work, on Sexual Inversion, the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Here, in the public eye, and more importantly in the eye of the law, science itself is liable to become obscene.
This is perhaps the final point for the historian to consider here: that these landmark investigations of sexuality, as much as they might represent attempts to set limits to phenomena that were dangerously unsettling for Victorian moral culture, were inevitably also signs of a phenomenon in process. While theorists might draw on the legacy of evolutionary millennia as a bulwark against the unsettling change of pace in the modern industrial capital, they were at the same time forced to acknowledge and engage with shifting economic and political imperatives, as well as the changing tenor of individual lives in the late nineteenth century. Thus Thomson and Simcox, in their approach to the natural history of human gender, make some kind of accommodation to the emerging prospect of the educated, professional woman. In a different way, Grant Allen used a knowledge of the theory of instinct, drawn from a reading of Darwin and Spencer, to unfold a new narrative about love and personal liberty in defiance of conventional notions of marriage. On another front, homosexuality which appears as a perversion within psychiatry, and a criminal offence to be prosecuted in the case of Oscar Wilde or that of Boulton and Park, is turned around in the writings of Edward Carpenter [document 1, document 2] and George Ives and connected with visions of a new humane religion, or with socialist ideals of unity and progress.
Though it is at points useful to consider certain strands of sexual discourse in isolation, it is clear that the various avenues of sexual investigation, both public and private, impact on and transform each other in unforeseen ways, and are never quite able to be corralled within any particular ideological programme. In this light, the investigation of sexuality concerns not just the evocation of a lost ‘historical scene’ – say, prostitution in Victorian London; nor simply the work of the theorists who attempt for the first time to give sexuality itself a presence and a history as a scientific object. In addition to these the multiple strands of sexual discourse assembled here yield an exemplary portrait of historical transformation itself. Even where the attempt is being made to draw the boundaries of Victorian identity and stabilize a set of natural or human laws, these are debates that set the issue of sexual identity and sexual behaviour in motion and launch it provocatively forward into new configurations that will resonate in the twentieth century.