The Making of Victorian Sexuality

At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet what did the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the most persistent cliches of modern times. Drawing on a wealth of sources from popular and professional medical and scientific texts to fiction, evangelical writing, and the work of radicals such as Godwin and Mill, Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of nineteenth-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to be in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The 'average' Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois 'paterfamilias' of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian twentieth century, this lively and fascinating study offers a radical challenge to one of the most persistent myths of our age.

ISBN 0198122470   DEWEY edition DC20 ISBN13 9780198122470 (What's this?)   Pages 348 Publisher Oxford University Press   Volumes 001 Imprint Oxford University Press   Weight (grammes) 587 Format Hardback   Published in Oxford Publication date 21 Apr 1994   Height (mm) 216 Non-book description ix338   Width (mm) 138 Library of Congress HQ18.G7M28   Spine width (mm) 27 DEWEY 306.70941   Academic level General

		List of Illustrations
		Abbreviations
1		Locating Respectability		1
2		Sex in the Society		37
3		Codes and Classes		105
4		Carnal Knowledge		175
5		Quantifying Sexuality		229
		App. I. English Classes		289
		App. II. Working-Class Housing		292
		App. III. The Medical Standing of 'Spermatorrhoea'		295
		Bibliography		299
		Index		331

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