The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (Paperback)

I trust it hardly needs saying that this is a serious work of scholarship and analysis, not some nudge-nudge production. By ‘serious’ I don’t mean or imply that it is solemn. Marcus has a very nice turn of academic sarcasm at times, and I treasure a few gems such as ‘There is about as little truth in this description as is compatible with the laws of probability’. A sense of humour and a sense of the ridiculous are needed to deal with a topic like this in a satisfactory way, and the author either is or puts up a good show of being a well-adjusted, emotionally balanced and admirably rational human being who has been able to evaluate what the human, or at least the human male, sexual experience amounts to. Pornography seems to be almost entirely written by men for men. A certain amount of the material that Marcus uses as illustration is written in a female persona, but this is usually a pretext for male self-reassurance with the putative women thrilled and amazed at the wondrous male body. A certain amount more is written from the male perspective, but again this seems to be largely concerned with the pornographer’s concern to reinforce his estimate, be it actual or hopeful, of his own effectiveness. Such writers claim intimate acquaintance with far more female bodies than it has been my own good fortune to experience, but one really striking feature seems to be basic ignorance of some of the elements of female anatomy – indeed also of their own male anatomy it sometimes seemed to me. Such is the mesmeric power of fantasy, it would appear.

The book is very well put together, and very clear about what topics it wants to address. Marcus begins with three particular works that deserve detailed comment in their own right, and he proceeds via some minor efforts that typify other aspects of the genre to the sort of thing one expects and demands in a serious and professional study – the origins of this kind of writing, its style and the significance of its vocabulary and idiom, the light it sheds on the world it took place in, its relevance to his own era, and, finally and very properly, some generalised reflections of his own regarding sexuality. The obvious place to begin was with Dr William Acton. From what Marcus tells me, Acton’s study of prostitution seems surprisingly sympathetic and perceptive. His more generalised study of sexuality is, sadly, something else. In the first place it more or less ignores the entire female sex, and in the second it invites mockery and ridicule for its Victorian attitudes and myths. Masturbation was a cause of not only blindness and madness, one gathers, but also potentially of bankruptcy, so the wonder is not only how the human race survived at all but also how a modern economy can have developed. However behind this absurdity what stares out at us is fear of and disgust at the sexual process in general. This, as I read the book, is the distinctively Victorian side of things. Part of the Zeitgeist was an official culture of cant and hypocrisy, and one does not have to be a professor of English at Columbia to read that loud and clear in Dickens and Thackeray. As a reaction, a subversive counter-culture arose, created and exploited by those with enough money, but with elements of downright courage and defiance too. If the culture demanded official reticence on matters sexual, those matters didn’t go away, they went underground and they developed a thrill of the forbidden in the process. Writing in the 60’s Marcus is still able to see this continuing into his own time, but in the 50’s his depiction of the Victorian scene was virtually unchanged in some quarters. One might be taught by celibate prelates in a claustrophobic atmosphere of guilt-trips and threats of damnation, and even teenagers commonly got the idea was sex per se was best avoided, at least until marriage, in which approved state it was permissible only for procreation. These days the prelates have lost much of their authority and not only because of lapses in celibacy, as much because a lot of what they taught seems mediaeval nonsense, but the awkwardness and embarrassment surrounding sexual matters was far from neutralised by the liberated 60’s. In Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars human beings are not reproduced sexually but by a computer, and the sexual act remains only as recreation not procreation. It may be some ultimately desirable goal, but it is a thousand million years off.

In his more general observations Marcus strikes me as sound and perceptive, at least in those where I have any interest in what he is saying. He quotes D H Lawrence as saying that pornography is never entirely pornographic, which may be true for all I would know. However Marcus quotes several works in extenso, and these entirely pornographic sequences confirm for me his interesting remarks about the vocabulary – it is only minimally verbal, more a speech-act as the linguistic philosophers used to say, until it has latterly lost even that functionality as the 4-letter words have degenerated into mere punctuation in vulgar utterance. I shall not even try to assess the professor’s learned forays into either psychoanalysis or literary criticism, because these are both fields where my attention wanders more than somewhat – I genuinely pick up some perceptions that strike me as valid and significant, others seem contrived to me, and most often of all I just wouldn’t be knowing one way or the other. On the other hand my own limitations do not prevent me from agreeing thoroughly with his finding that with Freud, for the first time in human history, it became possible to discuss sexuality in a neutral way. As for his intriguing conclusion of his own, namely that society, like individuals, may be passing through an adolescent phase – well, you never know. I don’t understand how this book has lapsed into obscurity as it has.