The Making of Victorian Sexuality.

In 1988 John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published their one-volume history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters. Their survey, intended for both students and a general audience, focused on specific issues, with a generous consideration of not only legal issues, but also racial and class habits. Michael Mason in his two volumes aims at a shorter time span and a more limited set of themes. The books focus entirely on intellectual, religious and medical debates about heterosexuality, both marital and pre-marital. Despite the focus on Victorian sexuality, most of Mason's evidence is drawn from pre-Victorian sources, confirming the rationalist and Romantic ideological roots of the era. But inevitably this leads to a slighting of important late (especially 1880s and 90s) discussions of sexuality, when the sexual subjectivity of women and homosexuals entered intellectual deliberations. Moreover, Mason never considers recent work on nineteenth-century homosexuality, nor does he engage with the revisionary work of feminist historians. Radical sexual behavior is construed entirely in terms of heterosexual excess or utopian marital schemes.

But Mason is ambitious to overturn several long-standing cliches about the Victorians. Thoroughly documented, and presuming at least a British student's knowledge of the nineteenth century (the Labouchere amendment outlawing sex between consenting adult men, for example, is not defined), Mason argues that the Victorians were both more and less similar to us than we might suspect. He faces the difficult task of picking and choosing when to accept the Victorians at face value and when to question them. Thus, for example, he insists that we accept personal accounts of modesty and continence, but he is skeptical of the findings of middle-class investigators of the working class. This weaving together of information sometimes leads to skepticism on the part of the reader, but by and large this is a convincing reassessment of Victorian sexual mores. How much of it is new to Victorianists is questionable - surely everyone in the field discarded long ago the canard about Victorian sanctimoniousness or tales of clothed piano legs and other satiric comments. But Mason trudges across familiar ground in order to provide an overview of how we came to see "Victorian" as the epitome of sexual hypocrisy. He avoids the easy generalizations of Peter Gay, but in the process may overwhelm the reader with detail about, for example, the medical profession's discussion of what happens to sperm if it is not "spent" or the Evangelicals' trumpeting of marital intercourse in opposition to Romish celibacy. He concludes, as many have before him, that such Modernists as Lytton Strachey, eager to overturn their forefathers, effectively damned them with the label "Victorian," meaning hypocritical, repressed and retrograde.

Mason does not deny the importance of repression - or, more precisely, self-control, for the Victorians; his aim is to demonstrate its powerful hold on the intellectual imagination of a broad range of society. He begins with an apposite comparison, "for many men and women in the period, issues of sexual behaviour presented themselves as they do to modern feminists: as issues to be judged according to a secular, rational, and progressive code rather than in the light of the deliverances of moral and religious authority" (p. 5). Starting with Francis Place, an early nineteenth-century leader of the Radical movement, a self-made man, and reformed sensualist, Mason shows what congenial partners personal self-discipline and social improvement were. He returns in the final chapter of the first volume to Place, as well as other precursors to the Victorians to demonstrate the intellectual roots of sexual self-control, secularism and progressive thought. He traces the congruity between William Godwin's arguments about the perfectibility of man and the Victorian belief in individual self-discipline. Deftly picking his way among the many contradictory arguments about innate sin versus environmentalism, Mason effectively demonstrates how many Victorian intellectuals believed that the signs of industrial and educational progress that they saw all around them went hand in hand with the steady improvement in morals and manners. For me, this is one of his most convincing arguments, pointing as it does to why sexual liberationists were so often spurned by political progressives.

Mason's extended discussion of "the making of respectability" is a model of documentation, demonstrating the pervasive acceptance of modesty (in body and speech) in the working class. Middle-class observers found it difficulty to distinguish speech from action, according to Mason, for the working-class could be bold in their language when "larking" in public, but proper and modest in private. He distinguishes between the large mass of respectable working class and a minority aspiring to gentility. The genteel were frequently mocked for their hypocrisy by their peers. Mason's most telling point may be in regard to the pervasive use of double entendres in Victorian humor, whatever the social class. We are much more pictorial in our humor, less given to the endless puns and word play exhibited in virtually every publication of the century. As Mason points out, this verbal wit was based on the assumption that sexual matters could not be concealed, but they also could not be discussed openly.

Joining Peter Gay, Mason argues that our forebears did enjoy sex, and when they didn't, it probably meant they had fewer pressures on them to perform than we do. He begins by noting "We feel that our age is unusually liberal on sexual questions, and the great majority of us agree with the spirit of this liberalism if not with its letter" (p. 3). His calm meliorist view will strike an American as disingenuous, given the recent political gains made by those adamantly opposed to sexual liberalism. The battles of our Victorian predecessors are very much with us, however much the vocabulary may have changed. In his anxiety to rehabilitate the Victorians as rational, sensual heterosexuals, Mason overstates the power of pre-Victorian revolutionary ideas about rationalism and human perfectibility.

Mason also largely ignores Ian McCalman's argument in Radical Underworld (1988), which documents thoroughly the connections between early nineteenth-century Radicals and the sale of pornography. For Mason, politically motivated sexual radicalism is a limited offspring of the Owenite movement. Indeed, a large portion of Victorian Sexual Attitudes is devoted to exploring why the Malthusian movement was so unattractive to all social classes for much of the century. He effectively rehabilitates George Drysdale's massive The Elements of Social Science (1854/55?) as a key text. His discussion of this revolutionary cry for sexual pleasure and its status as a marginal classic is fascinating. But like his earlier analysis of the mid-century disavowal of sexual libertarianism among political radicals, Mason is left concluding that by the 1860s and 70s a hegemonic ideology of self-control dominated all sectors of society. This conclusion short-changes the very public, even raucous, Bradlaugh-Besant birth control movement. Nor does Mason consider how the sexual radicalism of Karl Pearson's Fellowship of the New Life and similar groups discussed by Judith Walkowitz arose in the 1880s. And, as mentioned previously, homosexuality is virtually invisible in two volumes that purport to survey the entire range of Victorian sexual attitudes and behaviors.

These are interesting books, but not as revolutionary as its author seems to think. The no-nonsense approach to the past leaves Mason open to criticisms about his literalism and flat-looted interpretations; the division into two volumes yields some repetition and organizational confusion, so that Mason's best points are buried. Less might be more - Mason's account is sorely lacking the vivid examples that dot D'Emilio and Freedman's book. But Mason is to be applauded for his ambitiousness and his willingness to take on so many issues at a time when many historians seem to select very narrow topics. My criticisms must be balanced against my admiration for his clear sweep across the medical establishment, Evangelical thought, and the pre-Victorian intelligentsia. And, with characteristic modesty, Mason concludes by pointing out that the Victorians may be able to teach us that sex is not as important as we think.

Martha Vicinus University of Michigan