Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Gender and Sexuality during the Victorian Era
.
Dickens' View of Women: "...the natural inconstancy of their sex" 1

Dickens Limited by his Bourgeois Views

Background

What was the Victorian view about novels when Charles Dickens was writing?

"[a] book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered either writing or reading; and a mystery and a secret are the chief qualifications of the modern novel...", Fraser's Magazine, 1863.

An analysis of some of Dickens' books, including "A Tale of Two Cities", "Great Expectations", "Our Mutual Friend", etc. in the "Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction", Vol. 26, AMS Press, Inc., 1998, chapter "John Rokesmith's Secret": Sensation, Detection, and the Policing of the Feminine in Our Mutual Friend, shows that Dickens' novels were formulaic, and fit what readers expected of a novel. In addition, the attitudes towards women are made clear.

Fiction "engaged in a general struggle about the definition of woman, and also about the nature, power, and function of the feminine within the culture", Ibid, page 266. Examples from different novels from this time period, including "Our Mutual Friend", are seen to focus upon "anxiety concerning femininity, depicting the Victorian home as betrayed from within by the "devices and desires of the supposed 'Angel in the House'.", Ibid.

"Antithetical to the Angel in the House, the sensation heroine frequently embodied a mysogynistic horror of femininity sundered from such an ideal, as she indulged in sexual transgressions, deceptions, bigamy, adultery, and even murder." Ibid., p. 270

An analysis is then made of "Our Mutual Friend". Bella tells her father, "I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it"... She rebels at the thought of being "willed away, like a horse, or a dog, or a bird" (animal metaphors commonly used in Victorian texts to describe a wife's legal powerlessness) or being made the "property of strangers." Ibid., p. 273

"Hence while it appears to be John Harmon who violates the sanctity of the home with his secret past, assumed name, and suspicion of murder, the real angst surrounds Bella. She must unlearn her wilfulness (which is framed as a childish trait) and 'mature' into 'adult' submission. Above all, she must learn duty to home and family: the obligation to show loyalty to her parents (however flawed and unattractive her home may have been; the obligation to demonstrate 'perfect faith' in her husband; and the manifestation of this familial and domestic focus through the home arts of cooking, housekeeping, and motherhood." Ibid., p. 274

"The disciplining of Bella is dealt with by those living with or closest to her, and through mechanisms of control which operate on a domestic and private level. The primary agent of this subtle control is Rokesmith, whose position first as lodger in her family home and then as livein secretary in the Boffin's house enables him to scrutinize her behaviour almost continuously. He cast a 'covert glance at her face'; he 'watch[es] her with another covert look'; there is '[a]lways a light in his office-room when [Bella comes] home from the play or Opera'; and he is 'always at the carriage-door' to hand her out. In a rare piece of free indirect discourse, the narrative renders Bella's impression of this relentless scrutiny: '[i]n spite of his seemingly retiring manner, a very intrusive person, this Secretary and lodger...'. Ibid., p. 275

"Bella herself is nonplussed by the power he attains over her: 'What can I mean by it, or what can he mean by it?' she wonders. 'He has no right to any power over me, and how do I come to mind him when I don't care for him?' It is apparent to the reader, however, that her acceptance of his judgement, even at this early stage, anticipates the coverture of her future marriage." Ibid., pp. 275, 276

"As Mr. Boffin pretends to become a miser and to mistreat his secretary, he does so ostensibly in order that he, his wife, and Rokesmith can observe Bella's reactions to his moral decline. Bella, in short, would appear to be the one who is being watched. But in fact the reverse is also true: Bella becomes the watcher, as she scrutinizes Boffin's moral conduct. The Boffin plot thus involves Bella in a circle of mutual observation and discipline, whereby she becomes an intrinsic part of the domestic policing mechanism. She is both observer and observed — and even invites and willingly submits to moral scrutiny when she asks Rokesmith to 'try' her 'through some trial'." Ibid., pp. 277

"In terms of the relationship between Our Mutual Friend and sensation fiction, it is crucial that this key 'trial' should test Bella's performnce as wife. In order to succeed, this wilful girl who has rebelled against being 'willed away' must will away her will. In this respect, the novel turns it scrutiny and disciplinary force onto its true focus of anxiety; the role of the woman in marriage and the home. ... '[i]f the sensation heroine embodies anything, it is an uncertainty about the definition of the feminine, or of 'woman' ". Ibid., pp. 277

While allusions to sexuality were acceptable to the privileged classes during Victorian times, sex was hardly absent. And what were the views concerning sexuality as well as marriage from the viewpoint of the non-priviledged many? Shall we examine the entire issue of sexuality during the Victorian era? A good place to start is "The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England", by Steven Marcus, Basic Books, Inc., Publisher, 1966

"The Other Victorians"

Glossary

It is important to know how Victorians were expected to view sex. To be specific, what was the "official", open or public ideology used by the privileged? This view has been set out by William Acton, the "Kinsey" or "Masters and Johnson" of Victorian England. Acton was a physician, working in a London hospital for several years, then studying at the Female Venereal Hospital in Paris for a few years, returning to London as a Fellow of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London. Acton was a pioneer in passing the "Contagious Diseases Act of 1866", dealing with venereal diseases located around army or naval stations (Canterbury, Dover, Gravesend, Woolwich and Aldershot, p. 3). Eventually, Acton turned to writing. He wrote the very popular "A Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Urinary and Generative Organs in Both Sexes". Acton then wrote "Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, in London and other Large Cities and Garrison Towns, with Proposals for the Control and Prevention of its Attendant Evils", Ibid., p. 4.

Acton was concerned with several sexual issues:

Acton viewed prostitution as an inevitable evil that could not be prevented, thus must be regulated. Based upon the prevalent laissez-faire views then current, Acton's views were to "admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her own person, and that the State has no right to prevent her." Ibid., p. 5.

In his view, a prostitute is not an alien monster, and in most cases her life does not progress downward to death or venereal disease; instead, that most prostitutes are driven to prostitution by poverty. In fact, most prostitutes were generally free from disease and in the majority of cases, eventually turned to other occupations such as opening small shops or lodging-houses; emigrated; or especially, got married. Acton rejected the then-generally held view that venereal diseases were justice meted out as "the penalty for sin", and that it "is the strongest means of deterring men from being unchaste", Ibid., p. 6.

It is notable that no attempt to gather reliable statistics concerning prostitution existed, that gathering of knowledge from private physicians was primitive, and that questionnaires were never used to gather information. It is also important to note that religious views or morality shaped the view points. Ibid., p. 8

Acton's most popular work was "The Function and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations". However, in fact, this book was almost entirely about men in an urban setting. In According to Marcus, Action's view of the world was "...part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination, and part madhouse" Ibid., p. 14. Also in Acton's view, children were asexual, but he was aware that childhood sexual play and masturbation are well-known.

Acton feared premature intellectual growth, as reading by boys led to sexual excitement; recommending athletic exercises, as education (based upon his observation) led to fear of death that sexuality entails, and masturbation, which in an inevitable chain of consequences usually led to insanity or idiocy. Note: this is based upon observation.

"If childhood has its sexual dangers and temptations, those that beset youth 'are increased tenfold' [...] Although sexual desire in youth is a 'natural instinct,' and has its own 'beneficent purpose . . . mature and lawful love,' the young man is to be warned against fulfilling that desire. Indeed, 'such indulgence is fatal. ...' And what makes this bad situation even worse is that the youth neither feels nor knows this. ... We find ourselves here in a familiar setting; roughly speaking, it is the moral world of the Victorian novel. It is a world of nemesis, of unbreakable chains of consequences; it is a scene of incessant struggle against temptation, and in which the first false steps leads irresistibly to the last." Ibid., pp. 18-19
.
.
The fantasies that are at work here have to do with economics; the body is regarded as a productive system with only a limited amount of material at its disposal. And the model on which the notion of semen is formed is clearly that of money. Science, in the shape of Acton is thus still expressing what had for long been a popular fantasy: up until the end of the nineteenth century the chief English colloquial expression for the orgasm was 'to spend.' Ibid., p. 22

Later on there will be discussion of the upper-class household, in which the male typically "spent" money on prostitutes to obtain sexual satisfaction that either wasn't at home or was in addition to what was at home. 2, 3

Behind these images we can make out two further ideas. One is a universal personal and cultural experience of poverty — and fear of it. The other is that the human body is a machine, and that sexual functions are essentially mechanical. Acton regards sexuality and sexual disorders as strictly physiological functions — there is no such thing yet as psychology, and the world he describes is pre-psychological in nature, as is the world of pornography. Ibid., p. 22-23

[This fear of poverty was expressed by Dickens in "David Copperfield", among many others.]

What then is the prevention, cure, or solution for all these dangers? Acton's one recommendation is continence, which consists not only in sexual abstinence 'but in controlling all sexual excitement.' True continence, he writes, 'is complete control over the passions, exercised by one who knows their power and who, but for his steady will, not only could, but would indulge them.' ... Continence in other words is a variant form of that essential nineteenth-century idea, Duty ... Ibid., p. 23

Thus, when a person in Victorian England talks about Duty, they are also talking about sexuality, and as a basis for Imperialism, Colonialism, morality and money. This also forms the justification for their views of slavery, and their racism and bigotry.

Considering that masturbation is a great danger, even involuntary masturbation in nocturnal emissions, needed to be controlled. How can nocturnal emissions be controlled? Acton expresses the view that just as defecation can be influenced by what we now call conditioned reflexes, so can sexual dreams be controlled. As Marcus says, "the youth who has learned to control his sphincter should by the same token be able to constipate his genitals". Ibid., p. 25

At the same time, to regard the genital organization from the point of view of anal-economic regulation is to introduce another series of contradictions. It is to assimilate the idea of money, or of life-giving value, to the idea of waste, of dirt, of poison; and it is hopelessly to confuse the two. In Dickens' later works, especially Our Mutual Friend, the social ramifications of this process are memorably represented. Ibid., p. 25

The dust bins not only represent ambivalence about money (as apparently inherited by Boffin after the 'death' of Rokesmith), but serve to in some degree equate money, sex, waste and duty.

Given this view of male anxiety and sexuality, what then was the Victorian view of female sexuality?

The Victorian View of Female Sexuality

What of woman in this world of torment and fear? ... 'It is a delusion under which many a previously incontinent man suffers,' writes Acton, 'to suppose that in newly married life he will be required to treat his wife as he used to treat his mistresses. It is not so in the case of any modest English woman. He need not fear that his wife will require the excitement, or in any respect imitate the ways of a courtesan.' This passage contains a cluster of interesting assumptions. It assumes, in the first place, and as a matter of public knowledge, that large numbers of Victorian middle-class men will have had mistresses — who were courtesans. It further assumes that the Victorian wife will not have sexual desires, and as a corollary adds that courtesans or mistresses are in themselves extremely sexual; both of these assumptions seem at least open to question. Ibid., p. 29
.
.
I should say that the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally. It is too true, I admit, as the divorce courts show, that there are some few women who have sexual desires so strong that they surpass those of men ... but with these sad exceptions there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance . . . and even if roused (which in many instances it never can be) is very moderate compared with that of the male. Ibid., p. 31

One should remember at this point, the lack of statistics and questionnaires provided in Dr. Acton's book for this sexual ideology. 4

In reading David Copperfield, the image of the angelic and virtuous Agnes waiting years to get married to David is an example of this ideology. In fact, an interesting novel not pursued by Dickens is what happens after Agnes and David do get married? Up to the last line of the book, Agnes continues to be a non-sexual angel, 'pointing upward'. As Malcolm Pittock ("Taking Dickens to Task: Hard Times Once More, the Cambridge Quarterly Vol. XXVII Number Two, pp. 107-128) points out (on page 122), "... Dickens often contrives to write about marriage as if it did not involve intimate physical relations ..." Indeed, the men of the privileged class were sexually satisfied with their servants or other lower-class women or prostitutes. 5, 6 This now allows us to define what the views were of the female gender: the ideologically–acceptable woman was not to be demanding, to be asexual, and not too bright.

If one wanted to take a prostitute — or any woman — to some place indoors, "accommodation houses" of various degrees of costliness were to be found in every part of London. Here is one to which the author resorted when he was still a youth: "It was a gentleman's house, although the room cost but five shillings: red curtains, looking-glasses, wax lights, clean linen, a huge chair, a large bed, and a cheval-glass, large enough for the biggest couple to be reflected in, were all there." In the sixties and seventies "any coffee house with the word 'beds' on the windows' was also available for sexual use." Ibid., p. 99 Click to see.

"In addition to presenting such facts, My Secret Life shows us that amid and underneath the world of Victorian England as we know it - and as it tended to represent itself to itself - a real, secret social life was being conducted, the secret life of sexuality. Every day, everywhere, people were meeting, encountering one another, coming together, and moving on. and although it is true that Victorians could not help but know of this, almost no one was reporting on it; the social history of their own sexual experiences was not part of the Victorians' official consciousness of their society." Ibid., pp. 100, 101

Based on the above ideology of what is sexually acceptable among the privileged classes, it would be improper to have any overt sexual references.7 Sex must be pure and hidden (in marriage). The men of the privileged classes had sex with their mistresses and courtesans, who were primarily drawn from the lower classes: servants and prostitutes. At this time, sexuality in literature was to be found not in Dickens, but in gallanterie, "stories, novelettes, and whole novels of a sentimental-witty-racy kind. ... Periodical publications of different degrees of openness" were also to be had. Ibid., p. 66 Most of the gallanterie were not illustrated, but eventually more and more were not only illustrated but accompanied by Daguerreotypes. 8, 9

When we examine Dickens' David Copperfield, none of these sexual scenes appear. Who then is Dickens' targeting as his audience? Dickens is concerned with the wealthy, the privileged classes. How then can Dickens be the "conscience of the nation" when he was blind to injustices exacted upon all the majority of non-privileged? Dickens beautifully portrays injustice, but only the injustices perpetrated upon the privileged class to which Dickens belonged. Ibid., p. 184

Considering the very, very limited views concerning injustice that concern Dickens, how is Dickens viewed today? In partial answer to this question, was Dickens truly aware and knowledgeable about English society? An analysis of chapter LX in David Copperfield is very revealing. Chapter LX is an example of "WUI" (Writing Under the Influence), meaning the influence of gross ignorance. Many people think Dickens to be very much the sociologist, but an examination of chapter LX reveals Dickens' shocking ignorance of London society. A detailed examination of chapter LX would take a lot of words as there are so many problems in this chapter, but one area will be examined in detail.

In chapter L, Rosa Dartle, a woman that thinks of herself as not only belonging to the privileged classes, but as one of its appointed defenders, full of hate towards Em'ly Peggotty (who Rosa blames for the death of James Steerforth), leaves the wealthy home in which she has almost imprisoned herself, and travels to ....where? The very slums of London, into a building where prostitutes and criminals, the abandoned and forgotten, the very poor are found (the poorest of poor are not here, those people have no homes at all, living under bridges for example). Now the question: is this not an example of extreme psychological dissonance? Rosa Dartle, almost an aristocrat in her distance and hatred of the lower classes, freely mingles among the prostitutes and criminals in a slum? How do writers other than Dickens view the privileged visiting such an environment? We indeed, have two examples! However, before we examine what these other writers say, let us examine how Dickens took an opposing position less than one year after the publication of David Copperfield:

There are no girls or women present. Welcome to Rats' Castle, gentlemen, and to this company of noted theives! ... Inspector Field's eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field's hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends inexhorably, to New South Wales. Yet Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place. Every thief here, cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him, all answer when addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitiate him. This collar-company alone—to say nothing of the crowd surrounding the entrance from the street above, and making the steps shine with eyes—is strong enough to murder us all, and willing enough to do it; but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief here, and take him; let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say, with his business-air, "My lad, I want you!" and all Rats' Castle will be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!  Dickens, "On Duty With Inspector Field," Household Words vol. 3, No. 64, June 14, 1851, p. 266
Now Bark, we are going up stairs!—No, you an't!—You refuse admission to the Police, do you, Bark?—Yes, I do! I refuse it to all the adjective police, and to all the adjective substantives. If the adjective coves in the kitchen was men they'd come up now, and do for you! Shut me that there door! says Bark, and suddenly we are enclosed in the passage. They'd come up and do for you! cries Bark again, and waits. Not a sound in the kitchen! We are shut up, half-a-dozen of us, in Bark's house, in the innermost recesses of the worst part of London, in the dead of the night—the house is crammed with notorious robbers and ruffians—and not a man stirs. No, Bark. They know the weight of the law, and they know Inspector Field and Co. too well.   Dickens, "On Duty With Inspector Field," Household Words vol. 3, No. 64, June 14, 1851, p. 270
.

We see that Inspector Field, with several police officers, is enough to cow murderous, violent criminals, but how does one recognize criminals? "[T]he lowering foreheads, the sallow cheeks, the brutal eyes, the matted hair, the infected, vermin-haunted heaps of rags ... makes it very easy to identify criminal types. (Dickens, "On Duty With Inspector Field," Household Words vol. 3, No. 64, June 14, 1851, p. 64)  We get the feeling that Dickens himself accompanied Inspector Field, who was suitably armed to recognize and fend off violent criminals. How, then, did Dickens send the aristocratic Miss Dartle into a very poor section of London, where prostitutes, ponces (pimps) and other violent (or potentially violent) people, without any protection at all? Did Miss Dartle, with her rich clothes, think she was invisible?

Now let us continue with the opinions of two other writers who have dealt with this very situation:

First off, Jack London, writing not too many years later in The People of the Abyss, feels that he will be viewed as a very foreign element among the poor unless he at least dresses to look like he belongs among the poor. Not Rosa Dartle. Perhaps she expects her wealth to protect her and that dressed in finery, she will not be noticed? With her lips enflamed, scar brilliantly shining, she will dazzle the poor that she disdains? Now, how does the wealthy anonymous author of My Secret Life view such a trip to the slums of London?

"As we walked outside, I saw a number of stout, vulgar looking, flamingly dressed women without bonnets, some in twos - some alone - some with sailors - talking bawdily and openly in the public streets. It was to me a new phase of London life.", Ibid., pp. 103, 104
.
.
My friend knew sailors' necessities, and their habits, and those of their female acquaintances ashore, for he was a large ship owner. ...To amuse me and satisfy my curiosity, we dined together a few days afterwards, and after our dinner, visited several of the public houses. To avoid remark and possibly offensive behavior towards us, we dressed in the shabbiest possible manner, and with caps bought just opposite the docks, and such as were worn largely by the working people in the neighborhood, we flattered ourselves that we looked as common a couple of men as ever rolled barrows along the street. Ibid., pp. 103, 104
.
.
Thus costumed, we spent the entire evening at public houses, among sailors, whores, and working men - in an atmosphere thick and foul with tobacco smoke, sweat, and gas. We ordered liquors which we threw under the table or spilt when not observed; we treated some gay women, but in a very modest way, and altogether had a very entertaining evening. It was difficult to act up to our disguise. At one time I had a whore on my knee, and my friend another. We asked the women to bet which of us had the biggest prick, and the girls felt us outside quite openly. there was, however, nothing likely to shock people there. Of lewd talk there was plenty, though no gross indecency was practised. The barmen, or potboys, or the master were always there and checked it. — "Now you Sally, none of that; or out you go." — "Now hook it smart, you bitch," were phrases we heard with others, used by the master or servants when things got too hot. At one house, they turned a woman and a sailor out by force, who were too noisy and rather drunk. "Let's go and fuck, Tom," said the woman, who was readier to leave than the man. Ibid., pp. 103, 104

What Dickens wrote in chapter LX was the imaginings of a man who never visited the slums, or he knew the truth but could not write it for fear of offending his privileged class readers who could not deal with realism. Thus it is, Dickens' view of women: either Dickens was ignorant, or he knew the truth but could not write it for fear of offending his privileged-class readers who viewed women as non-sexual idiots. Dickens the rhetorician, ever concerned with the profits from the sale of his books.

Is this distance from reality commonplace, or is this simply a lax error?

Concerning the anonymous author of My Secret Life, after he has raped a young farm worker, he writes that he tryed to foist payment upon the young victim:

"Take the sovereign" (she had refused it before), "I'll give you more another day; it will help to keep you a while, - hold your tongue and no one will know," said I. She hesitated, pouted, wriggled her shoulders, but at last took the sovereign ... saying that she would tell her sister. Then said the foreman, "None o' that, gal; an I hears more on that, you won't work here any more, nor anywheres else in this parish, - I knows the whole lot on you; I knows who got yer sister's belly up, - she at her age, she ought to be ashamed on herself; and I knows summut about you too, - now take care gal." "I've nothing to be ashamed on," said the girl; "you're a hard man to the women, they all say...." "Well, there," said he, dropping his bullying tone, "the squire won't harm you; I think you be in luck if he loikes you, - say you nought; - that be my advice." The girl muttering went her way. Ibid., p. 138

A Note on Hygiene in Victorian England

It is pointed out that no people wore undergarments. A common fear among men was catching "the pox" (syphilis). A lack of hygiene would aggravate this possibility.

Is hygiene in Victorian England important? The reoccurring pandemics of Cholera, suggests that hygiene was a significant problem.

The angle of the street named as leading out of the Strand was dark of a night and a favorite place for doxies to go to relieve their bladders. The police took no notice of such trifles, provided it was not done in the greater thoroughfare (although I have seen at night women do it openly in the gutters in the Strand); in the particular street I have seen them pissing almost in rows; yet they mostly went in twos to do that job, for a woman likes a screen, one usually standing up till the other has finished, and then taking her turn. Indeed the pissing in all the bye-streets of the strand was continuous, for although the population of London was only half of what it now is, the number of gay ladies seemed double there." Ibid., p. 98

Rakers and gong-fermors collected human excrement. The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. p. 8

For many Londoners, the financial cost of removing waste exceeded the environmental cost of just letting it accumulate - particularly for landlords, who often didn't live on top of these overflowing cesspools. Sights like this one, reported by a civil engineer hired to survey two houses under repair in the 1840s, became commonplace: 'I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools ... Upon passing through the passage of the first house I found the yard covered in nightsoil, from the overflowing of the privy to the depth of nearly six inches and bricks were placed to enable inmates to get across dryshod.' Ibid., p. 10

Dickens the Bourgeois

"In Dickens, that born writer, there is to be found—as though in a convex mirror—a lively and fascinating picture of the Victorian age both in its overt tastes and its latent impulses. The Swiss professor, Friedrich Brie, in applying the term Biedermeier10 to England, found the essential requisites of this bourgeois type in Dickens. 'His bourgeois-humanitarian instincts protect him from all tendency towards the supernatural, the marvellous, the revoultionary, from all exaltation of passion.' Goodness and quiet happiness are his ideals, as is made clear from the story of David Copperfield, the virtuous bourgeois youth who, through privations and harsh experiences, finds at last his own quiet harbour of refuge. The contrasting character, James Steerforth, the fascinating, untrammelled aristocrat, capricious, arrogant, seducer of women, is as it were the symbol of the Romantic poet in the guise in which he appeared in England, in Byron particularly, and with a few allusions to Shelley as well (his death in a shipwreck during a storm). This pair of opposites is equivalent, in the language of Dickens, to Carlyle's 'Close your Byron, open your Goethe'. ["The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction", by Mario Praz, Oxford UP, 1956, p. 127.]
.
"Nancy, in Oliver Twist, is little more than a cipher: of the surroundings in which she moves, of the language that must have been spoken there, Dickens gives no exact idea; he never hints, even obscurely—as Humphrey House has pointed out—at the fact that the athmosphere of iniquity in which Oliver lived in London must have been 'drenched in sex', since the women like Nancy who had the task of entrapping young men into the haunts of evil life certainly made use with them of every form of low seduction.
Dickens simply cannot deal with women or sexuality: he is subject to both his own and his audience's bourgeois Victorian attitudes, thus in David Copperfield:
.
"From the very beginning Agnes had appeared bathed in a kind of religious light: 'the soft light of the coloured window in the church, seen long ago, falls on her always, and on me when I am near her, and on everything around.' The Victorian sentiment that idealized women as a weak, angelic creature,..." 11 and:
.
Dickens affair with the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan was handled in an entirely Biedermaier fashion: "...'like a madman', about the young actress, for whom he took a house in the rural district of Peckham, Windsor Lodge, paying the rent under the false name of Charles Tringham."12 Dickens, in his own life, felt he could not be honest (with himself as well as his readership). "What makes a painful impression in the whole of this affair is not really the fact of his adultery but, alongside and in contrast with his curious exhibitionism, the series of subterfuges, the shabby expedients, to which Dickens had recourse in order to avoid calling things by their real names—in life, as in art—as far as sex was concerned."
.
This dislike of too realistic detail is not in any case limited, in Dickens, to sexual life; Mr. House has also pointed out how, even with the great pile of adjectives at his command, Dickens, in describing the London underworld, never defines precisely the more repugnant objects, but speaks of 'polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life' (Dombey and Son, chap. xlvii), says that 'the air was impregnanted with filthy odours', and that 'drunken men and women were positively wollowing in filth' (Oliver Twist, chap. viii), 'Dirt' is a word that recurs frequently in Dickens's descriptions of London, which do not go beyond generic terms of this kind. Mr. House has tried to penetrate into the origin of this Victorian prudery. The middle class became sensible of the horrors of poverty and filth, and sharpened sensibility was accompanied, on the one hand, by a wish to turn away from them, on the other by a wish to cure them; but the cure could only come about if the evils were exposed in their full foulness, and this, 'dainty delicacy' did not like to hear: hence a vicious circle from which Dickens never quite escaped. For frankness, which never abandons him when he is denouncing injustices, cruelties, and humbug, fades away when he seeks to denounce the more revolting consequences, in sex, drink, and dirt, of bad social conditions. Mr. House observes that this aspect of Dickens is characteristic of the morality of a middle, ambiguous class. Whereas writers of popular origin, or those who belonged to upper classes, described vice, even in the Victorian age, with human realism, Dickens was, on the one hand, too far removed, both by habits and social class and feeling, from such things to assimilate them fully (he was ashamed when he thought of having once been a manual worker), and yet was not remote enough to be able to treat them with detachment. It was not merely convention that prevented Dickens from speaking freely: there was the conflict within himself. And so it is that, at the time of his separation from his wife, he himself provided a typical case of Victorian hypocrisy. 13
.
Did this bourgeois blindness to reality afflict all Victorian writers? There were writers who were not so limited, and were able to see sexuality in the society. For example, Henry Mayhew was a keen observer at this time, and he was quite able to deal with sexual matters, which after all were very visible at least in London. Thus, Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor" Volume IV ("Those That Will Not Work, comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars, by several contributors"), Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1968, we find the following commentary, accompanied by illustrations:
.
"Men in a certain position avoid publicity in their amours beyond all things, and dread being seen in the neighbourhood of the Haymarket or the Burlington Arcade at certain hours, as their professional reputation might be compromised." [Mayhew Vol. IV, p. 222]
.
"They were all prostitutes, and most of them prowl about at night to plunder drunken men." [Mayhew Vol. IV, p. 298]
.
"By lorettes, I mean those I have before touched upon as prima donnas, who are a class of women who do not call going to night-houses in Panton Street walking the Haymarket ... [a place for the lowest-class, cheapest prostitutes]." [Mayhew Vol. IV, p. 259]
.
"Women who are well kept, and have always been accustomed to the society of gentlemen, have an intense horror of the Haymarket women, properly so called, who promenade the pavement in order to pick up men." [Mayhew Vol. IV, p. 259]
.
"Even if a good sort of woman has been thrown over by her man, and is in want of money, she will not pick up any one at a night-house who may solicit her; on the contrary, she will select some fellow she has a liking for: ... the Haymarket women will pick up any low wretch who she thinks will pay her." [Mayhew Vol. IV, p. 259]
.
"His [Dickens'] champions of goodness were figures of popular art like Épinal prints. There is stressed in these characters, in a form which comes very near caricature, a certain generic benevolence quite devoid of any reference to the controversies and ambitions of the time. And this mixture of generic quality and exaggeration has the result of making these characters appear to us today almost like monstrous grotesques." 14
                     Return to Top

However, silence often is a sign or censorship. More information exists about sexuality during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries! Click to see!.

Glossary
                     Return to "The Other Victorians"

1 "Pictures from Italy", by Charles Dickens, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 56 Return

2 I tried to like, to love her. It was impossible. Hateful in day, she was loathesome to me in bed. Long I strove to do my duty, and be faithful, yet to such a pitch did my disgust at length go, that laying by her side, I had wet dreams nightly, sooner than relieve myself in her. I have frigged myself in the streets before entering my house, sooner than fuck her. I loving women...ready to be kind and loving to her, was driven to avoid her as I would a corpse. I have followed a woman for miles with my prick stiff, yet went to my wretched home pure, because I had vowed to be chaste. My heart was burning to have an affectionate kiss, a voluptuous sigh from some woman, yet I avoided obtaining it. My health began to give way; sleepness nights, weary days made me contemplate suicide." A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England", by Steven Marcus, Basic Books, Inc., Publisher, 1966, pp. 91, 92 Return

3 "I have avoided Argyle and Cremorne, and any other place to which whores resort, for fear of being tempted.", Ibid., p. 96. Return

4 In the discussion of My Secret Life (author unknown), Steven Marcus notes that the author was interested in about one hundred questions, which he memorized to avoid the need for a written list, which he felt would discourage honest and uninhibited response. Marcus believes that this is the first sexual 'questionnaire'. The questionnaire included attitudes towards genital sizes and the frequency and duration of coitus, none of these questions arising with Acton, whose ideas are based only on morality and religion. "On the other hand, if we were to suppose that he wanted to discuss and reason about his behavior, how would he have gone about doing it ...? [E]ven the current medical terminology, as we have seen in Acton, was still largely derived from moral and religious conceptions." Ibid., p. 163-166 Note, Marcus claims that My Secret Life "..is the most important document of its kind about Victorian England...", Ibid., p. 97 Return

5 "This freewheeling aggressiveness is combined with a sexual ideology of class which, he reports, was held by men of his rank. "As to servants and women of the humbler class...they all took cock on the quiet and were proud of having a gentleman to cover them. Such was the opinion of men in my class of life and of my age. My experience with my mother's servants corroborated it." Ibid., p. 132 Return

6 "She was a well-grown, good looking woman about twenty-three years old, of the costermonger class. She looked like one who sold goods from a barrow, or a very small shop. She was commonly but comfortably clad, not warmly enough perhaps for well-to-do people, but enough so for her class who don't feel cold as we do." p. 152 (sounds like Steerforth in David Copperfield?) Return

7 "A language, a diction, a vocabulary suitable for describing the actualities of sexual experience did not form part of the Victorian sensibility." Ibid., p. 190 Return

8 "Pornography (gallanterie) originated in the seventeenth century, fully flourished in the later part of the eighteenth century, and became widely available in the nineteenth century, paralelling the rise in popularity of the novel. Ibid., p. 282 Return

9 However, the working classes were not expected to be ignorant about sexual matters. Thus we find the following. "In contrast, Francis Place (b. 1771), an early birth control advocate, recalled that he was 'pretty well acquainted with what relates to the union of the sexes' by age thirteen. Looking back on the 1780s from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he noted that 'Conversation on these matters was much less reserved than it is now, books relating to the subject were much more within the reach of boys and girls than they are now, and I had little to learn on any part of the subject.' Obscene penny prints were commonly sold to laboring people, and Place read Aristotle's Masterpiece, as a result, he could not accept the gospels' account of the conception of Jesus." "The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes", by Johnathan Rose, Yale University Press, 2001, p. 208 Return

10 The term "Biedermeier" comes from the pseudonym "Gottlieb Biedermaier", used by the country doctor Adolf Kussmaul and the lawyer Ludwig Eichrodt in poems, printed in the Munich Fliegende Blätter (Flying Sheets), parodying the poems of the Biedermeier era as depoliticized and petit-bourgeois. The Biedermeier name was at first applied in a joking spirit, to a period of European culture and a style of furniture, decoration, and art originating in Germany during the period between Napoleon's defeat and the 1848 revolution and especially popular there and in Austria. It is believed to have been named for the worthy, bourgeois-minded "Papa Biedermeier," a humorous character featured in a series of verses by Ludwig Eichrodt, published in Fliegende Blätter. The Biedermeier period found expression in comfortable, homelike furnishings, simple in design and inexpensive in material, fitting the requirements of the German people in a time of little wealth following the Napoleonic Wars. Biedermeier refers to work in the fields of literature, music (for example, "Die Fledermaus"), the visual arts and interior design; the style corresponds to the Regency style in England, Federalist style in the United States and to the French Empire style. Return

11 "The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction", by Mario Praz, Oxford UP, 1956, p. 135 Return

12 Ibid., p. 133 Return

13 Ibid., p. 131 Return

14 Ibid., p. 143 Return

Back

© Copyright 2006 - 2019    The Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Trust     Web Site Terms of Use