Of the many books since the 1960s that claim to overturn the cliche
of Victorian prudery, this is surely the least interesting,
persuasive, and readable. Mason (English/Univ. College, London)
broadly defines the Victorian era as starting with the 1790s - the
Romantic, Regency, or Georgian period - and petering out well
before 1900, his cut-off date. He's certainly done resourceful and
intensive research (check out the mammoth bibliography); his text
considers such varied sources as working-class papers, medical
reports, popular culture, and religious writing. Missing, however,
is analysis of the major cultural landmarks that Peter Gay
illuminates so brilliantly in his still uncompleted series on "the
bourgeois experience." Using imperfectly assimilated sociological
jargon, Mason argues that a crisis in confidence in courtship and
marriage for the first two or three decades of the 19th century
encouraged prostitution and casual sex; that interest in marriage
and concubinage was renewed at mid-century; and that the
introduction of artificial contraception revived sexuality after
1860. The moral "recalibration" that began in the lower classes
with a rise in sexual "moralism," he asserts, became a sign of
political progress throughout the period, touching the middle
classes as well. Considering popular entertainments, housing, class
orientation, and medical attitudes, he finds a discrepancy between
sexual attitudes and behavior - in brief, Victorian hypocrisy - a
discrepancy he criticizes Foucault for overlooking, but one that he
claims anthropologists find in many societies. While the material
is interesting, Mason's focus is so narrow, his writing so gnarled,
his syntax so confusing, his structure so uncertain, that it is
difficult to follow his argument or ascertain the direction in
which he is moving (toward the end he proposes a second volume).
Hard to imagine why anyone would prefer this volume to Gay's, or
even read it afterward. (Kirkus Reviews)
What did the Victorians think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour? What wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? A lively and fascinating synthesis of a wealth of new research, The Making of Victorian Sexuality expertly disrupts our present comfortable consensus on nineteenth-century society. Moreover, it persuasively argues that the Victorians may have much to teach the libertarian twentieth-century.
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