The Victorian Age

 From John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman chapter 35:

In you resides my single power
Of sweet continuance here. -- Hardy, "Her immortality"

At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years of age, have been brought in pregnant to be confined here. The girls have acknowledged that their ruin has taken place...in going or returning from their (agricultural) work. Girls and boys of this age go five, six or seven miles to work, walking in droves along the roads and bylanes. I have myself witnessed gross indecencies between boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age. I saw once a young girl insulted by some five or six boys on the roadside. Other older persons were about 20 or 30 yards off, but they took no notice. The girl was calling out, which caused me to stop. I have also seen boys bathing in the brooks, and girls between 13 and 19 looking on from the bank --Children's Employment Commission Report (1867)

What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds--a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit , in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never--or hardly ever--have so many great public figures, from the future king down, let scandalous private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanized; and flagellation so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss, where Dr. Bowdler (the date of whose death, 1825, reminds us that the Victorian ethos was in being long before the strict threshold of the age) was widely considered a public benefactor; and where the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained--the flushing lavatory came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900--so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one was not constantly reminded of them. Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms, and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing by tyranny in the most personal and fundamental.

At first sight the answer seems clear-it is the business of sublimation. The Victorians poured their libido into those other fields; as if some genie of evolution, feeling lazy, said to himself: We need some progresss, so let us dam and divert this one great canal and see what happens. 

While conceding a partial truth to the theory of sublimation, I sometimes wonder if this does not lead us to the error of supposing the Victorians were not in fact highly sexed. But they were quite as highly sexed as our own century--and, in spite of the fact that we have sex thrown at us night and day (as the Victorians had religion), far more preoccupied with it than we really are. They were certainly preoccupied by love, and devoted far more of their arts to it than we do ours. Nor can Malthus and the lack of birth-control appliances quite account for the fact that they bred like rabbits and worshiped fertility far more ardently than we do. Nor does our century fall behind in the matter of progress and liberalization' and yet we can hardly maintain that this is because  we have so much sublimated energy to spare. I have seen the Naughty Nineties represented as a reaction to many decades of abstinence; I believe it was merely the publication of what had hitherto been private, and I suspect we are in reality dealing with a human constant: the difference is vocabulary, a degree of metaphor. 

The Victorians chose to be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and the way the  expressed their seriousness was not to talk openly about sex, just as part of our way is the very reverse. But these "ways" of being serious are mere conventions. The fact behind them remains constant.