The Wig Club was founded in 1775 in Edinburgh, and named after its most venerated item of regalia – ‘one renowned Wig worn by the Sovereign composed of the Privy-hairs of Royal courtezans’ – a hairpiece, that is, made of the pubic hair of Charles II’s mistresses. The Wig Club’s members ranged from the ages of 21 to 68 with the average admission age being in the late-3os. ‘Each member of the Wig Club had to provide locks of public hair suitably harvested to be added to the wig, as proof of having triumphed sexually,’ recounts Stevenson. ‘Whether this proof of ability on matters sexual is more or less distasteful than the Benison’s masturbation may be debated.’
The Wig Club was more ribald than even the Beggars, who inclined a little towards solemnity. Stevenson tells of one Wig Club meeting where ‘… it was ordered that all members were to drink “to the Wig out of the Prick Glass”, which, just in case things weren’t achingly jocular enough, may have been a trick glass “designed so that part of the contents would be released suddenly when the glass was raised to a certain angle, so drenching the drinker”.’
Almost wholesome by comparison with the Scottish sex clubs was another marker buoy of eighteenth-century sexuality, John Cleland’s erotic 1748 novel Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. This tale of young Fanny’s arrival in London as an innocent orphan from Liverpool, her swift descent into prostitution and subsequent experiences in a brothel run by Mrs Brown, takes the form of confessional letters bursting with all the gynaecological detail the most demanding male reader could want.
The first work of pornography to be written in English, it was an immediate bestseller, even though full, unexpurgated editions were not available until after the renowned indecency trial in 1963 of the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the same way as that twentieth-century trial provided a huge publicity boost for an obscure pornographic text, the legal hoohah that accompanied publication of the first part of Fanny Hill in 1748 was a splendid advertisement for it.
John Cleland was a Westminster School boy in the 1720s and for some years worked for the East India Company in Bombay. He started writing Fanny Hill around 1730 in India. He returned to London in 1741 and soon fell into debt – he actually completed Fanny Hill in the Fleet debtors’ jail. Cleland’s financial problems combined with a legendary grumpiness isolated him from literary circles, but his father had been a friend of Alexander Pope, and he was known to the day’s luminaries, Boswell, Garrick, Pope and Smollett. He survived to the impressive age of seventy-eight, his earnings from Fanny Hill only just keeping him going through a barren subsequent literary career. He wrote little else – three more erotic, but long-forgotten, novels and some hack journalism.
The moment Fanny Hill came out, there were the expected complaints from the Church, but Cleland was not prosecuted for indecency. He was, however, arrested for obscenity and summoned before the Privy Council. There he pleaded poverty; the Privy Council gave him a warning but accepted his mitigation that he was only doing it for the money and awarded him, puzzlingly enough, more money still in the form of an annual pension of a hundred pounds. Ralph Griffiths, the St Paul’s Churchyard bookseller who stumped up a hefty twenty-guinea advance for the book, went on to make a reputed profit of £10,000 from sales of Fanny Hill.
What stands out about Cleland’s work is that, in the global tradition of pornography for men, it mostly consists of wishful male thinking – to wit, that almost anything a man does will have the ladies simpering in delight. The orgasms are described from a female perspective, in keeping with the convention that even male writers never attempt to describe the male orgasm, preferring instead to imagine the female. Although it is ripe with voyeuristic, masturbatory fodder, it is surprisingly prim, light on rude words, heavy on euphemism and with just one fleeting allusion to oral sex; cunnilingus and fellatio were simply too smelly to consider in the unwashed eighteenth century.
Fanny Hill is, nonetheless, creditable pornography that succeeds in still being erotic today, as well as packed with sex action. Finding the sexual scenes, indeed, is like looking for hay in a haystack: ‘My young sportsman wantonly takes my hand and carries it to that enormous machine of his that stood with a stiffness! a hardness! an upward bent of erection! and which, together with the inestimable bulge of lady’s jewels, formed a grand show out of goods indeed! … Chiming then to me, with exquisite consent, as I melted away, his oily balsamic injection, mixing deliciously with the sluices in flow from me, sheath’d and blunted all the stings of pleasure and flung us into an ecstasy that extended us fainting, breathless, entranced … I no sooner felt the warm spray darted up my innards from him, but I was punctually on flow to share the momentary ecstasy.’
Then there is Fanny’s first attempt at masturbation, again through the rose-tinted monocle of Mr Cleland: ‘… guided by nature only, I stole my hand up my petticoats, and with fingers all on fire, seized, and yet more inflamed that centre of all my senses; my heart palpitated, as if it would force its way through my bosom; I breath’d with pain; I twisted my thighs, squeezed, and compressed the lips of that virgin slit, and following mechanically the example of Phoebe’s manual operation on it, as far as I could find admission, brought on at last the critical ecstasy, the melting flow, into which nature, spent with excess of pleasure, dissolves and dies away.’
And here is Cleland’s male perspective, steering scrupulously clear of giving any hint of what orgasm is like for a man and concentrating instead on the visual – plus the male experience of the woman’s orgasm: ‘What firm, smooth, white flesh is here! … How delicately shaped! … Then this delicious down! Oh! let me view the small, dear, tender cleft! … This is too much, I cannot bear it! … I must … I must … Here she took my hand, and in a transport carried it where you will easily guess. But what a difference in the state of the same thing! … A spreading thicket of bushy curls marked the full-grown, complete woman. Then the cavity to which she guided my hand easily received it; and as soon as she felt it within her, she moved herself to and fro, with so rapid a friction, that I presently withdrew it, wet and clammy, when instantly Phoebe grew more composed, after two or three sighs, and heart-fetched Ohs! and giving me a kiss that seemed to exhale her Soul through her lips, she replaced the bedclothes over us.’
Fanny Hill nevertheless has an unexpectedly suburban dénouement, though one appropriate to a time in which, in spite of rampant bawdiness, Josiah Wedgwood took care to stick spurious fig leaves to the relevant bits of his classical china nudes. Fanny meets – well, is rented by – a young buck called Charles, falls in love with him and becomes his kept woman. They live in sin for a while before he vanishes abroad, leaving her to rekindle her old career in a new brothel. She becomes the kept woman of an older man, who then dies, leaving her his fortune. She is reunited with Charles, and they marry.
The era of Fanny Hill (and of the Venetian sexual adventurer Casanova, who lived from 1725-98, for that matter) begins to peter out towards the end of the eighteenth-century as the early signs of Victorianism – ‘The Great Forgetting’, as Naomi Wolf has called it – start to appear.
There were several last-gasp libertine carry-overs into the new century. In 1828, the by-then veteran political and sexual radicals, Richard and Jane Carlile, published an attack on conventional sexual morality, Every Woman’s Book, or, What is Love, containing Most Important Instructions for the Prudent Regulation of the Principle of Love and the Number of a Family. The Carliles argued that passion, subject to birth control, should be given free rein. They believed that all kinds of illnesses were caused by sexual frustration, and wanted to build a Temple of Venus where men and woman could enjoy sex purely for pleasure and outside the bounds of marriage. In accord with the new trend for anti-masturbation sentiment, they maintained that masturbation led to physical and mental disease. It was wrong, they said, because it diverted sexual desire and pleasure away from the family The Carliles’ free love vision, on the other hand, was for them the solution to the plague of prostitution an
d paedophilia.
The Germany of Goethe and Schiller proved highly influential in orchestrating the sexual tempo of the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Weimar, the German Oxford, became a hotbed of both heterosexual and homosexual passion, which were extolled with solemn eloquence – and practised with erotic verve. Weimar intellectuals from Schlegel to Liszt reconciled their outward Christianity with a sturdy defiance of its restrictions, demanding and grasping a freedom in sexual matters which scandalised burghers and Church alike.
But arguably darker forces were already at work across the world. Sex before marriage was so rife in eighteenth-century Britain that in the second half of the century more than 40 per cent of children were conceived as a result of sex before wedlock. Few societies can sustain such potentially destabilising non-compliance with consensus values, and the Marriage Act of 1753 stipulated that all sexual relations were to be banned until after marriage. Four years later, a censorious Society for the Reformation of Manners had been officially endorsed by George III, who issued a Proclamation against Vice to back it up. In 1802 a still more severe Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in London by William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner. The society was designed, ‘… to check the spread of open vice and immorality, and more especially to preserve the minds of the young from contamination by exposure to the corrupting influence of impure and licentious books, prints, and other publications.’
There was now a perceptible swing away from what had been acceptable by default in the previous century. Medical texts became dismissive of sexual pleasure, witness the Medical Journal’s 1802 statement that, ‘Many viviparous animals are subject to periodical venereal orgasm’, meaning, one assumes, that humans are above that sort of thing. Middle-class, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century European men began to look to wife and home for relief from the morally tarnished life of coffee house, whores and scandals. In the same way as the early Christians tried to forge ahead with a modern approach to life, by which they meant ditching their licentious, sexy pre-Jesus ways, the coming of the new century in Europe prompted a bout of anti-sex modernism. A new middle class ‘erotophobia’, as it has been called by some historians, was formulated on an ostensible reverence for women’s superior spiritual being. And just as a franker, brasher take on sex would spread from West to East in the twentieth century, in the early nineteenth, the ‘cleaned-up’ Western view of sexuality reproduced virally through many other parts of the planet. In the Islamic Ottoman Empire, for example, homosexuality, which had been happily tolerated since the fourteenth-century, became taboo with the adoption of a Western influenced culture. The same thing happened in India, where a hitherto fluid view of sexuality was more general until British influence began to establish itself.
The new Western worship of supposed womanly temperance came, however, at a cost for women themselves, as it precluded them from fulfilment of their sexual needs. Yet even women willingly bought into the myth. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, the virtual founder of feminism, scolded her peers in the 1790s for what she saw as their selfish pursuit of pleasure and argued, as did many others of her stripe, for the control of sexual passion by religion and reason. Women, for Wollstonecraft, were figures who ‘civilise men and raise children up to virtue’. A century later the Suffragettes also willingly embraced the concept of female ‘nobility’, untainted by lust for orgasmic relief.
Literature was subjected to a revisionist fervour that would put the twentieth-century Taliban to shame. Jane Austen was condemned for allowing Lydia in Pride and Prejudice to elope without disaster befalling her. Dr Thomas Bowdler, a Swansea medical man and co-founder with Wilberforce of his anti-vice society, gave up medicine to practise a crude form of censoring surgery on the plays of William Shakespeare, the Old Testament and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He removed from all these lewd works ‘words and expressions which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’, and gave the English language a new word – ‘bowd-lerising’, meaning literary emasculation.
Public concern over masturbation reached hyperbolic extremes. In 1834, the Reverend Sylvester Graham, a Philadelphia Presbyterian minister and proselytiser for vegetarianism, published A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardian. Graham, who inter alia invented the ubiquitous American staple Graham flour and believed humans should be more like orang utans, set the pattern for a century of hysterical condemnations of masturbation and sex in general, predicated on no discernible research or thought process at all.
Decades before the notorious John Kellogg, another eccentric cereal founder portrayed in the film The Road To Wellville, Graham believed sexual desire was heightened by ‘high seasoned food, rich dishes, the free use of flesh’, that masturbation reduced life expectancy and led to insanity, and that over-sexed married couples would be struck down with ‘languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, headache, melancholy hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, spinal diseases, weakness of the brain, loss of memory epilepsy insanity apoplexy abortions, premature births, and extreme feebleness, morbid predispositions, and an early death of offspring’.
Graham’s prescription for the good life was an overweening blandness in food and sex. But a general onset of mildness in reaction to the sexual excesses of the eighteenth century was already well in train. The idea that women’s sexuality is inherently milder than that of men dates from this time. The ‘modern’ medicalised view was that women were more angelic than animal, their desires focused not on lust but on affection and domesticity.
There are many convoluted theories of what, other than the kind of crudeness illustrated by Hogarth’s engravings, brought about this attitudinal shift. Democratisation – which certainly was the political drift of the period, increased literacy, belief in science above superstition, and changing patterns in economics have all been argued as causes for the new blandness. The most plausible theory is that women were recognised, biologically speaking, as being better equipped than men to control the impulsive, destructive drive of carnal desire. Libido was increasingly ascribed purely to masculinity. So middle-class women as never before, seeing their less fortunate sisters floundering in a morass of sexual vice and disease, took on sexual ‘purity’ as their defining virtue. For poor women prostitution continued to boom, but strictly as a service industry to cater – quite usefully – to men’s base lust.
As for hope that a more sexually mature society might emerge in the nineteenth century from the anarchy of the eighteenth, there was precious little. In 1821, a Massachusetts court found a Boston printer, Peter Holmes, who tried to publish an American edition of Fanny Hill, guilty of smut-peddling. It was the United States’ first obscenity trial. The judge had refused to see the book, or let the jury see it, or to enter passages from it into the court record. To do so would ‘require that the public itself should give permanency and notoriety to indecency, in order to punish it’. Holmes appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, pointing out that the judge had not seen the book. The superior court was not swayed. The Chief Justice wrote that Holmes was, ‘a scandalous and evil disposed person’ contriving to ‘debauch and corrupt’ the citizens of Massachusetts and ‘to raise and create in their minds inordinate and lustful desires’.
In Britain too the retreat was being sounded for sexual liberation. The Wig Club closed for business in 1827. The Beggar’s Benison died out in 1836, although rumour had it that as late as 1861, covert Beggars’ groups were still meeting. But as Victoria was being groomed for the throne, it was simply no longer acceptable, even
within the confines of a private gentlemen’s club, to be overtly sexual.
13
A Tale of Two Sexes?
The Orgasm From Victoria
to Health & Efficiency
‘Literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute’
Bracebridge Hemyng, quoted in Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
Victorian prudery was not Queen Victoria’s fault. It started before her time, and is argued by many historians actually to have been on the ebb by the beginning of her reign. The pious hope that the nineteenth century should be more ‘civilised’ than the seventeenth and eighteenth was already forming during the eighteenth. It was in 1791 that the Gentleman’s Magazine boasted, with no irony intended: ‘We are every day becoming more delicate, and, without doubt, at the same time more virtuous; and shall, I am confident, become the most refined and polite people in the world.’ Neither was the disparaging of sex that is associated with Victorian Britain just a British phenomenon. As we will see in this chapter, some of the most enthusiastic ‘Victorians’ were in Europe and the newly liberated American colonies.
Just as the Christian disavowal of sexual pleasure early in the first millennium was made in the name of progress and modernity, the nineteenth-century trend towards a more sexually covert and sober society was informed by a mélange of the blossoming belief in science plus notions of moral ‘purity’. There was a specifically new twist in this anti-sexual ‘revolution’, however – the placing of women on a pedestal, if a rather rickety one.
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