Why Victorians Thought Sex Manuals Were Like Porn

Victorian sexuality can be approached from so many directions, including (but not limited to) body image, sexual orientation, masturbation, prostitution, sex education, disease, religion, marriage, and pornography. All of these aspects overlap and influence each other, creating tremendous diversity in attitudes toward sex at any given point in history. Each of these factors provide the context in which sexual identities are created. This post is the fifth in a series of posts that seek to explore that context from the 1890s with an emphasis on male sexuality.

Sex Education

We know now, beyond any reasonable doubt, that sex education reduces the risk of unwanted pregnancy, and prevents the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Of course, there are still a few crazy people, who argue against sex education, people, I assume, who don't know the difference between sex education and pornography. Those people were the majority in the nineteenth century, believing that sex education led to promiscuity. 

The Victorians had more of an excuse for feeling that way, as there was often little difference between sex education manuals and pornography. Often pornography was a young man's first introduction to sex. BuzzFeed Contributor, Fern Riddel inadvertently made this case last year with a list of "9 Books That Will Change Your 19th Century Sex Life." The books are described as sex manuals, and include the English translation of the Kama Sutra (1883), and My Secret Life (1888).

I imagine that most of my readers know about the Kama Sutra and Orientalism in the nineteenth century, and beyond. The chapter of My Secret Life, published by anonymous, but attributed to Henry Spencer Ashbee, begins like this:

Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of a coupling the sexes, called fucking. It is performed by two organs. That of the male is familiarly and vulgarly called a prick, that of the female a cunt. Politely one is called a penis the other a pudenda. The prick, broadly speaking, is a long, fleshy, gristly pipe. The cunt a fleshy, warm, wet hole, or tube. The prick is at times and in a peculiar manner, thrust up the cunt, and discharges a thick fluid into it, and that is the operation called fucking. It is not a graceful operation, in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.

If you read the rest of this chapter, you will quickly see that the author needs a lesson in "no means no." The Victorian sex manual's association with books like this made more earnest attempts at promoting sex education much more difficult. I'd like to give two examples of this: The Fruits of Philosophy, and Abbotsholme, before I discuss the difference in sex education for Victorian men and women.

An American doctor, atheist, and writer, Charles Knowlton wrote 'The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People' and was sharing it with his patients. In addition to offering treatments for impotence and advice on conceiving children, the book promoted then-popular methods of contraception, like chemical douching. For his efforts, Knowlton was prosecuted and fined for distributing pornography, so he published a second edition in 1832, so that it might be more widely distributed.

Of course, this led to Knowlton's three-months in prison, and another blasphemy trial in 1838. He died in 1850.

Annie Besant (1847–1933)
was a prominent British socialist, theosophist,
women's rights activist, writer and orator
and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule.

In 1877, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried in London, for publishing the book there. Telling of the demand for sex education, the trial turned the book into a bestseller, increasing sales from around 700 copies to 125,000 copies in a single year. 

I've seen it proudly stated that England was the first country to offer formalized sex education classes. However, I don't think the creator of those classes felt that his country was so proud of him at the time.

Cecil Reddie

Cecil Reddie was the founder of Abbotsholme School, a school for boys between the ages of ten and nineteen, in Rocester in Staffordshire. Reddit was an education reformer, influenced by John Ruskin; fellow teacher, Clement Charles Cotterill; polymath, Patrick Geddes; and the romantic socialist poet, Edward Carpenter. Reddie lived with Carpenter, and Carpenter helped Reddie found the school in 1889. He ran the first formalized sex education class at that school. 

In 1900, Reddie wrote a book about his experiences running the school from 1889-1899. Though many of his students were British, his teaching methods were more popular in Europe, especially Germany. Teachers came from around the world to learn his methods, and set up their own schools. In England, his methods were met with great opposition, though the greatest opposition he faced came after the turn of the century when England developed a distaste for his pro-German leanings.

1890s Abbotsholme School.

Which leads me nicely into the difference between sex education between genders. If any female students attended such classes in the 1890s, Reddie would have likely been shut down. The rest of England wasn't as opposed to men learning about sex, as it was to women learning about... well... anything. 

The sexual education of boys was broadly discouraged. As I said in my post on prostitution, it was broadly believed that men needed some form of sexual relief, but they weren't allowed to masturbate. If there was any chance that sex education, being so much like porn, might encourage a man to masturbate, it was to be discouraged. Hence, most wouldn't risk it.

On top of this, a young man's parents likely didn't have any sex education either, and probably didn't know that they were making their sons and daughters more vulnerable to diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The idea that their children might have been masturbating would have terrified most parents in the 1890s. Because most sex manuals were so strongly linked in their minds to pornography, knowledge of sex insinuated an interest in pornography.

Consequently, any sex education for women was reserved for marriage. "Instruction and advice for the young bride," an article published in The Madison Institute Newsletter, Fall Issue, 1894, promotes the notion that women have no interest in sex - even after they are married! Author, Ruth Smythers writes, encouragingly, "By their tenth anniversary many wives have managed to complete their child bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contacts with the husband."

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Where did your favourite 1890s writer go to school?

What did it take to be a successful writer in 1890s London? Did Education have anything to do with it? While managing the Lyceum, Bram Stoker used to receive manuscripts from aspiring playwrights of all walks of life. Though Stoker seemed skeptical about some of the aspiring writers he came across, a study into the educational backgrounds of some of 1890s London's most successful writers demonstrates that they did indeed come from all walks of life.

Of course, access to education was influenced by gender and social class. Women's education was topical in the 1890s, and formed the basis of some of these writers' works.

J.M. Barrie was educated in his native Scotland before moving to London, and becoming a writer. Barrie started school at the Glasgow Academy at age 8. At 10, he continued at the Forfar Academy, before moving on to the Dumfries Academy at age 14. He had a lifelong love of reading, and devoured Penny Dreadfuls as a kid. Barrie knew he wanted to be a writer, even though his family wanted him to go into the church. Determined to study literature, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned his M.A. in Literature in 1882.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, like most Victorian women, was privately educated. It helped that she married a publisher.

Hall Caine grew up in the Isle of Man, but attended the Hope Street British Schools until age 14.  After school, he articled with John Murray, as an architect and surveyor. During this time, he still loved reading, and spent a lot of time at Liverpool's Free Library, leading him to insist that he was mainly self-taught.

Marie Corelli was the love child of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr. Charles Mackay, and his servant Elizabeth Mills. Consequently, she was educated by a series of governesses, who, according to biographer Annette Fredrico, "fled from her intellectual exhibitionism and her intimidating sense of her own brilliance." Without a governess to look after her, Corelli was sent to a convent, most likely in Paris, where, according to Fredrico, "she concocted private theatricals about love and murder." Corelli left the convent at age 15. She published her first novel 16 years later, after a career as a musician.

Arthur Conan Doyle came from a broken home. His family actually had to split up because of his father's alcoholism, and lived in squalid tenement flats. With the financial support of his uncles, Doyle went to a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at age 9, then Stonyhurst College, until he was 16. Next, he spent a year at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria (also a Jesuit school). He left that place agnostic, and went to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where writing became a hobby for him. He finished school at 28 with an advanced medical degree, and tried to be a doctor, until he got really good at his hobby, and the world became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.

Richard Bernard Heldmann a.k.a. Richard Marsh used his pseudonym to practically assume a new identity, which included a claim to having graduated from Eton and Oxford. These claims have recently been proven false. Marsh adopted the new name, and life, to recover from the scandal of serving eighteen months’ hard labour, during April 1884, for forging cheques in Britain and France in 1883. He started using the name "Marsh" upon release from jail. Stories by ‘Richard Marsh’ begin to appear in literary journals in 1888, followed by two novels in 1893. Marsh wrote prolifically during the 1890s, and the early years of the 20th century. However, we're still not sure where he really went to school.

Ellen Buckingham Mathews a.k.a. Helen Mathers attended a boarding school in Chantry, near Frome in Somerset, which made it into her first novel,"Comin' thro' the Rye." In that book, she explores her experiences at school. "Mr Russell" in the novel was Rev Fussell in real life, who was the Lord of the manor and founder of the school. In the novel she calls the village Charteris.

W. Somerset Maugham studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. He was still studying there in the 1890s (I mostly include him in this site because he is one of my husband's favourites). During this time, Maugham felt he got the education he needed for writing from the streets, by hanging out with the "low" sorts of people that he didn't otherwise get a chance to be around. He saw them on the streets, and in the hospital: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..." As a medical student, he wrote at night, and published Liza of Lambeth in 1897, which was a big success.

Sometimes, more is made of Bram Stoker's education before he went to school than during. An unknown illness kept him in bed, listening to his mom's horror stories, until he inexplicably recovered and went school at age 7. Of being a sickly kid, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." His private school was run by Rev. William Woods. Stoker's early illness left him with no further major health issues; he even excelled as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with honours as a B.A. in Mathematics. Stoker actively participated in the College Historical Society, 'the Hist', and became president of the University Philosophical Society, writing his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society".

One might say education was a habit in the home of Mary Augusta Ward a.k.a. Mrs. Humphry Ward.  She was born into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists in Tasmania, Australia. Ward was the daughter of a literature professor, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and she was Aldous Huxley's aunt. She attended boarding schools, including Shifnal in Shropshire from ages 11-15. Her schooldays inspired one of her novels, Marcella (1894). When she wasn't at school, she was at home with her family at Oxford University. She eventually married a writer and Oxford educator, and continued to live at Oxford, at 17 Bradmore Road, where she is commemorated by a blue plaque.

Oscar Wilde was educated at home until age 9, focussing on languages with a French bonne and a German governess. Then he was off to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He developed a prominent role for himself in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. By the time he was finished school, Wilde was basically the poster boy for aestheticism.

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Woman's World Magazine

Fashion is such an essential part of the mundus muliebris of our day, that it seems to me absolutely necessary that its growth, development, and phases should be duly chronicled.

Oscar Wilde was editor of Woman's World Magazine from 1887-1889 and wrote the above in response to criticisms of the magazine's fashion pages. As a writer, trying to recapture some sense of the times, I'm incredibly grateful to those, like Wilde, who documented the frivolity of their times.

Wildeans often think of Oscar Wilde's love of ancient Greece in terms of how he idealized the ancient Greek approaches to men's sexuality, but we can see how he used the classics as models for women's lives as well, when we look at articles he published in Woman's World during those years, articles like “The Women of Greece,” “Woman and Democracy,” “Roman Women at the Beginning of the Empire,” and “A Pompeian Lady.”

The Woman’s World, edited by Mr. Oscar Wilde, gracefully got up as it is in every respect, has taken a high place among the illustrated magazines. Written by women, for women and about women, striking out an original line, it merited the success it has obtained. - The Times (December 1888)

In the 1890s, journalism was increasingly seen as an acceptable career path for a woman. Oscar Wilde's mother supplemented her income this way, she even wrote a piece for Woman's World called "Historic Women." Oscar Wilde's contributors were established female writers, society women, students, professional women and feminist campaigners. Julia Wedgewood, a well-known suffragist, authored "Women and Democracy." 

Readers followed social issues and philanthropy and were overwhelmingly feminist. Of course, with Oscar Wilde at its helm, Woman's World became associated with aestheticism, but it was also linked to women in pursuit of higher education.

Something new that I learned today is the an 1880s and 90s synonym for the "New Woman" was "Girton Girl" because Girton referred to England's first residential college for women, established in 1869. Annie Edwards published a novel called A Girton Girl (1885), which has been digitized by Google, and was published in three volumes, dealing with many of the themes of a late-Victorian New Woman's life.

A laboratory at Girton College Cambridge (1900) 

Poetically, Elaine Showalter writes:

New Women and decadent artists were linked together as twin monsters of a decadent age, sexual anarchists who blurred the boundaries of gender.

I imagine them as very well-dressed and likable monsters, which reminds me that I started this tangent thinking about what my protagonists would wear to a very formal dinner party in 1889/90. 

Toward this end, Oscar Wilde called upon the ancient Greeks and wrote in  Woman's World that women could follow the ancient principles of Greek dress by suspending their dresses from their shoulders, even with sleeves, thereby creating rich and rippling folds.

Most of the information in this post comes from my own research and an essay by Isobel Hurst "Ancient and Modern Women in Woman's World."

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