Are Men Gay Deceivers?

Headline from the November 18, 1909 issue of The Republican.

Though it sounds funny to our ears now, in the nineteenth century, the term 'gay deceiver' referred to a man who used his charm for personal gain. The term could most certainly be applied to Oscar Wilde's older, and more sinister, brother, Willie.

The following essay, entitled "Are Men Gay Deceivers?" was written and published by Mrs Frank Leslie on the occasion of her divorce from Willie Wilde. She was seeking a divorce because he had clearly married her for her money and refused to work, but spent all of his time drinking instead. In the almost two years it took for their divorce to be finalized, she slandered her soon-to-be ex-husband in the press, while he shacked up with his future wife, the heiress, Sophia Lees. It's hard to not read this essay as Leslie's assessment of Willie's character at this time.

ARE MEN GAY DECEIVERS?

MODERN DECEPTIONS AMONG MEN AND WOMEN.

It is a stock phrase under certain unfortunate circumstances to say that a girl has "been deceived" by some man, or to call an immoral man "a gay deveiver." Now, the question in my mind is whether this is, in the majority of cases, a correct judgement, or whether one might not better say the woman deceived herself and blinded her own eyes.

The fact is that most women are far more clear-sighted than most men, and even those of the sex who might be called deficient in intelligence are endowed with a keen, if vague, instinct which cries "'Ware, danger!" even though it is quite unable to describe the precise nature or position of the menaced trouble.

Willie Wilde by Alfred Bryan.

But a woman, no matter of what degree, so soon as she falls in love blinds herself, or rather, she sets up her own ideal of the beloved object between herself and the reality, and if she said reality only reasonably keep quiet, and not persist in destroying of stepping out from behind his shelter, all will go well.

 The trouble is that few men have enough tact to be really deceitful; few have finesse enough to enter into a woman's mind and perceive the position which she has assigned to her hero of the moment and adapt themselves to it. They try to do it, but they don't often succeed; and by way of a glittering generality on may say that men mean to be deceitful and are really transparent, and that women, while apparently most deliciously transparent, are actually subtly deceitful.

Here, I suspect that Leslie is reflecting on the beginning of her marriage, when she reported in the American press that she had married Oscar Wilde's older brother and that Willie was even more of a genius than Oscar was. It seems that she feels it would have been very easy for Willie to make their marriage work, if he had only seen what a high opinion she had of him and pretended to be clever.

Of course, like other generalities, this rule has particular exceptions; and there are men who really do deceive, and women who cannot do so. I must say that for myself I do not like either of these classes; they are out of nature, and require special study.

Like George Michael, Leslie feels that, as a rule, "There are boys you can trust and girls that you don't."

Born Miriam Florence Folline, she changed her name to retain control of her third husband's publishing empire. Willie Wilde was her fourth and last husband.

The really deceitful has a strong feminine coat of character, and this of the womanish and not womanly nature. He is a self deceiver like her, but not because, like her, he wishes to believe others better than they really are, but because he is determined to believe them as bad as he wishes them to be. He adopts a code of morals, or immorals, and various forms of casuistry persuades himself that this is not only justifiable for himself, but the actual code of others, no matter what they may profess. If he is clever, he can argue from this standpoint that black is white, and left is right, and crooked straight, with so much conviction and candor that he may often end in persuading even a woman to believe him and to adjust her own beliefs to his.

But this sort of man is unfortunately rare; the more usual form is the man who knows very well his right hand from his left, an is perfectly sure that the moon is not made of green cheese, but who wishes to make some woman believe that it is; it is rather interesting to watch the maneuvers of this class of deceivers; the casual mention of the fact to be established, let us say  of the cheesy quality of the moon; the apparent surprise and indulgent amusement when the pupil indignantly contradicts the proposition; the gentle arguments, the mock deference and respect for the feminine view so diffusely and vaguely set forth; the raillery and playful irony, often more effectual than any other weapon; the compliments so skillfully introduced, and the thoughtful pause, as if considering the true value of the pearls of wisdom let fall from the pretty lips, at which he gazes so admiringly.

Later in life, Mrs Frank Leslie fashioned herself the Baroness de Bazus. 

Then comes the personal appeal: "If anybody could convince me, it certainly would be you, and your arguments are so strong and so well put that I am half inclined to accept them in spite of my own reason, and yet I can't but see that there is a very, very cheesy look to the moon, and so many people older and perhaps wiser than either of us have believed it. Don't you think you are perhaps a little prejudiced? I wish we could think alike upon this as upon so many other matters. Now don't you se," this and this?

Victorian advice on handkerchief flirting.

Probably at this point of the game the game the woman who is in love begins to finger the handkerchief with which she will presently blind her own eyes; she listens more to the compliments and personal appeal than to the arguments; she begins to take note of the hyacinthine locks, the careful moustache, the white teeth, the handsome hand of her companion-but shall I tell you where she did not look? It is into his eyes; for although I have seen a great many men trying to deceive, I have never seen one who could bring his eyes into full subjection. He may open them wide and stare you boldly in the face; he may raise them to your own with elaborate candor; he may gaze upward at the ceiling or outward at the sky, or downward in pensive consideration, but I have never yet saw an eye absolutely successful in deceit; and I believe that if Marguerite had looked Mephistopheles full in the eye, and meant to read the truth there, he would not have had power to conceal it; and if he could not, less expert "gay deceivers" need not try to. But if the woman is not in love she is very much tempted to laugh aloud and say: "What a clever special pleader you are! You ought to be a lawyer; but all the same, you don't believe a word you're saying and neither do I. We both know perfectly well that the moon is not made of green cheese, and never was, and never will be. Why pretend it is? 

 I say the woman may be tempted to make this little speech, but if she is a wise woman she will resist the indulgence, for she knows perfectly well that to mortify a man's amour propre is to lose that man's allegiance, whatever that may be. Every man is born with the belief that he is intellectually full-blooded specimen of his sex he carries that belief to his grave; and it is very commendable that he should do so, for one likes to see landmarks respected.

1890s ideal of the perfect man.

 Now, of course, if the woman sees through the man's sophistry, and laughs at his attempts to deceive her, it is flinging confetti or even mud-pellets at the landmarks; it is disturbing tradition and suggesting that she actually knows as much and is quite as clever as her traditional lord and master. Therefore the clear-headed woman never laughs at the man's attempt to deceive, unless  she is ready to be rid of him, and even then it is not a good plan, for no wise woman wishes to sow dragon's teeth in her own path; no, as a general thing she gently deceives him, but not herself; she listens to his arguments, she looks sweetly considerate over his propositions, however absurd; she appears to be on the point of yielding while fixed like a rock in her own position. When tired of the situation, she ends it by murmuring, with pretty deference: "There's a great deal in what you say, and I never looked at the question from your point of view; of course you have studied these matters a great deal more than I, and you have a much wider opportunity of observation-but-well, I must think it over; and certainly I shall look at the moon with different eyes from what I ever did before." But sometimes, alas! one only wishes the man could and would be more deceitful than he tries to be. Most men, when in a candid mood, confess that there are depths in the masculine nature which few, perhaps no women, can fathom; that they are of coarser fiber and more earthly material than women are, and that no woman ever enters into their temptations or realizes their possibilities. All this may be so; if they say so of themselves, one is bound to believe it, for surely no man can be suspected of deceit in this direction. But if these depths do exist, one would wish them to be securely and constantly concealed. the oubliettes in the Imperial Palace were so well disguised that the innocent guests walked over them quite unconsciously, and if some sinister rumor of their existence came to unwilling ears, it could at least be dismissed with the verdict, not proven. But if people insist upon glass windows over their oubliettes, and call upon you, as you gayly tread parlor-floors, to gaze upon the unclean depths below, one wishes that such people were wise enough to at least try to be deceitful. Again, a man is ignoble; he is dishonest in his affairs, he is cowardly, he is disloyal, he is purse-proud, or perhaps he has rheumatism, or colic, or some other distressing complaint not necessarily apparent. Well, let him cover up both his mental and his bodily diseases and deficiencies while in society, and refrain from obtruding sentiments, theories or symptoms with which the companion of the moment can not agree or alleviate. But if he is not wise enough to do this, he may, perhaps never suspect that he ought to have done so, for one of the most charming and most dangerous traits in a woman's nature is her power of sympathy and her dread of giving pain.

She feels for the man who is making himself ridiculous as he would be quite incapable of feeling for himself, and she gently guards him from perceiving his own folly, even while she is dimly conscious that no human power could make him see it. I have seen a very clever woman listening with serene patience and apparent interest to a deluded individual who was explaining the wonderful system he would adopt if he were Secretary of the Treasury, and winding himself up in such a spider's web of words that he finally turned very red and moist, and stammered into silence, with a suspicious glance at the gentle face beside him, upon which, however, not a trace of a smile could be observed as the candid voice replied: "I don't wonder you despair of making me understand. I never could get hold of politics, and am glad all these matters are in your hands rather than mine."

Do you call this woman deceitful? Well, so do I-admirably, generously, charmingly deceitful; and if that man went away comforted in his soul rather than humiliated and stung, was it not well for him and also for her?

When Leslie begins speaking about Titanias, I have to wonder if she is thinking of the woman Willie is living with at the time and will eventually marry. If she is, I suspect she feels more sympathy than jealousy.

Sometimes, of course, the sympathetic in the woman degenerates into weakness; and I have seen nice women behave in anything but a nice manner, simply because they did not wish to mortify their male companions by showing that they felt shocked at their language and manners. In fact, I think women seldom enjoy or wish to indulge for their own pleasure in objectionable pursuits; they simply allow themselves to be led by their companionship, and will, out of real goodness and delicacy, pretend to be bad and coarse. But to return to the first point, of what deceit a good woman will cultivate when she is in love. It is one of the most painful, or rather, pathetic, sights in life to see some lovely, piquant, little Titania trying to impress both the world and herself with the idea that Nick Bottom is a hero, and the ass' head is the true model of an Adonis. How wistfully she watches him in society; how she hovers around his conversations, darting in now and again with some word or hint, or little laugh or gesture, that seems to interpret his platitudes or errors into capital jests and hidden bits of wisdom. How she finishes out his sentences, and suggests to his dull brain something to say next. How lovingly she listens to the dullest and most prolix harangues; how she puts a noble construction upon his most ignoble deeds, and tells everybody how prudent he was in not making that investment, or helping this imposter, or subscribing to their plan, when all the world knows he was saved from loss in these directions by the pigheadedness that never allows him to do what anybody asks him to do.

Shakespeare's Titania depicted by Edwin Landseer in his painting
Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Dear, deceitful little Titanias! What a multitude of them there are, and how I love them, even while they always remind me of an old Dutch tomb whereon are sculptured two delicate little angels tugging away at the soul of an uncomfortable old alderman who declines to budge an inch.

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Marriage Really Was The Answer To Everything

Eight posts ago, I started a series on 1890s male sexuality, and expected to wind up characterizing the 1890s gentleman and his sexy self as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the novel itself can be read as a critique of societal expectations of male sexuality.

The strange sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature gives us the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its posing and eliding of the issue of man, sliding as it does between male and human, between a sexual-instinctual problematic of masculinity and an undifferentiating psychological recognition of the beyond of consciousness, of ego and id. The story starts from the exclusion of the woman which is the condition of a questioning of the man and also its limitation, the specifics of difference are pulled back into general themes. The title, in fact, is misleading or, to put it another way, is itself one of the precautions and a symptom of the problem of representation: nothing about the story is really strange other than that it should be thought strange, the strange case of male sexuality is precisely unstrange by being made into this strange case which comes out of, works with the assumptions of, the given system of representation. Male sexuality is neither the foregone conclusion of animal passion nor the horror of an unspeakable darkness but once it is envisaged within this system that is all that can be said, all that is allowed.

I love-love-love this passage in Stephen Heath's "Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case." I love the essay for what it is, and love this passage for how it speaks to this series of posts. For over a month now, I've been talking about male sexuality as if there is some difference between male sexuality and human sexuality, and I've been trying to limit the discussion of female sexuality. Picturing sexuality as animal passion, is it wrong to assume that there was any difference in sexuality 120 years ago? Surely, as animals we can't have changed that much.

Eugen Sandow

I began this series by discussing 1890s male body image. The ideal male form was characterized as much by ability as it was by form. Form, they had discovered, could be sculpted, and doctors were already refusing to treat obese patients.

In my discussion on sexual orientation, I showed you how they were inventing the modern concept of homosexuality. Men having sex with other men wasn't new, but the act of letting the action define who one was was new. Identities carry power. As a heterosexist society, 1890s London mobilized to limit the power of homosexual identities by outlawing it, and redefining it as a form of mental illness.  In spite of the homophobia that this gave rise to, I think that homosexual men in the 1890s were better off than the men who had no labels because they must have felt less alone.

Which brings me to my post on masturbation: everybody did it, but Victorians worked very hard to make each other feel bad about it. The rumors about what masturbation could do to your health were almost as bad as the remedies for masturbators. It was during this post that I felt the most like I would end up with a Jekyll and Hyde conclusion because it seemed that people feared sex so much that the most reasonable personal solution was to keep it a secret.

Thankfully, that's not generally what they were doing. Homosexuality wasn't the only new identity an 1890s guy could wear. People were trying out aestheticism, being a Bohemian, they were even switching religions, and inventing new religions. In many ways, the 1890s were like the 1960s, but people dressed better. It seems that they were even beginning to understand that the identity of 'man' or 'woman' is one that we create for ourselves, but the full realization of that notion still seems a long way off.

There were both male and female prostitutes, just like there have always been, but the motivation of male prostitutes was perceived differently from the motivation of female prostitutes, much the same way the idea of being a male porn star today is quite different from the idea of being a female porn star. My discussion on prostitution made it clearer to me that the main difference between 1890s male sexuality and 1890s female sexuality was the concept of agency.

Men were perceived as having these out-of-control sex drives, whereas women weren't supposed to have a sex drive at all. What little sex education existed in the 1890s existed exclusively for young men. On the other hand, all responsibility for the transmission of STDs fell on the heads of female prostitutes.

In many ways the increase in religious and spiritual feeling at the end of the 19th century can be linked to the Darwinian Revolution and the need some people felt to differentiate themselves from animals. Sex was viewed as a baser instinct, an act they had in common with every other mammal on the planet. Morality was used to condemn anything they didn't like, and science was frequently used to back those notions up. Disease could then be read as a moral failing, linked to the degeneration (rather than upward evolution) of mankind.

I couldn't talk about 1890s male sexuality without talking about women. Women were cast into a separate sphere, dressed up as a morally-outstanding potential wife/mother, taught to refuse all sexual advances, and portrayed as the antidote to all male sexual problems.

If Eugen Sandow was the perfect man, the perfect woman knew nothing about sex and was a virgin until the horrible night that she got married. Her life's ambition was to become a mother. The perfect woman had no aspirations outside of keeping a perfect house to raise her perfect children in. She would refuse sex to her husband whenever he asked for it, and would refuse to take her clothes off when they did it.

If you were a man and were less than perfect in any way, common sense of the day suggested you find that woman and marry her straight away because she would cure your masturbating, she would reduce your sex drive, and she would shape you into the kind of man who could carry a family of six on his shoulders.

Basically, women were needed to balance out the baser instincts of male sexuality and to harness his ambitious nature, while directing him along the right path in life. That path steered clear away from pornography, masturbation, and dirty pictures, and on toward a bland diet, lots of exercise, and kids to ignore. The kids were her responsibility.

We know, of course, from the biographies of nearly every writer ever mentioned in this blog that, even if this was the ideal, it was almost never the reality, and more married couples lived apart in England and Wales than in any other part of Europe. Like Jekyll and Hyde, there were probably some men who lived double lives, just as there are today, but for the most part, people couldn't help being whoever they were, even if society was working really hard to make them feel bad about it.

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The Marriage Question

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 seventh in a series of posts that seek to explore that context from the 1890s with an emphasis on male sexuality.

Marriage

“A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.” - Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan.

Victorians generally viewed heterosexual marriage as beneficial to both men and women. Marriage and motherhood were the ultimate goal for a young woman. In the separate spheres ideology, women were portrayed as the angel of the household and a wife would act as her husband's moral compass. In this view, corrupt men could be reformed by such a woman.

Heterosexist views of sexuality painted women into asexual angels. In terms of sexual relations with their husbands, new brides were advised to "GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust." - Ruth Smythers (1894).

Even today, the heterosexist binary view of gender paints men with sex drives that they will not be able to control if women aren't chaste enough. Ideally, the Victorian wife's refusal of sex tempered her husband's raging libido. Of course, we know none of this is true. Men do not necessarily have higher sex drives than women, and many people would give anything to turn their marriages into "an orgy of sexual lust." But, in the Victorian era, if you were a man, who masturbated or thought about having sex with men, marriage to a woman, who would ideally refuse to have sex with you, would somehow save your life.

History is full of examples of this not working out very well. Oscar Wilde is one example, though friends speculated, at the time, that, perhaps, he had married the wrong woman, and that if he had married his first love (Bram Stoker's wife), none of his same-sex relationships would have ever taken place.

Florence Stoker is an example of the ideal Victorian wife. The Stokers had one child. After he was born, his parents stopped having sex. Although there's evidence that Bram Stoker may have had many homosexual fantasies, there's no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife, even though they spent most of their time apart (he was busy working and travelling).

Although I don't think that Oscar marrying Florence would have prevented his affairs, I don't think that either of them were happy in their marriages, even though Florence was such a 'good' wife. They pined for each other, and neither were completely happy with their spouse. So, what happened when someone was unhappy with their spouse in the 1890s?

I've already mentioned 'the marriage question' in my post on sexual orientation. The marriage question focused on divorce. Ironically, the divorce rate in England and Wales in the 1890s was the lowest in Europe. However, its estimated legal separation rate was the highest.

Bram Stoker's employer, Henry Irving got married in July 1869. One night in November 1871, when she was pregnant with their second child, his wife criticized his work: "Are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" They were riding in a carriage, and Irving stepped out of it at Hyde Park Corner. Their paths would never cross again. They never divorced, and when Irving was knighted for his work, his wife styled herself "Lady Irving."

Irving's case was not exceptional. Contrary to popular belief, marriage was very unstable in Victorian times. Private separation deeds were common place and not confined to the upper-classes, as poor and working class people also sought to avoid the embarrassing scandal of divorce.

Martha Tabram, possibly the first victim of Jack the Ripper, had parents who separated, then had a troubled marriage herself, due to her alcoholism. Her husband left her in 1875, and paid her 12 shillings a week for three years. He reduced this amount to two shillings and sixpence when she moved in with another man.

Further contradicting popular beliefs about Victorian marriages, many couples of all classes lived together without ever getting married. Oscar Wilde's brother lived with his second wife for about a year before they were married. In the Murder of Mrs and Baby Hogg, we learned that the killer lived with a man before moving in with Mr Hogg, and had assumed that first man's name without marrying him.

With real life providing so many examples that contradicted the mainstream ideal of what marriage should be, writers and readers in the 1890s questioned the institution of marriage on legal grounds, and based on human desire. With the support of women writers mentioned elsewhere in this blog, legal reforms began to support women's property rights in marriage, and after it. As the Darwinian Revolution began to scientize the way people thought about themselves and their basic instincts, people questioned the monogamy that traditional marriage demanded. If men supposedly had such strong libidos, maybe they weren't meant to be with just one woman their entire lives.

The marriage question, also sometimes referred to as 'the sexual problem,' brought with it the concept of 'varietism.' According to Anne Humphreys, 'varietism' meant anything from promiscuity to serial monogamy, and the language used to discuss it was cloaked in evolutionary theory. This need to describe sexuality in terms of evolutionary theory ties back into people's needs to justify desires that were not condoned by their religious beliefs.

Although they thought and wrote about it an awful lot, the marriage question was never really answered in the 1890s. Though they thought about 'varietism' and engaged in alternatives to conventional married life, none of it was ever fully embraced by the more dominant aspects of their heterosexist culture. In 1912, Dr Muller-Lyer wrote:

The body of available and necessary knowledge to be taught the young became larger, the task of imparting it more difficult, and it was essential that family life should become consolidated, for much of this instruction could only be imparted by and in the family. And therefore monogamy became more frequent and met with definite approval, and unrestrained varietism in sex relations began to appear harmful, exceptional, and disreputable.

Consequently, the marriage question was thought about and written about throughout the twentieth century, and the way that we discuss it reflects the challenges of our times. Like most nineteenth and early-twentieth century German texts on evolutionary theory, eugenics, and race, Muller-Lyer's book is loaded with racism and classism, but he does suggest that we stop morally judging our ancestors for their sexuality, which is an attitude that should be applied to the way that we think of our contemporaries as well.

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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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Willie Wilde’s Failure as a Husband

Oscar Wilde (2nd from left) & Willie Wilde (sitting on right).

Oscar Wilde's one-time sister-in-law once declared to her then-husband Willie Wilde that she had married the wrong brother. Such bitter irony because Oscar was already married, and we all know how that turned out. Then I found this wonderfully gossipy 1893 article that outlines what made Willie even worse as a husband!

The Morning Call, 8 June 1893, 10.
WILL LOSE WILLIE
Mrs. Leslie in the Divorce Court
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VISIT
The Great Matrimonial Comedy About to Close - Willie Wilde’s Failure as a Husband

Many people out here who had the opportunities a year and a half ago to please themselves by meeting Mrs. Frank Leslie and the brother of Oscar Wilde will gossip with considerable relish about the dissolution of the matrimonial alliance between them.

Mrs. Leslie expects that the bonds will be put assunder by Judge Brown of Newburg, N.Y., in a very few days, and the very minute she finds herself a free woman again she will sail to Europe.

That was a funny sort of match from the start, and the breaking of it now only makes people smile. The characteristic passages in the married life of Mr. and Mrs. William Wilde would make a more delightful society comedy than the stage ever presented if properly selected and strung together.

Mrs. Frank Leslie

People out here who met them when they visited California with the League of Press Clubs were not impressed by the idea that it was one of those tender love affairs. They had been married about four months then, so that the trip came pretty near being a honeymoon tour. Everybody who had ever seen Mrs. Leslie thought they knew what she looked like, for next to President Harrison her picture had been published as often as anybody else’s in America, displaying the bright, handsome face and the trim and stylishly dressed form of a striking and fascinating young woman.

But oh, what a difference time had wrought since the negatives from which all of Mrs. Leslie’s pictures have been made were new! She came as bright, independent, positive and hustling as she ever was, but there were furrows where the bloom had once rested and nature had acquired that careless way of letting lines of grace sag into less pleasing outlines. No good picture of Mrs. Leslie has ever been labeled “From a recent photograph.” But everybody was curious and ambitious to meet the famous woman who had taken a great publishing business where her husband had left it at his death - deeply involved in debt - and by her own shrewdness made an independent fortune out of it.

Oscar & Willie by Unseam

And Willie Wilde - William C. Kingbusy Wilde - was regarded with little less curiosity. He was a great tall, bewhiskered, large-eyed Englishman in rather ill-fitting clothes, with a stoop about his shoulders, a slowness in his talk and movements and a very unaggressive manner.

He was a man who had distinguished himself - by becoming brother of a poet and by marrying Mrs. Frank Leslie. He was the husband of Mrs. Frank Leslie and was always identified that way. That suited the bride to a T - in fact, she insisted on it herself. She never proposed her identity be swallowed up in a mere husband and she never betrayed a disposition to do any great amount of cleaving to him. She was always “Mrs. Frank Leslie,” though at times she would let “Wilde” be tacked on with a hyphen, and she always went right a head having her own way with as little regard for her hubby’s wishes as though he were her coachman. In fact, the ruthless way in which she would “sit down” on him in the presence of strangers was often quite distressing. It was even more distressing to be compelled to witness the apologetic “Will you allow me, madame?” way that William C.K. Wilde had in her presence.

And when Mrs. Leslie and Willie Wilde returned to New York to take up the routine of life they did it in very different ways, and as time went on no affinity was developed. She got out of bed betimes and attended to her business. while he, ready to receive the good sent by the gods, took up the “dolce far niente” style of languid existence, the hustling wife trying in vain to just “sha-ake” him into doing something in the way of “getting there.”

Then there was Willie’s careless way of leaving his teeth lying around her boudoir and little things like that to gradually increase a desire on her part to lose him. So it was no wonder that Willie finally went back to London where she met him and whence he came nerved up to a grim resolve not to weary in persuading, which resolve enabled him to make the one brilliant stroke in his life.

Mrs. Frank Leslie is a brilliant success as a publisher, but like a few other women she was not so smart about getting married. Now people will wonder if she will not go back to Europe to again set the gossips to talking and perhaps see if she can’t do better next time.

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The Irish Wife

So many of our writers in London in the 1890s were terrible lovers, cheating on their spouses and harbouring secret loves for another, but not all were so.

The Irish-born writer, Katherine Tynan seems to have shared a long and happy life with her Irish-born husband, Henry Hinkson, even if little seems to be said about it.

A literary biography of the couple, Katherine Tynan, states that:

A well-bred woman of her class cannot speak to openly of love, even conjugal love. If Mrs. Tynan Hinkson had for her husband feelings comparable to Elizabeth Barrett's for Robert Browning, she was too inhibited to write them down.

And...

I could never prove that her romance was not so tender and satisfying, but she was too inhibited, too well-bred by her own definition, to verbalize it.

She did, however, publish a collection of love songs. I like to imagine her looking on and smiling as Henry Hinkson sang this one for her.

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Love Doodles

H.G. Wells second marriage was unconventional, but I think most things that writers did with their hearts in the 1890s were unconventional. What stands out about this one is that Wells married Amy Catherine Robbins, "Jane," in 1895; the couple had a turbulent, but fun and open marriage until her death in 1927.

Ok, maybe it wasn't fun, but The Picshuas of H.G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary make it difficult to imagine it was all that terrible, when he communicated with her so frequently through cartoons. I'm collecting some of them here for your enjoyment.

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