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There is certainly evidence that out of Victorian repression arose a great hunger for fantasy sex besides real prostitution. Sales of pornography boomed, albeit smut of a pitiful standard compared to John Cleland's. Victorian pornography, with one possible exception as we shall see later, was largely joyless and suffused with violent sadomasochism. None of it suggests that its buyers were sexually sophisticated or sensual by today's frames of reference.

Yet familiar as the archetype is of the hypocritical, waxed-moustached, middle-class Victorian seducer, it is far easier to
pinpoint evidentially the anguished Ruskin type, suffering from the male version of the vapours because of his own sex's dissolute excesses. Thus we find John Addington Symonds, the gay (but vehemently anti-gay in public) poet, critic and historian, writing of his time at Harrow School: ‘Talk in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing.'

Or there is Gerard Manley Hopkins, so obsessed with sex as sinful that he recorded every instance of his own masturbation in his journal under the code ‘O.H.' (Old Habits). He used the same abbreviation for nocturnal emissions, which he seemed to regard as even more heinous. Then we have Gladstone, famed for his missions to rescue prostitutes; although there is no account of his ever having sex with them, he acknowledged feeling inappropriate temptation. His diaries duly record his practice of self-flagellation. The shamelessly carnal poet Swinburne was another notorious flagellant but, as a bohemian, had no qualms about getting others to do his flagellation for him. He was, accordingly, a customer of a North London brothel renowned for its birching facilities.

Other progressive Victorian era literary characters were less apologetic about their sexuality. This is Walt Whitman, radical American journalist, formerly an innovative teacher who permitted his students to call him by his first name and devised learning games for them in arithmetic and spelling, writing in 1860 in his poem ‘Children of Adam':

It is I, you women, I make my way, I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you
,

I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you
,

I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States
,

I press with slow rude muscle
,

I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties
,

I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me
.

Another Victorian male who bravely admitted his erotic interest and, by the by, changed the face of sexuality in the Western world was the retired British Army officer Richard Burton who, along with his fellow members of the Karma Shastra Society, such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, translated and published the
Kamasutra
in 1883.

Burton, a Devon-born Arabist, had been by turns an explorer, linguist, ethnologist, professional treasure hunter and Crimean War spy. While in India, he undertook with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, a colonial civil servant whom he had befriended, a study of brothels staffed by boys and eunuchs. Burton converted to Islam and underwent adult circumcision. Back in England he enjoyed, by all accounts, a free-ranging and very modern sexual relationship with his wife Isabel, and with other women and other men, including possibly the now-retired Arbuthnot whom he always referred to as ‘Bunny'. Isabel was reportedly the envy of all who heard the rumours because Burton was reputed to excel in the art of cunnilingus. When he died, however, Isabel burned all his unpublished work and gave free rein to a prudish streak that must have been present all the time.

It was doctors and lawyers, practically all male, who formed the vanguard of Victorian sexual repression. Literary Victorians, and prolific ‘ordinary' diary and letter writers, provide the surviving evidence that these pompous professionals' outpourings on sex were not necessarily taken very seriously.

Most Victorian doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female sexual excitement and indulgence could damage their reproductive organs and urinary system. Even enlightened doctors who knew the ‘secrets' of
women's desire considered it inappropriate to let them speak about it themselves. They conducted research and diagnoses by asking husbands instead. Freud's breakthrough in the next century was primarily in letting women speak for themselves about their sex life, even if he did then re-cast much of their testimony in the likeness of his own Victorian prejudices.

Victorian physicians were generally quite clued up on anatomical fact. An 1836 gynaecological textbook reports that ‘the lower part of the vagina and the clitoris are possessed of a high degree of sensibility'. It explains that while in some women these erogenous areas are ‘the seat of venereal feelings from excitement, in others, such feelings are altogether absent'. Other medical authorities confirmed that the clitoris underwent erection, and even acknowledged female ejaculation. The way the socio-political prejudices of the age reasserted themselves, however, was in the near total consensus that women were quite capable of playing host to all this physiological turmoil without being disturbed by any feelings unbecoming to their sex. A Parisian doctor, Adam Raciborski, argued in 1844 that 75 per cent of women only ‘endure' sex with their husbands.

In England Dr William Acton, FRCS, a prominent venereologist, set out in 1857 the most direct manifesto yet for the idealised sexlessness of the modern woman: ‘Many of the best mothers, wives and managers of households, know little of or are careless about sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel … A modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband's embraces, but principally to gratify him and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions … The married woman has no desire to be placed on the footing of a mistress.'

Curiously, it is Dr Acton who debunks the contemporary idea that prostitutes became so as a result of their excessive sensuality; that was too ridiculous even for him.

The United States Surgeon General, an ex-Army man called
William Hammond, was in accord with Acton's principal statements, averring himself of the belief that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. And Isaac Ray, an American gynaecologist, opined in 1866: ‘In the sexual evolution, strange thoughts, extraordinary feelings, unseasonable appetites, criminal impulses, may haunt a mind at other times unviolent and pure.'

Roy Porter's
Medical History of Humanity
identifies a more ominous stage yet in the growth of prudery: the point when theory turned to practice and surgical ‘cures' for women's sexuality ‘grew widespread'. Surgery, specifically unnecessary hysterectomies, clitoridectomy and cauterisation of the clitoris, began to be sought by husbands concerned about their wives' sexual feelings. ‘Abuse of gynaecological surgery to control women culminated in the work of Isaac Baker Brown (1812-73), a London surgeon who specialised in clitoridectomies on women whom he or their husbands judged oversexed, as evinced by masturbation or “nymphomania”,' Porter recounts.

Other researchers have felt the need to point out, however, that Baker's procedures were not even remotely routine, and that he was drummed out of the London Obstetrical Society – albeit for operating without the correct consents and for self-promotion, not for performing the operations. An inspection of the records of the meeting at which he was expelled also reveals that a good part of Baker Brown's offence to medicine was to have implicitly insulted British womanhood by suggesting they were at all prone to masturbation! Brown is believed to have emigrated to the US, where it was easier to promote fringe medicine unregulated. There, for instance, a doctor called Battey had popularised an operation called ‘normal ovariotomy', the removal of healthy ovaries in women diagnosed as hysterical (i.e. orgasmic) or neurotic.

Contraception received the condemnation of the medical profession from the 1860s, when the shocking truth of its spread began to become apparent. After Charles Goodyear's invention of vulcanised elastic rubber in 1843, a number of
companies adapted the development for the manufacture of thick, re-usable condoms. Surprisingly, no one business patented the rubber condom, probably since the basic design, in a variety of animal materials, had been available for centuries.

In France condoms were, and still are, called
les capotes anglaises
, ‘English raincoats'; in English-speaking countries the French letter. This is perfectly in keeping with the neighbourly convention that the British call anything they regard as faintly exotic Trench' (knickers, kissing, manicure, etc), while the French call anything they see as faintly risible (condoms, homosexuality, syphilis, boiled food, even strikes) ‘English'.

In the nineteenth century, condoms as a commercial product were always more openly sold in the US than in Britain, where little evidence survives of their underground existence. But advertisements for ‘Dr Power's French Preventatives', among other brands, appear in the
New York Times
and other newspapers by the time of the Civil War in 1861. Other contraceptive methods, especially douches and sponges, were widely used too. Women in the Northern States were frustrated during the war by a sponge shortage; all the fisheries were in Confederate territory, in Florida.

The American Social Hygiene Association fought vigorously against condoms as immoral and un-Christian. Their eccentric view was that anyone whose behaviour put them at risk of getting VD, deserved it. What would now be called ‘natural' contraceptive methods were also touted. In 1866 Dr Russell Thacker Trail published a bestselling book in the US in which he claimed to have discovered in both Tonga and Iceland women with'… that flexibility and vigour of the whole muscular system that they can, by effort of will, prevent conception': Trail advised the women of America that ‘sometimes coughing or sneezing will have the same effect:'. He also recommended running, jumping and dancing as contraceptive methods.

The reaction from less adventurous doctors in the US and Britain was stony. The
Lancet
sneered in 1869: ‘A woman on whom her husband practises what is euphemistically called
“preventative copulation” is necessarily brought into the condition of mind of a prostitute. As regards the male, the practice, in its character and in its remote effects, is in no way distinguishable from masturbation.' In the States, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which banned ‘obscene materials' – meaning condoms – from the mail.

In 1877, in London, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried at the Old Bailey for republishing Dr Charles Knowlton's forty year-old textbook on birth control,
The Fruits of Philosophy
. The prosecution argued, ‘… this is a dirty, filthy book, and the test of it is that no human being would allow that book to lie on his table; no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it…' The jury ruled that a reissue of Knowlton's book was ‘calculated to deprave public morals', but exonerated the defendants of the charge of having corrupt motives. On appeal, Besant and Bradlaugh won the right to publish.

Contraception still failed to receive official sanction in Britain, however. In 1879, C.H.F. Routh in
The Moral and Physical Evils Likely to Follow Practices Intended to Act as Checks to Population
argued: ‘First, let me state that I look upon conjugal onanism as a great moral crime. Masturbation is mean and bad enough, and much to be reprehended, because it is fostered by a filthy spirit which can no longer control the sexual impulses. But here, at least, there is no partner in the sin, and no pure woman is degraded thereby. Conjugal onanism places both the man and the woman below the instincts of the brute creation.' As late as 1894, a Dr Alice Stockham was recommending that a woman should
never
copulate non-procreatively,
never
more than once a month, and
never
during menstruation or pregnancy. Ten years later, John W. Taylor, President of the British Gynaecological Society, was warning that ‘mechanical shields' resulted in ‘purulent vaginitis' and ‘brain fag' – an archaic term for cere-bropathy, a hypochondriacal condition in those who feel their brain has been worn out.

Rubber contraceptives and ‘outercourse' (as
coitus inter-ruptus
has latterly been called) were unacceptable to these moralists; cunnilingus and fellatio did not even show up on their radar. It was masturbation, nonetheless, that remained the ultimate taboo throughout the Victorian era and long beyond. In 1850, an editorial in the
New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal
inveighs against self-abuse: ‘Neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils, have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilized society.' An 1878 book,
Psychological Medicine
, by Bucknill and Tuke, warns: ‘Onanism is a frequent accompaniment of insanity and sometimes causes it.' The previous year the Reverend Edward Lyttelton in
The Prevention of Immorality in Schools
states that: ‘Solitary vice is dangerous and deplorable because it was learnt, not instinctual. Boys are innocent of masturbation until inspired to foul practices by other boys who spread corruption through the school.'

The influential German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis
appeared in 1886; it boldly linked masturbation to criminality. Women who exhibited ‘excessive' sexual desire, for Krafft-Ebing, were nymphomaniacs, while, ‘If [a woman] is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a family impossible.'