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Masturbation was so offensive to Victorian sensibilities, in spite of the probability that most men still practised it, that extreme attempts were made to ‘cure' it. An 1887 tract,
Spermatorrhoea
by J. L. Milton, advocated metal-spiked penis rings to prevent erections. It even leant on the developing field of electrical technology to prevent children from falling foul of the habit. Milton published plans for a penis switch that could activate an electric bell in the parents' bedroom if their son had an erection while asleep or awake. (No details were given as to what the parents should then do.) Even less fortunate boys
would – or so we are told, and there is no evidence that anyone ever followed these nuggets of advice – have leeches applied to their genitals, a (supposedly) doctor-recommended method of subduing erections. Others still could allegedly find themselves wrapped tightly in sheets or chained to walls to prevent masturbation.

Dr Sturgis's
Treatment of Masturbation
(1900) encouraged an even more pointed disincentive, with what he termed a male chastity belt: ‘The prepuce is drawn well-forward, the left forefinger inserted within it down to the root of the glans, and a nickel- plated safety pin introduced from the outside through the skin and mucous membrane, is passed horizontally for half an inch or so past the tip of the left finger and then brought out through the mucous membrane and skin so as to fasten from the outside. Another pin is similarly fixed on the opposite side of the prepuce. With the foreskin looped up, any attempt at erection causes painful dragging on the pins and masturbation is effectually prevented. In about a week some ulceration of the mucous membrane will allow greater movement and will cause less pain … but the patient is already convinced that masturbation is not necessary to his existence … If the penis erects while the wearer is asleep and he is awakened by the jab of metal on flesh, he should first remove the device. Next, soak the organ in cold water until it has subsided, and once again affix the apparatus to the genitals. The wearer can then return to his innocent sleep, assured that a moral as well as a material victory has been gained!'

In Britain, female masturbation was so unthinkable it was not considered worthy of attack. In America, though, a physician called Smith published in the
Pacific Medical Journal
a cut-out-and-keep guide for doctors on how to detect female masturbation by examination. Labia which were longer on one side than the other was, for Smith, an indicator of indulgence. But in keeping with the technological fervour of the age, he went on to develop an electronic test too. He would pass a mild current through the urethra in a way which purportedly
helped him determine whether women were overly responsive to sexual stimuli, and hence masturbating.

A rare ray of sunshine filters through at this time from an unaccustomed source – the Catholic Church. One French Church official, the Vicar General, M. Craisson, endorsed women bringing themselves manually to orgasm if they did not achieve it during sex. In an 1870 book,
De Rebus Venereis ad Usum Confessariorum
(On Sexual Matters for the Guidance of Fathers Confessors), Craisson wrote: ‘The fourth question is as to whether, if the husband should withdraw after ejaculation, before the wife has experienced orgasm, she may lawfully at once continue friction with her own hand in order to attain relief.' Most moral theologians, Craisson answered, permit this: ‘In the same manner, it is lawful for the woman to prepare herself by genital stimulation for sexual union, in order that she may have orgasm more easily.' Perhaps it was in the light of advice like this leaking out of the Church that an English convert to Catholicism, the poet and essayist Coventry Patmore, felt free to masturbate. Patmore's method was, however, a little unusual. He perfected a form of masturbation without ejaculation, so he could enjoy the pleasures of arousal without, so to speak, a result; modern Tantric sex aficionados would later attempt the same feat, but in their case as a means of sexual circuit training.

The question that has to be addressed in view of the nineteenth-century flood tide across the Western world of sexual advice, practically all of it misleading or malevolent propaganda, is whether it was really meant to be followed or if it was just sensational, hack pseudo-pornography, informed by dubious personal psychological motives on the authors' behalf and designed to drum up book sales rather than practical guidance. Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, in her 1992 book
Love In The Time Of Victoria
, makes the point that what would now be called the chattering classes – the reformers, Christians and educators – showed at this time a suspicious level of interest for its own sake in other people's sex lives and
bodies. ‘They went into great detail about sexuality they deemed to be pathological. Their suggestions for such deviancy were harsh and they went into details such as what was the perfect number of coitions per month,' she observes.

Some of the more reliable instances of Victorian prurience, such as the unnecessarily detailed probing into the sex lives of single mothers by the governors of the Foundling Hospital, suggest that the Devil was truly in the detail for these (one imagines) monumentally priapic, but frustrated, Victorian men. They developed a talent for teasing the pornographic out of anything. In English law courts early in the century, it was necessary in order to obtain a separation to prove that ‘criminal conversation' had taken place between one's wife and another man. ‘Crim. con. cases were a steady source of prurient details, and the salaciousness of some of the judges who supervised them was notorious,' comments Gordon Rattray Taylor in his 1953
Sex in History
.

Michel Foucault argues that in France, the restriction and the policing of sex at this time was in fact a sexual obsession, and like all obsessions it was overdone. His example does not chime very well with modern sensitivities, however, even though it is less than thirty years since Foucault wrote his
History of Sexuality
. He relates a story about what he describes as the absurd overreaction when a simple-minded farmhand ‘begged a favour' of a little girl in 1867 in a village called Lapcourt. ‘As luck would have it, the man was called Jouy, which sounds like the past participle of the verb
jouir
, which colloquially means “to come”. They would play the familiar game called “curdled milk”.

‘So he was pointed out by the girls' parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality,
these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.'

These, then, were the public faces of Victorian sex. But there is a strengthening trend today to revise our view of nineteenth-century sexuality, to argue that the received wisdom is overly influenced by writings that were a sham – that the real Victorian man and woman were sexually much more like us than we imagine.

To put things into perspective, the population of London was five times greater at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning. That, as many historians now point out, represents a lot of orgasms. Henry Mayhew reported that among costermongers in London, fewer than a tenth of couples living together were married, and ‘legitimacy or illegitimacy of children was a matter of little concern'. A study of the middle class by a Cambridge University historian, Dr Simon Szreter, notes a simultaneous sharp decline in the birth rate in professional families at the same time, a decrease that cannot be accounted for merely by contraception. He concludes that abstention must have been the principle way in which the economically hard-pressed Victorian bourgeoisie kept their families to a manageable size. And yet, Victorian middle-class families were still enormous by our present-day standards. A significant amount of sex still had to be going on behind those heavy velvet drapes!

Or consider masturbation; in 1980, it was estimated that 97 per cent of males and 78 per cent of females practised some form of masturbation. Why, if we think of humans as being on some kind of slow-moving evolutionary escalator, should the statistics have been significantly different a mere hundred years earlier? Because of cultural pressure against masturbation? Maybe, but there was huge cultural pressure to dissuade people from prostitution, yet even by the Victorians' own account, if it is to be taken at face value, it was widespread.

The historical evidence discovered in diaries, medical accounts and even a handful of rudimentary Victorian sex surveys tends to counter the idea that middle-class Victorians were sexually repressed, and that dour public ideology invariably dictated the private pursuit of sexual fun. One such survey was conducted discreetly by a Baltimore women, Clelia Duel Mosher (1863-1940), who asked 45 married women about their sex life of whom 34 reported experiencing orgasm. One woman complained, however, of the inconsistency of her orgasms and commented that ‘men have not been properly trained'.

What is most significant about Mosher's survey is that it remained unpublished until 1980. The same fate befell other such pioneering works on Victorian female sexuality. Katherine Bement Davis (1860-1935) did extensive research before the turn of the century, but only published her book
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women
when she was an elderly lady in 1929. She had been wise to hold back in the prevailing social climate as her work broke two taboos: her sample was split equally into married and unmarried women, and she questioned women up to 83 years of age. A third Victorian researcher, gynaecologist, Robert Latou Dickinson (1861-1950), surveyed 4,000 married and 1,200 single women from the 1890s onwards but, again, published only four decades later, when he had retired.

Peter Gay, in his 1984
Education of the Senses, The Bourgeois Experience
, provides further ammunition for the argument that the Victorians' prudery was partly a façade. Gay discovered that married men and women were advised by their doctors to enjoy foreplay as well as intercourse. The Victorians, according to Gay and others taking his view, were also as ingenious at finding places to enjoy sex as they were at dreaming up mechanical contraptions to put a stop to it.

The advance in the provision of cheap public transport was a highly significant factor in bringing about a more equal distribution of orgasmic delight. Couples in London, for instance, who would otherwise have been confined to grabbing sexual
pleasure in corners of such unsatisfactory love nests as workrooms, were now able to enjoy daytrips out to places such as Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, Battersea Park and Epping Forest, where a quiet corner could be found for outdoor sex. The reasonably private rear area of the new hansom cabs were also the site for many trysts, while horizontal rendezvous could be had at hotels, coffee houses and pubs, where beds could be rented by the hour.

This sexual playground view of Victorian mores also points out that parts of the law were quite hard on out-and-out male seducers. They could be prosecuted for breaching a ‘promise of marriage' and pursued with paternity orders. As a result many ‘bounders' vanished a few months after their Sunday assignation.

Prominent Victorians, too, were sometimes outspoken in favour of sexual pleasure. John Stuart Mill was imprisoned for a few days for distributing leaflets advising couples on
coitus interruptus
and the contraceptive sponge. Mill regarded contraception as analogous to putting up an umbrella in a rain shower. A British Socialist doctor, Henry Havelock Ellis, who would later publish a revolutionary seven-volume
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(1899-1918), was convinced that the presumed sexlessness of Victorian women was a falsehood.

Havelock Ellis, an English doctor, was the first authority to suggest openly that sex and reproduction did not need to be bedfellows. ‘Reproduction,' he wrote, ‘is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organs that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected to sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.'

Ellis also argued that in marriage one should ascertain not just the sexual needs of the husband but of the wife, too. His open-mindedness was informed by the occasional sexual peculiarity. He was an ‘undinist', a man capable of being brought to orgasm by the sight of a woman urinating while standing up. (Another prominent undinist was Rembrandt.) This obsession had been
prompted, Havelock Ellis said, by an incident at London Zoo when he was twelve and his mother was caught short and obliged to lift her skirts to urinate. In adult life, this was Havelock Ellis's chosen method of arousal. His wife, Edith Lees, was bisexual, and when she died, he married one of her lovers. Unsurprisingly then, Ellis was always fascinated by case histories of other people with fetishes. A prostitute on the Strand in London once told him about a client whose complicated and expensive treat was to bring her to orgasm as she and another naked colleague wrung the neck of pigeons. Another client enjoyed licking a prostitute's boots.

Charles Kingsley, author of
The Water Babies
, social reformer and committed Christian, was another Victorian who believed in the value of sexual intimacy. He spent his four-year courtship with his fiancée Fanny Grenfell imagining how sex would be. Fanny referred to the ‘delicious nightery' of her ‘strange feelings' and her troublesome ‘spasms' – for which the doctor recommended getting married sooner. Charles reminded Fanny in a letter before their marriage, however, of the remarkable amount that can be achieved in an un-chaperoned instant. Other Victorian women who speak of their sexual feelings are rare, though. Coventry Patmore's daughter, Emily, became a nun, but after dreams of religious fulfilment recounted awakening with ‘a throb of ecstasy'.