Late-Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System

In: International review of social history, Band 8, Heft 1, S. 18-48

Abstract

As others before him, the late Humphrey House once remarked upon the paucity of our knowledge concerning sexual behavior in Victorian England. For House the extreme reticence of the Victorians magnified the value of every fragment of evidence pertaining to sexual behavior that scholars uncovered. To fathom the meaning of the extreme reticence itself does not seem to have been particularly relevant to the problem for House. In this paper, which is an analysis of late-Victorian Sexual Respectability, not only the fragmentary sorts of knowledge that House alluded to, but a comparatively unexplored source, medical books, have been made meaningful and interpreted within the frame of reference of the Respectable Social System prevailing in England roughly between 1859 and 1895.