In Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this weird and wonderful journey through the attitudes and ideas of the Victorian century. Perhaps you have been shocked or surprised by just how modern many Victorian attitudes appear to be. With any luck, this book should have gone some way towards challenging the beliefs we all have about the nineteenth century, from ideas on sex, and women, to pleasure and marriage.

We often only think of Victorian sexuality as a battleground between a dominant patriarchy and a supposedly submissive female counterpart. But as women like Annie Besant, Cora Pearl and Ada Lovelace have shown us, that is not the case. Although difficult to fully express when writing as a Victorian, Ada’s correspondence with Charles Babbage – the father of modern computer programming – is highly significant. So the Victorians were highly anti-women, but in reality this century is full of incredibly strong female figures either excelling in their chosen fields – literary or scientific – or campaigning to improve conditions for womankind.

So where do our misconceptions of the Victorian attitudes to sex come from? I’m not sure; ever since the nineteenth century ended there seems to have been an overwhelming desire to paint the Victorians as repressed, or sexually deviant, but I just don’t think that is the case. In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel P. Maines argues that the late Victorian medical fraternity would often submit hysterical women to ‘pelvic massage’ to cause what she describes as a ‘hysterical paroxysm’ or orgasm. She believes that the popular vibration devices of the time, such as the ‘VeeDee Vibrator’, took the place of this manual labour on the part of the doctors who were unaware that the reaction they were provoking in their patients was in any way linked to their sexuality. This has become a popular theory for the press and media but one for which supporting evidence is a little thin on the ground.

As we have seen, the Victorians were fully aware of the female orgasm and the effects of masturbation and so it is highly unlikely that a doctor would carry out this practice without the knowledge that it was a sexual act. I have also not yet found a single reference to a specific ‘pelvic massage’ in any of the books or pamphlets I have read on the treatment of hysteria in Britain, or directions for how it would be carried out, let alone the later use of vibration in this area.

However, while I disagree with Maines’s theory of a widespread medical practice, I do not doubt that some enterprising Victorians would have privately used the device in this way; I mean after all, look at ‘Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle’, or the Femme de Voyage! Objects like this are almost impossible to find now, and as sex has always been regarded by the majority of society as a personal and private affair, it is almost impossible to gauge how many people were openly exploring their sexuality with their partner. The price of the Femme de Voyage gives us a clue about its popularity. Although the guinea coin was abandoned in 1816 and replaced by the pound, it was still a term that remained in use throughout the nineteenth century, most often in conjunction with goods for the high end of the market. A guinea is equal to 21 shillings, and in modern money this places the Femme de Voyage as costing £300, or upwards of £12,000 by the end of the century. This would have placed it out of reach of most people living in the Victorian period and so, as with the Siege d’Amour, possibly only available – if it does, in fact, exist – to royalty.

But that doesn’t mean that sexual exploration was only the property of those with money. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh specifically targeted the working classes with their Fruits of Philosophy contraception manual, and this is something where we can see a widespread impact – there are newspaper reports of hundreds of people clamouring for a copy and a circulation of a reported 125,000 shows us that the average everyday Victorian was just as excited and interested in sex as our own modern society.

For me, the Victorian tenets of True Love, Respect, and Mutual Physical Pleasure are ones we can still embrace today. They are a set of Victorian Values that we should identify with, and while the study of Phrenology, or the diagnosis of Hysteria has thankfully been left to the mists of time, there’s still an awful lot we can thank the Victorians for. After all, we wouldn’t have the Kama Sutra, rubber condoms, or the age of consent without them.