Harrison's Dark Angel

Fraser Harrison: The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (1977)

Victorian Studies is a stock market on which the shares continually rise and fall. Hardy remains bullish but is peaking out. Browning is very bearish. But the scholarly Poseidon at the moment is undoubtedly Victorian sexuality.

Ever since Stephen Marcus floated the subject in his masterly The Other Victorians (1963) by exploiting the untapped resources of the contemporary pornography and by bringing to general attention the 11 volume autobiography of that tireless sexual athlete Walter, its stocks have shot upwards. Ronald Pearsall’s extensive The Worm in the Bud (1969) was abominably organised but collected a great mass of material, while a big fillip was given to the market by the publication of Walter in a giant uncut version (a fact of which Harrison is strangely unaware) from one of only six printed copies.

G.K. Chesterton’s epigram that ‘the history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it’ is pathetically untrue for the sexologist. We know little and will probably never know much more. Apart from the oddity Walter and a few others, the bourgeois male wrote little about his sexuality except in the highly elliptical form perfected by novelists. Primary written data about his female counterpart, and about the mores of the working class, are gone for ever.

What remains is well-known; and it is for this reason that past studies have tended to be repetitive, to give the same few sources, to make the same judgements. All that is left to us is interpretation and analysis: a close reading between familiar lines.

Of the three sections of Harrison’s very readable study, two are devoted to middle and working class sexuality and one to the phenomenon which to a degree links them: prostitution.

There is much that is new and interesting in the first section because the approach there is indeed sensitively analytic. The latter two sections by contrast serve up the mixture as before. His account of proletarian sexuality, for instance, starts with a description of ‘the conditions under which the poor were obliged to live’. This is unexceptionable in itself. We need to be regularly reminded of the outrageous revelations supplied by Booth and Mayhew, Engels and Jack London.

But none of these observers were, by training or inclination, Victorian Kinseys. True, Walter, taken at face value, is close to it. But how far, when we read My Secret Life, are we reading objective reportage and how far fantasy? Harrison never questions, as others have done, that Walter is a field reporter doing his interviews in bed or alley and indefatigably making notes for posterity. And yet, even if we swallow Walter whole there is little really to add to the impression that among the lower orders a century ago sex at best must have been nasty, brutish and short.

Concerning the ‘fouled hindquarters of English life’ as the French observer Taine called prostitution, historians are now settling down with the almost incredible statistics that one in 60 London houses was a brothel and 60-80,000 women ‘professionals’. Equally incredible in the contemporary refusal to lay bare the economic roots of the trade. Dr Tait’s study, not quoted here, put ‘licentiousness’, ‘irritability’ and ‘pride’ as the three major causes – poor wages came a mere ninth. Yet consider: Walter thought half a sovereign reasonable pay for straight coitus; whereas Mayhew noted that a needlewoman in a rare week of full employment might earn 5s 6d working 16-hour days! The social historian is faced with explaining not why maybe 8 per cent of all adult women in London were prostitutes, but why more were not.

Harrison’s major contribution to our understanding of bourgeois sexuality is his pointing-up of the inextricable mingling in the common mind of sex and money. Since ‘spending’ was the commonest epithet for (male) orgasm, we see the metaphorical connections between the well-charged bank account and bursting seminal vesicles. Only celibacy could fit one for marriage; it was a physiological edict as well as a moral one, which was probably why the concept of chastity really did have more than lip-service paid to it. Many tried to live up to impossible standards., tried to see their women as ‘angels in the house’ and in the process ruined their lives.

Harrison documents such tragedies movingly. It is a pity he did not give just a little notice to the few tough, resolute and discreet people who built domestic niches of unorthodoxy against all the odds. One thinks of George Chapman the publisher, whom the slightest breath of scandal would have ruined, in his rambling house at 142 Strand, where at one time he juggled his wife, mistress and George Eliot in a weird ménage a quatre which presumably gave some pleasure all round.