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What We Know About Sex in the Victorian Age Is Absolutely Wrong
They Definitely Weren’t Prudes
The Victorian era was the time period covering the reign of Queen Victoria of England, who was queen from June 20, 1837 to January 22, 1901. When most people today think of the Victorian era, they don’t think about the queen herself, though she is the United Kingdom’s second-longest reigning monarch after Queen Elizabeth II. They don’t think about Charles Dickens, the second-greatest figure of that time who began writing the year before Victoria’s coronation and was a literary superstar for the next three decades (and well beyond). The first thing that comes to mind for the vast majority is sex, or rather the lack of it; we all know the Victorians were big-time prudes.
We are all spectacularly wrong. While we are more open about sex and intimacy today (some would say too open), the Victorians were not nearly as sexually repressed as the history books would have you believe. It is true that, officially at least, people of the time were warned to confine sex to the purpose of procreation. That worked about as well then as abstinence-only appeals do today.
At least in the mid to late 19th century, there were a couple of good reasons for the attempt to limit sex somewhat. First, syphilis was rampant and incurable, usually leading to…
