Victorian sex factoids
Factoid: n. Something that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not (or may not be) true; spec. an assumption or speculation reported and repeated so often that it is popularly considered true; a simulated or imagined fact. (Oxford English Dictionary)
'Thinking of England'
Queen Victoria and lesbians
Prince Albert's 'prince albert'
Clitoridectomies
The Victorian patriarch and his family
Those piano legs in pantalettes
Doctors masturbating women as a cure for hysteria/'Victorian vibrators'
What the Contagious Diseases Acts actually did
Wife-beating and the 'Stick no thicker than one's thumb'
Prostitutes at Thackeray's funeral
Alleged code meaning of 'earnest'
Ruskin's supposed phobia of female pubic hair
The fashionableness of nipple-rings
Marie Lloyd and the London County Council
The advanced age at which nineteenth century girls began to menstruate
Still no definite information either way: the alleged condoms bearing the image of Queen Victoria (or other Victorian notables)
'One "dud" in every box'
Statistical problems: Prevalence of STDs; Numbers of prostitutes
Cannabis, alleged use for period pains by Queen Victoria Also whether she really popularised use of chloroform in childbirth
Aristotle's Masterpiece: A Banned Book?
Some thoughts on Jack the Ripper and Ripperology
The British Royal Family’s Circumcision Tradition
Victorian Sanitary Protection
'Close your eyes and think of England', or 'I close my eyes [in some references, 'and open my legs'] and think of England' are sayings attributed to various Victorians either as their own comment on marital sexual relations or as advice from mothers to daughters on impending marriage. They are repeatedly cited as an exemplar of Victorian sexual attitudes, at least among middle/upper-class females. The only even remotely contemporary source for this consists of a citation to the unpublished diary c. 1912 (thus not literally Victorian, or even Edwardian, but Georgian) of 'Lady Hillingham' by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny (1972). No further details are given, such as where it can be located - not even the unhelpful statement 'in private hands'. No Lady Hillingham appears in the relevant contemporary reference works, but there was a Lady Hillingdon alive and married around at that time: but whether the (putative) author of the (putative) diary can be assimilated to her is open to question. The line about closing ones's eyes and thinking of England may (but this is only a guess) be a fairly early post-Victorian construct about Victorian sexual mores. It sounds most unlike anything the dear Queen would have said herself. Gathorne-Hardy himself, p.95, remarks 'The source for this quotation is a little suspect'.
Update: I orginally said that no citations much earlier than the 1970s have been adduced in evidence. I have now come across a 1940 (still well post-Victoria) version in Dorothy Thurtle's Abortion: Right or Wrong?, which suggests that the phrase was current at least 30 years earlier:
Their attitude is fittingly illustrated by the reply of the woman who, endeavouring to enlighten her daughter how she herself had managed to survive the horrid ordeal, replied that she just closed her eyes and thought of England. (p. 32)
The much-cited story about Queen Victoria personally intervening to omit lesbianism from the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 is a myth.
My own opinion on the matter as put forward in Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (2012): 'There is an apocryphal story that the clause* originally included "gross
indecency" between women but that this was struck out by Queen Victoria
herself, who refused to believe it possible**. The Queen surely stands as a
metonym for the reluctance of the Victorian age to conceive of sexual
autonomy in women. There was no existing offence, analogous to buggery,
relating to lesbianism, which did not count as a 'matrimonial offence' for
the purposes of divorce. Women were not conceived of as capable of rape or
the seduction of minors, and equality before the law on such charges was
never argued. The torrent of warnings against self-abuse in the male had no
female equivalent. Immediately prior to the introduction of Labouchere's
amendment, the House of Commons strongly rejected as cruel and unjust the
suggestion that a girl under fifteen who consented to unlawful intercourse
with a boy of the same age (for which the boy was liable to imprisonment)
ought to be sent to a reformatory.'
* The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which criminalised 'gross indecency' between (consenting) (adult) males in public or in private.
** Or, in some versions, the government officials could not bring themselves to explain it to the Queen.
A recent version of this myth has some never-named players in the scenario, government officials or advisers to the Queen, fearing that even mentioning lesbianism in the law would 'put ideas' into women's heads, with terrible effects on the stability of the realm. There was, in fact, an occasion when MPs did fear that even mentioning Sapphism in legislation would alert wives to the possibility, but this was in 1921 during debates on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill then proceeding through Parliament. The context was very different: not only had gender norms been massively disrupted by the suffrage movement and the Great War, this was in the aftermath of the sensational 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel case and the prosecution of Despised and Rejected, while Clemence Dane's best-selling novel about passions within a girls' school, Regiment of Women came out in 1917. While not perhaps as visible as it became in 1928 with the publication and prosecution of The Well of Loneliness, the subject had emerged from the shadows.
Chiara Beccalossi has noted, in Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870-1920, the oblique and evasive way in which even the British medical profession discussed female same-sex desire in the Victorian period, using 'almost encoded' language (in contrast to the situation in contemporary Italy).
In the spring of 2000 there was much discussion on the Victoria and Histsex discussion lists about claims that the form of penile piercing known as 'Prince Albert' was thus named because the Prince Consort himself had such a piercing. The general consensus was that this was very unlikely to have been the case. One contributor pointed out that, according to rec.arts.bodyart: Piercing FAQ 8--Historical Information, Doug Malloy, who was one of the 'grandfathers of late 20th century piercing practices' and 'created a number of the piercings now considered standard', wrote much of the ancient history he claimed for piercing himself and that most of this was probably his own invention: 'he never produced any concurrent written records of his findings'. It was also plausibly suggested that the name arose from the similarity of this piercing to the 'Prince Albert' style of wearing a fob-watch chain.
There is little evidence that clitoridectomy was ever a routine prescription of Victorian medical men for ‘female disorders' such as hysteria: given the lack of attention paid to the clitoris in medical textbooks, probably few doctors could reliably have located it. Clitoridectomy gained temporary notoriety through the activities of Dr Isaac Baker Brown, who advocated the operation and performed it at his London Surgical Home in the 1860s (some passages from his Surgical Diseases of Women can be found on the Clitoris: Historical Myths and Facts page). He was expelled from the London Obstetrical Society after heated debates, and died mad and in disgrace. For an excellent analysis of this episode and doctors' competing agendas, see Ornella Moscucci, 'Clitoridectomy, circumcision, and the politics of sexual pleasure in mid-Victorian Britain', in AH Miller and JE Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Discussion of the subject disappeared from Victorian medical literature: however, I was informed recently by someone who had done research in later nineteenth century case records of one of the Scottish lunatic asylums that these had recorded occasional instances to curb habitual masturbation. But have not as yet had any specific citations on this. There is a good short online article by Helen King: The rise and fall of FGM in Victorian London. For some background information and noting the erasure of the case from history until the 1960s, see my blogpost, A ‘gross and barbarous operation’: when Baker Brown featured in the Divorce Court.
He holds lengthy family prayers before breakfast, married relatively late in life a virginal bride with whom he has an infrequent and inhibited sex life and who now spends much of her time lying on a sofa exhausted by childbearing and the strain of marriage to such a man, routinely flogs his sons to maintain discipline, keeps his daughters as useless and ignorant as possible, turns pregnant housemaids out of doors with no pay and no character, keeps a mistress in a discreet establishment, and probably also has sex with underage prostitutes. A picture which conflates the attitudes and practices of a wide range of very different Victorians over the whole extent of Victoria's long reign into one composite Frankenstein figure, who owes particular debts to Rudolph Besier's play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (twice filmed, in 1934 with Charles Laughton as Mr Barrett and in 1957 with John Gielgud in the role) and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. This conflation is also one of the foundations of notions of Victorian hypocrisy: i.e. moral earnestness and libertine behaviour were both to be found in Victoria's subjects but very seldom in the same individual.
This is a topic which is perennially being raised on the Victoria list. The whole story originated in Captain Frederick Marryat's 1839 Diary in America as an observation of one of the weird ways of the Americans:
I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy (see note at end of chapter) of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!
It was persistently used as an exemplar of Yankee prissiness and over-refinement by the robust British Victorians.
This notion has been given extensive currency via Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm (1998), a work which was critically discussed on the Histsex list in the summer of 1999 (entries now collated into one compendious and convenient document). The general consensus among a number of individuals working within the field of history of sexuality and medicine was that the practice, if it occurred at all, would have been confined to an extremely limited group, rather than being as widespread as Maines seems to indicate. Some of the sources cited don't entirely support the arguments that rest on them.
Discussions on H-Histsex, Aug 2011, generated by the release of the trailer for the movie Hysteria; and further discussion there, Oct 2012.
A few points that came up in discussion then and in later iterations which suggest that a certain scepticism about these claims would be appropriate:
- Ideas about and treatment of hysteria that form the basis for the argument are based on outdated secondary literature, leading to misreadings. A nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the meanings of hysteria in different historical contexts can be found in the work of Professor Helen King, who has now provided an extensive analysis of the problematic nature of Maines' (and others using Maines as their source) invocation of classical sources: Galen and the widow. Towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology (pdf).
- There was enormously pervasive horror around masturbation in Victorian Britain - see above under Baker Brown and his clitoridectomies. If the general opinion was that Baker Brown exaggerated the extent of female masturbation and that his methods were crude and brutal, masturbation in women was still seen as either causative of or symptomatic of some kind of pathology, physical, mental, or moral.
- This is borne out by diatribes against contraception as 'Conjugal Onanism', which claimed that sexual stimulation of women without its culmination in (at least potentially) reproductive marital sex led to all sorts of ailments, including 'Malthusian uterus'.
- Doctors had major concerns about being accused of sexual impropriety with female patients, which could lead to serious professional consequences including being struck off the Medical Register. Textbooks cautioned medics who were administering anaesthesia in their consulting rooms to female patients to ensure that a nurse was always present, because under the influence of the anaesthetic women might hallucinate incidents of sexual molestation.
- During the latter decades of the nineteenth century there was the rise of a separate profession to undertake the work of massage and physical treatments, and that this was seen as an inferior and handmaidenly skill rather than anything doctors themselves would be doing.
- Quacks of the day were purveying vast numbers of devices which deployed the notion of electricity as a magical curative agent. In most cases, these devices did nothing very much but, presumably, evoke a placebo reaction. Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (2011) by Iwan Rhys Morus provides useful insights into legitimate and fringe medical uses of electricity.
- I am also given to understand that the 'Victorian vibrator' rather surprisingly, if it existed, does not feature in pornographic texts of the period (relying here on the evidence of someone who has given this much closer study than I have).
- Do we have any idea how effective in inducing female orgasm any of the supposed 'Victorian vibrators' would have been?
- It is true that some kind of 'electrical treatment' featured among the more specialised services being offered for men in the covert and coded prostitution advertisements to be found in the racier periodicals of the day.
- Robert Latou Dickinson and other sex therapists were introducing the use of vibratory massagers in cases of 'female frigidity' from the early 1930s and would appear to have considered this a new and modern innovation: the practice is mentioned in the context of several of the case-studies in Dickinson and Lura Beam's A thousand marriages: a medical study of sex adjustment (1933 - link to 1949 reprint). There is some discussion in Jennifer Terry's An American Obsession : Science, Medicine, and the Place of Homosexuality in Modern Society (1999), pp 146-7. Edward M Brecher, in The Sex Researchers (1969), p. 191, suggests that Dr WF Robie and Dr LeMon Clark were also responsible for the introduction of the of the electrical vibrator or massager into American gynaecological practice - this assertion is repeated by Vern L Bullough in Science In The Bedroom: A History Of Sex Research (1994), p. 111. Neither of these provides citations.
The prolific (if dubiously qualified and probably not original) writer of works on sex, birth control, prostitution, corporal punishment,torture, nudism, phallic worship, bathing, rejuvenation and poultry-keeping George Ryley Scott, mentions 'electric medical appliances' in the entry on Female Masturbation in his Scott's Encyclopaedia of Sex (1939). He also mentions 'electric appliances' in connection with female masturbation in the chapter on 'Self-Abuse' in The Sex Life of Man and Woman (1941 edition, first published 1937). No citations are given. One gets the sense that his works relied heavily on copying from works by others, but without attribution, and no bibliography wherein one might trace the source (see my blogpost, I am somewhat cynical about his claims to expertise). One observes, see below, that Kinsey found this a negligible factor.
- In spite of this technological advance, as late as the 1940s Alfred Kinsey did not find vibrator use common enough to be separately quantified in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953): it is mentioned, p. 163, under 'Other Techniques' occasionally employed but not 'in any appreciable number of cases'.
- A search kindly undertaken in the British patent records found, in the medical equipment section, patents for 'a number of vibratory massage devices, but mostly in the form of rollers or vibrating pads to be attached to the hand' but that none were granted for explictly sexual aids until around 1970 (though of course this may just be the date at which such explictness became possible).
- I can't believe that I never checked the works of Iwan Bloch, turn of the century sexologist already cited below under 'nipple rings'. His research, if as indicated there, rather uncritical and lacking in scepticism, was exhaustive in the extreme. I have checked both The sexual life of our time in its relations to modern civilization (1909) and Sexual Life in England (1901-3 in German, 1930s English translation). Both go into a fair amount of detail on the subject of dildos (origins, fabricated from, where they could be obtained) and The sexual life of our time also includes an account of various other instruments and objects which he believed to be used for autoerotic pleasure by women. While this included sewing machines (early treadle machines had a bicycle-type seat and women finding the treadling motion stimulating was also mentioned by Havelock Ellis) and hairpins (and assorted fruit and vegetables including beetroot), there was absolutely no mention of any kind of mechanical device that could be read as a Victorian vibrator.
- An article in Social History of Medicine, Vol 28 no 4, Nov 2016, by Anders Ottosson, The Age of Scientific Gynaecological Masseurs. ‘Non-intrusive’ Male Hands, Female Intimacy, and Women’s Health around 1900 (unfortunately paywalled) is also critical of the notion that this, although admittedly a somewhat controversial practice, was in the least about gratifying women's unfulfilled sexual desires. Ottosson plausibly argues that doctors were 'terrified of this connection being made to the treatment' and that some even advocated that as a precaution the techniques 'should be carried out in such a manner that the patient felt discomfort and even pain'. It was used to correct tendencies to 'nymphomania' and to treat pathological masturbation leading to insanity by curing the 'hyper-irritability of the nerves in [the] so-called pleasure organs'.
It is impossible to say with any definiteness that something never occurred, but it is possible to argue that this particular treatment for 'hysteria' was rare and fell outside mainstream accepted medical practice in Victorian England. Things may have been different in North America. However, this piece (using US evidence) points out that in the medical history of electricity, vibrators appear alongside galvanic battery belts and quack electrotherapies as one of many quirky home cures of the early 20th century as part of a wider, non-sexual context of commercial quackery offering wide-ranging cure-alls, and even repairing the ills of overindulgence in the solitary vice.
Scepticism about whether the practice even existed is becoming, at last, more widely disseminated: No, no, no! Victorians didn’t invent the vibrator; Buzzkill: Vibrators and the Victorians.
And see Hallie Liebermann and Erik Schatzberg, 'A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm', Journal of Positive Sexuality, Vol. 4, No. 2, August 2018, which rigorously investigates the sources cited by Maines and finds them unsatisfactory as evidence for her thesis; discussed in a more popular article here including interviews with the authors.
Every so often I come across an allusion to the Contagious Diseases Acts making assumptions about their extent within Victorian Britain which are entirely wrong. This is wince-making enough in works intended as popular fiction which tend to have form more broadly in the area of 'did not do the research', but is rather more serious when such claims are made by those who purport to be serious historians. The CD Acts were in force 1864-1883 (when they were suspended), repealed in 1886. As a measure to preserve the health of the armed forces of the nation, they applied only to 'designated districts' of certain port and garrison towns. I.e. it was not the case that throughout Victorian Britain 'common prostitutes', or any woman suspected of being a 'common prostitute' could be non-consensually examined for signs of sexually-transmissed infection, and if found to be infected, involuntarily incarcerated in a 'Lock Hospital' until 'cured' (given the state of both diagnosis and cure at the time, and the fact that any doctor who could blag a better job would not take a job as Examining Surgeon under the Acts, a good deal of cynical scepticism is probably appropriate). This is not to deny that, as several historians - e.g. Frances Finnegan, Catherine Lee, Julia Laite - have documented, women engaged in street sex work, or liable to suspected of engaging in it, were likely to be subjected to harrying by the police under various provisions of the law respecting nuisances and vagrancy, prostitution itself not being illegal.
Wife-beating and the 'Stick no thicker than one's thumb'
It was widely believed in the Victorian era, and the belief has persisted until the present, that there was a statutory right of husbands to beat their wives providing the stick used was not thicker than their thumb. Maeve E. Doggett, in her exhaustive study Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England 1992, was unable to locate the much-cited 'phantom Caroline statute' allegedly embodying the old Common Law, authorising a man to 'chastise his wife with any reasonable instrument'. Nor could it be proved that Sir Francis Buller, an eighteenth century judge, had, in 1782, 'tried to revive the ancient doctrine that it was lawful for a husband to beat a wife, provided that the stick were no thicker than his thumb', even though three contemporary cartoons allude to this. There is no indication that this pronouncement was made from the bench during any of the cases on which he sat that session.
Researching this topic still more recently, Jenni Murray discovered that 'we had landed in the territory of urban myth': there was not and had never been such a ruling in modern British law, either in statute or case law. However, she did find that in medieval Welsh law, under certain specific stringently defined conditions, a man might strike a woman with a stick as thick as his middle finger and as long as his forearm, but only three blows were allowed, anywhere on the body but the head. She suggests that Buller, whose court sat in Shrewsbury on the Welsh Marches, and Judge Tudor Rees, who claimed in 1948 that the common law permitted the 'rule of thumb' chastisement of wife by husband, and had trained at the University of Wales, may have been influenced by memories of folk custom in Wales. Her article 'I was nearly beaten by "the stick"', appeared in The Daily Telegraph, 7 Feb 2002 (not online, unfortunately).
In a letter to The Guardian Review, 17 Jan 2004, Patrick Leary pointed out that the allegation that 'the prostitutes Thackeray visited turned out in force at his funeral' is entirely a construction of DJ Taylor's 1999 biography of Thackeray:
In painting a picture of the crowded scene at Thackeray's funeral, Taylor quotes JE Millais's observation that among the approximately 2000 people milling about the chapel and gravesite was a group of women wearing brightly coloured dresses. "Who were these gaudy grave attendants?" Of course the answer is that we don't know. A great many people who had never even met Thackeray in person showed up at his funeral. But now this unidentified group of colourfully dressed women has mutated, not only into prostitutes, but prostitutes that Thackeray himself had "visited".
Leary points out that this is 'an excellent example of how a sniggering remark can mutate into a factoid whose truth, soon enough, everyone takes for granted'.
It is increasingly frequently claimed that the word "earnest" was a Victorian slang code word for "homosexual", making the title of the Wilde play a deliberate triple pun relished by his friends in London's homosexual subculture. Patrick Leary points out that this claim had been been debunked several times in several places, most
comprehensively in the Times in 2001, as reported on VICTORIA and the Oscar Wilde discussion list.
The assumption that John Ruskin had a phobia about female pubic hair and that this was the reason for the non-consummation of his marriage to Effie Gray, subsequently annulled, has very wide circulation. This interpretation is based on Mary Lutyens' speculations as to what Ruskin might have meant by telling Effie that he was 'disgusted with [her] person', in her works on the Ruskin marriage, Effie in Venice (1965) and Millais and the Ruskins (1967). It is by no means a contemporary explanation, and is merely one theory out of many as to why he failed to consummate his marriage. Lutyens herself changed her mind (see her 1972 The Ruskins and the Grays), having discovered evidence suggesting that Ruskin would have been aware that women normally had pubic hair. The comment about 'disgust with [her] person' was made at a stage when their marriage had become full of hatred and bitterness. See extensive discussions on the Victoria list, between 13 and 19 February 2006, for a variety of competing theories, and a general scepticism over the 'pubic hair phobia' myth. Many thanks to everyone on Victoria and also on H-Histsex who provided assistance with elucidating this and tracing it to Lutyens.
It is alleged that there was a high society fashion for women to have nipple-piercings in order to wear breast jewellery in the late Victorian/Edwardian era. The evidence for this as a widespread fashion rather than a niche practice is very dubious. All sources trace back eventually to citations of correspondence in the journal Society during 1899. Although Society included political notes, society gossip, theatre reviews, some fiction, and so forth, its correspondence columns were entirely given over to discussion of such topics as corporal punishment (mainly in girls' boarding schools), tight-lacing, and the fascination of tight kid gloves. The fetishistic tone of these letters has been recognised by the classifying of Society as a 'Cupboard' item by the British Library, and in Valerie Steele's discussion of this and similar periodicals in Fashion and Eroticism (1985). It appears to have been taken as serious reportage by Iwan Bloch in Sexual Life in England (first published in German in 1901). As Peter Fryer noted in Private Case, Public Scandal (1966), this work, which demonstrates Bloch's 'touching inability' to distinguish when something was pornographic fantasy, was extensively mined (often without attribution) by writers of popular works on weird sexual practices and unusual fashions over a period of several decades. However, my attention was drawn by the author of these blog-posts to correspondence 1888-1889 in the perhaps rather unlikely venue of English Mechanic and the World of Science, in which a number of individuals joined in a discussion that was kicked off by queries about the ability of human flesh to heal around foreign bodies. The tone of the discussion - indeed that of this journal generally - is quite different from the correspondence in Society. Some cases were reported by women, but the majority of the instances seem to be men describing their experiences, with some allusions to France as the place where the piercing occurred. While an interesting insight into the enormous variety of Victorian practices, I think that caution is still required as to how extensive this particular practice was.
There is a long-standing story about the music hall artiste Marie Lloyd being summoned before the London County Council's theatres and music halls committee during the Social Purity Alliance's campaign against the immorality of these venues and associated agitation about the salacity of her songs. Allegedly she performed one of her famous numbers in an entirely chaste manner (the one often cited is 'Johnny Jones' - 'What's that for, o, tell me Pa/If you won't tell me, I'll ask Ma./ Ma says oh it's nothing, shut your row. / Well, I've asked Johnny Jones, see, and I know now' - not sure this would ever sound entirely chaste) and then some well-known Victorian parlour ballad - 'Come into the garden. Maud' is usually cited - in a thoroughly lubricious and suggestive manner. This is regarded with some scepticism by her serious biographers, and now so many newspapers are available online, we can see that they documented the deliberations of the London County Council's theatres and music halls committee over challenges to the renewals of music hall licences by the forces of social purity in some detail. 'Johnny Jones' was one of the songs under discussion when the Oxford Music Hall licence renewal was under consideration in 1896, but it was not the only one, nor was Lloyd the only artiste deemed problematic, and no artiste was required to attend or perform - had they done so it would surely have been recorded by the press. It may also be noted that the possibility of lewd renderings of 'Come into the garden, Maud' had been mooted in 1890 by a Mr GS Elliott, a representation for Islington on the LCC, in a speech critical of censorious attitudes towards musical hall songs ('Music Hall Gossip', The Era, 15 Feb 1890).
The factoid concerning a furore about Lloyd allegedly singing a song with the line 'she sits/walks among the cabbages and peas/lettuces and leaks' continues to circulate. Neither of the more serious of her biographers - Richard Anthony Baker, Marie Lloyd, Queen of the Music Halls (1990), Midge Gillies, Marie Lloyd, the One and Only (1999) - substantiate this rumour. Baker failed to locate any song with lines like this contemporaneous with Lloyd's career - he suggested that Leslie Sarony's 'Mucking About The Garden', c. 1929, might have, but versions publicly available do not include these lines (possibly, however, there were versions for more intimate discreet performances?). Gillies has a detailed list of Lloyd's songs none of which resemble anything like this. A search on Google Books Ngram Viewer finds a similar title, 'Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas' included under 'Parodies on Popular Songs' in an advertisement, ? early 1900s, for the US publication The Vaudeville Prompter #4 in Plays of the 19th and 20th Centuries Vol 27. But nothing from the UK. The Vaudeville Prompter is a very elusive publication (does not appear to be held by The American Vaudeville Museum Archive in Arizona or in other major US repositories).
I have now documented these persistent myths in even more detail, involving checking the earlier biographies of Lloyd and databases of US newspapers, in a blogpost: The Marie Lloyd mishmash of myths.
One often hears it asserted that the nineteenth century girl did not attain menarche until the age of around 17. Vern L Bullough pointed out that this was a misinterpretation of the often scattered evidence, in his article 'Age at Menarche: A Misunderstanding' published in Science, 213, 17 Jul 1981, pp. 365-366, and that the assumption that over the previous hundred years the age of menarche had dropped precipitously from 17 to 12.5 years was based upon misinformation, so that the change was very much less than supposed.
I have come across (and so have other people) accounts of C19th condoms bearing the image of the Queen (or other eminent Victorians, e.g. Mr Gladstone). It's possible that the images were on the packets rather than the condoms, but either way, this intriguing (if rather creepy) factoid about Victorian contraceptive marketing practices remains in limbo. No definite sightings, but no citation to a definitely fictional source either. The jury is still out on condoms bearing depictions of Eminent Victorians, but illustrated condoms were definitely A Thing
Possibly not Victorian, but sufficiently early in the twentieth century that it may well have been around as received folk wisdom during the latter decades of the nineteenth. It's less a factoid about the Victorians than a factoid of the time itself: the pervasive belief in that there was 'one "dud" in every box' of contraceptives (condoms or chemical pessaries).
Contraception at that date was far from reliable: the technology was rudimentary and quality control pretty much non-existent in a stigmatised industry (until the 1930s, when the National Birth Control Association started producing an Approved List of products which had passed their stringent tests). This lack of fitness for purpose got turned into a deliberate 'has to be one "dud" in each box', to the extent that it was even reported that 'they are obliged by the Government to have one "dud" in every box' (an alternative, somewhat later, version suggested that Roman Catholics got undercover jobs in contraceptive factories in order to stick holes in condoms).
The canard presumably arose through a combination of the perception that birth control was not successful in its desired purpose and awareness of increasing pronatalist concerns over 'population' as the decline in fertility began to register.
These don't perhaps strictly count as factoids, but given the number of people who want to establish definite figures in these area, I think it's worthwhile pointing out the problems in trying to do so.
There are significant problems in determining the extent of venereal infections among the Victorian population.
The state of diagnosis was extremely basic and capable of leading to both under- and over-diagnosis of specific STDs.
The diseases were not notifiable and thus no collated statistics were being compiled at either local or national levels
Theoretically, information from death registrations might give information at least on syphilis-related conditions, but: syphilis was the 'Great Mimic' and fatal conditions of many organs could be caused or exacerbated by it; plus, at least among the respectable classes, doctors might well wish to spare the feelings of the family (especially if they wished to keep them as patients) by not reporting deaths as owing to this cause.
Hospital statistics of admission and treatment are not going to be particularly representative. There would have been numerous sufferers who were not 'of the hospital class' and would have been treated by private practitioners, with the expectation of discretion.
Patients in all classes sought out quack remedies. That this was very prevalent is suggested by the number of quacks in business, but actual figures of those who sought treatment by this route would be impossible to come by.
Quantifying numbers of sex workers in the Victorian era is very problematic.
Michael Mason in The Making of Victorian Sexuality pointed out the problems with reliance on estimates of numbers of prostitutes made by contemporaries, which tended to be either over- or under-estimated depending on the agenda of the observer, and might include stigmatising labelling of women who were not actually commercial sex-workers but merely living outside certain conventional moral frameworks.
Unlike large parts of Europe, the UK did not operate systems of registering and licensing of prostitutes, except in designated port and garrison towns for the fewer than twenty years during which the Contagious Diseases Acts were in force (first Act 1866, acts suspended 1883).
In those countries which did operate systems of registration, it was widely recognised that a great deal of 'clandestine' sex-work was taking place underneath this legal radar, and thus that the official statistics failed to reflect the extent of the trade.
Police statistics relating to arrests can tell us something, but pretty much apply only to street prostitution (a single, though the most visible, element within the sex-trade economy) and also varied wildly over time and from place to place depending on a range of factors affecting policing of this area.
A good deal of sex-work was casual or seasonal, undertaken by women who would have defined themselves as members of other occupational groups, as a result of temporary economic pressures.
As pointed out by Helen King in a letter to The Times 22 June 2011 (unfortunately concealed behind their paywall), this particular myth was definitively exploded by Virginia Berridge in 'Queen Victoria's Cannabis Use: Or, How History Does and Does Not Get Used in Drug Policy Making', Addiction Research & Theory Jan 2003, Vol. 11, No. 4: 213–215. John Russell Reynolds, a physician to the Royal Household, wrote in The Lancet in 1890 on the possible therapeutic benefits of cannabis. Any connection between these theories expressed in the medical press and his prescribing practices when treating the Royal family is not established: however, one can point out that by 1890 dysmenorrhoea was unlikely to have been a problem for the Queen, who was then over 70.
Another medical myth attaching to the Queen is that the application of chloroform during her accouchement with Prince Leopold greatly accelerated its acceptability: a 1996 article in Anaesthesia by H and T Connor plausibly argues that 'Examination of contemporaneous publications suggests that the use of chloroform by Queen Victoria in 1853 did not result in the major breakthrough in the acceptability of obstetric anaesthesia with which the event has been credited by some later writers'.
Why it's misleading to describe Aristotle's Masterpiece as 'a banned book'.
Some very interesting and productive work can be done by examining this high-profile case, on the immediate setting, the women, Victorian sex-workers generally, late Victorian policing, the role of the press in creating it as An Event, and so forth. However, in the 1880s the population of London was pushing 4 million, plus as a capital and a major port city it had a substantial number of transients passing through. Tower Hamlets alone had a population of over 439,000. Given the number of possibilities (not to mention that it has been argued that not all the supposed Ripper victims were murdered by the same hand), it is rather irksome to find that the relatively small number of suspects suggested by a long tradition of Ripperologists are nearly all individuals already known to history for some reason or another. It's obviously easier to make a case (though some of the cases creak noticeably at the seams and are far from watertight) about someone who is known and for whom records survive and can be identified. But it's very problematic history to decide on a suspect and then look for the evidence.
For a very different perspective altogether, Hallie Rubenhold researched the victims: For too long there has been this idea that these women were all the same. A nameless, faceless mass of grubby, disgusting people, indistinguishable from one another. And they aren’t; and probably not all of them even prostitutes.
Very useful article by Robert Darby and John Cozijn on the Genesis and Evolution of this Contemporary Legend:
The birth of Prince William’s son in July 2013 was the occasion for an outpouring of media speculation about the fate of the royal baby’s foreskin. The possibility that he might be circumcised was connected to a purported tradition of circumcision within the British royal family, said to be have been initiated either by Queen Victoria or by George I. In this article, we trace the origins and evolution of these stories and assess their validity.
Recommended
More of a myth about the modernity of the commercialisation of menstrual products. No, they weren't first invented during the First World War, but were being marketed on a commercial scale a good 20-30 years (at least) previously. My thoughts and evidence on the subject in a blog post.
