454Chapter 23
in mid-Victorian Britain, nearly twice as many as la-
bored in textile industries, or twenty times as many as
were engaged in all forms of education. Even middle-
class families could afford at least one servant because
the wages paid were shockingly low.
A study of Austrian household structure illustrates
how nineteenth-century families became smaller, but
household size remained large. Viennese census data
reveal that a typical master baker and his wife had five
children. But their household contained eighteen resi-
dents: six journeymen bakers, two shopgirls, and the
family’s three domestic servants. In another illustration,
a widowed textile manufacturer in his sixties lived in a
household of nine people: his two sons who had be-
come his partners in their thirties and still lived at
home, his five household servants, and his coachman.
Sexual Attitudes and Behavior
in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century lingers in popular memory as
an age of prudery and puritanical restrictions. To de-
scribe a person or an idea as “Victorian” is to connote
repressive attitudes about human sexuality commonly
associated with the era. This stereotype of Victorianism
contains much truth. Respectable women who con-
sulted a physician normally went with a chaperon; they
would point out their ailments on a doll rather than
touch themselves. Gynecological examinations were
performed only in extreme cases, and genteel opinion
held that women should endure much pain before
submitting to the indignity of a pelvic exam. Prudish-
ness governed polite conversations. The words for bod-
ily functions (sexual or not) were unacceptable, and this
ban forbade such outrages to delicate ears as to sweat,
which was deemed much too animalistic. Decent peo-
ple did not refer to legs—a word thought to inflame sex-
ual passions—but to limbs.This taboo included the legs
on furniture, and truly respectable families placed a
cloth skirt around a piano, lest the sight of its limbs
provoke prurient thoughts. This puritanism culminated
in Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette,which stated the moral
principle that books in a family library must be orga-
nized so that those written by men not lay next to
those written by women—unless the authors were
married.
This image of the nineteenth century contains
much truth, but it hides truth as well. The early nine-
teenth century, when fashionable dress at continental
balls permitted the exposure of a woman’s breasts, did
not correspond to the prudery of later years. Many
people believed that foreign countries teemed with a
sexuality unknown at home (as the British viewed
France), although that may reveal more about their
own behavior away from home. The upper classes, in-
cluding Queen Victoria’s family, did not behave by the
standards of middle-class Victorianism. Victoria’s prede-
cessor on the throne, William IV, lived with a mistress
for twenty years and had ten illegitimate children with
her; Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was the child of a
broken marriage; and Victoria’s heir, the future Edward
VII, had a legion of lovers, from a famous actress to a
duchess who always curtsied before climbing into the
royal bed. Such exceptions to the Victorian stereotype
were widespread: Nude bathing at the seashore was
commonplace for most of the nineteenth century and
the mid-Victorian House of Commons declined to out-
law it in 1857. Somehow bourgeois prudery coexisted
with startling exceptions, such as permitting Lewis Car-
roll to enjoy the hobby of photographing naked young
girls, including the Alice for whom Alice in Wonderland
was written.
Historians have studied many aspects of human
sexuality hidden by the stereotype of Victorianism.
Subjects such as the double standard, prostitution,
venereal disease, and homosexuality have all drawn the
attention of social historians. The double standard be-
hind Victorianism is clear. Sometimes it was a matter of
hypocrisy: the governing and opinion-making classes
said one thing in public and behaved differently in pri-
vate. During Napoleon III’s Second Empire, for exam-
ple, the government of France stoutly defended public
morality. When Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bo-
vary(1857), which dared to suggest that a respectable
married woman might choose to commit adultery, the
government immediately indicted Flaubert for outrag-
ing public morals. The public agreed so heartily that
when Edouard Manet first exhibited “Olympia,” des-
tined to become one of the most noted paintings of the
century but depicting a nude woman reclining in bed,
guards had to be hired to protect it from vigilante
moralists. The private morality of the Bonaparte family
was somewhat different from their public standard, and
they welcomed the friendship of Flaubert. The emperor
was as lusty as Edward VII, and his biography is filled
with episodes such as the costume ball at which he
found one of his mistresses, a teenaged countess who
wore a transparent costume.
Another variant of the sexual double standard ex-
pected different behavior from men and women. Un-
married women were expected to remain virginal until
marriage; unmarried men were assumed to be sexually