Introduction

Historians of the nineteenth century have perceived a definite change in sexual attitudes, and in ways of talking about and dealing with sexual issues, around 1880, the beginnings of certain ‘modern’ ways of thinking about sex. Michael Mason has suggested that much early twentieth-century reaction against Victorianism was aimed specifically at those decades, during which leading anti-Victorians had grown up, while Simon Szreter has made a persuasive case for the persistence of a ‘long Victorian era’ in Britain, which only dissolved in the 1960s, rather than at the death of the Queen in 1901.1