The Victorian Background

‘The Victorians’ and their sex lives remain endlessly fascinating in the popular mind. Several memorable but erroneous ideas are constantly recirculated by journalists and the media.1 In spite of numerous scholarly works deconstructing any idea of a monolithic Victorian morality, there is a continuing stereo typical picture of the Victorians as sexually repressed hypocrites; while every few years for the past forty or so somebody publishes a popular book promising to overturn all these received ideas about the Victorians (usually by focusing on particular individuals, groups, or subcultures behaving in ways counter to the stereotype).2