Sexual Intercourse Began in 1863

[steepholm]

This is another query flung tangentially from our History Project like a spark from a Catherine wheel. It's common wisdom, both on the web and in print, as dozens of hits on Google Books attest, that Victorian women advised their daughters - usually before their wedding nights - to lie back (or perhaps close their eyes) and think of England (or possibly the Empire). Indeed, this is frequently cited as evidence of the resistance at the time to the idea of female sexual pleasure.

But is there any evidence that this phrase was ever used during Victoria's reign? Apocryphally it's sometimes attributed to Victoria herself, although this tendency has abated as Victoria's enthusiastic enjoyment of sex has become better known. Other than that, the earliest citation appears to be from the 1912 journal of Alice, Lady Hillngdon, in which she expresses her relief that these days she is obliged to "lie down on [her] bed, close [her] eyes, open [her] legs and think of England" only twice a week. But that quotation first appeared in print in the 1970s, and the journal itself (as Brewer notes) has never been produced, so it must be treated with suspicion at best. Something similar is said to have been given as advice to her daughter by the wife of Stanley Baldwin, but again, no evidence.

It's tricky, of course, the subject matter being such that people who might have conceivably have used the phrase would have shied from putting it down in print; but surely there would have been many women from the early to the middle part of the twentieth century who would have attested to its use in earlier times? Did the Suffragettes make no mention of it? Marie Stopes? Virginia Woolf? Gwen Raverat? Marie Lloyd? Anyone at all?

By this point I'm pretty much convinced that the phrase is a twentieth-century invention, foisted on the Victorians as a way of poking fun at them (c.f. Victoria refusing to outlaw lesbianism) - but I'd still like to know who first came up with it.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

oursin has a wonderfully informative web page about Victorian sex factoids which fails to find a reliable source, though the phrase does seem to have been current in the early 20th century.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That looks like some good reading there.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

In the course of debunking one myth, Hall writes, "moral earnestness and libertine behaviour were both to be found in Victoria's subjects but very seldom in the same individual."

That may be true, but they may often be found today in the same individual, when that individual is an American fundamentalist preacher. The number of those whose denunciations against homosexuality turn out to be self-beatings for their own, apparently irresistible, homosexual inclinations is truly remarkable.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, George Rekers springs to mind (and then, thankfully, out again).

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

It depends how you define "libertine." Charles Kingsley (who was certainly an earnest fellow) and his fiancee Fanny Grenfell engaged in some mighty heavy petting before marriage (in the 1840s), apparently without any sort of guilt. "My hands are perfumed with her delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent. And every moment the thought comes across me of those mysterious recesses of beauty where my hands have been wandering, and my heart sinks with a sweet faintness and my blood tingles through every limb." Fanny was just as enthusiastic, from all accounts.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

oursin did say "very seldom" rather than "never". Also you have to remember a) that America in 2011 is not Britain under Victoria's reign and b) consider how many (as a percentage of the population) of these fundamentalist religious hypocrites there are currently in the US. Just because a few cases makes a good story for the media doesn't make their behaviour the norm -- which is what oursin is saying about the Victorians.

Of course hypocritical behaviour exists. We have plenty of instances here of hypocrisy more recently; the whole "back to basics" ideology of John Major's Tory government foundered on that very point, but many people think that all Victorian men were repressive tyrants at home and sexual libertines outside it, which is very much not the case.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

You write as if you think you're disagreeing with me about something, but I don't know what it might be.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I remember a discussion at rec.arts.sf.composition (c. 2000?) with David Friedman and others. Someone (DF iirc) came up with a reference suggesting that it was originally advice given for use during childbirth rather than during sex. And Queen Victoria had said something else about something else. ;-)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

An intriguing possibility! Not that childbirth is that passive an activity, but it's easy to imagine it being said.

Alas, I just went back and checked the discussion, and the person who mentions it - Cally Soukup, in conversation with Friedman - can't remember where she saw the reference (which seems to be the story of this phrase).

And Queen Victoria had said something else about something else. ;-)

That I find easy to believe.

[gillo]

Good grief. I know Cally quite well from other online sources. All roads eventually lead to...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, it turns out that there are only about five dozen of us using the internet, but we all have a lot of aliases...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

My searches have brought up a source that may have been influential, between the 1940 example she gives of Thurtle and the dubious 1972 journal extract: Pierre Daninos's Les Carnets du Major Thompson (1954), which was made into a film starring Jack Buchanan, and which (in its English translation) has the Major's wife Ursula being advised by her mother to "just close your eyes and think of England!"

I wouldn't be surprised if that book gave the phrase quite a boost, at least. But Major Thompson is a fictional version of the typical Englishman, and one invented by a Frenchman, no less - so certainly a case of "He would say that, wouldn't he?"