ABSTRACT

This chapter explore the key elements of Victorian sexual ideologies as they developed in a complex dialogue with the legacy of the eighteenth century: in part continuing trends already observable then, in part a reaction and challenge to them. The trend towards a form of social colonisation was accentuated throughout the nineteenth century by the perceived otherness of the working class, condemned, it was believed, to sexual rampancy and immorality, and often even physically different from the more leisured classes. In the absence of effective birth control, changes in patterns of fertility require both the modification of restraint by men and less guarded sexual behaviour amongst women. The conscious articulation of the domestic ideology was the work of the first half of the nineteenth century, and was a product both of political crisis–the fear of social disintegration for which the breakdown of familial and sexual order became a striking metaphor–and of the self-development of an increasingly dominant class.