The public and the private

The major political groupings themselves had different attitudes towards moral regulation in the later part of the century. Moral reform, from the 1870s, came close to the centre of political debate – much more so than structural social reform ever did in the nineteenth century. Individual conduct and moral reformation were seen as the key to public health. The double standard of morality relied upon the separation between the public and the private. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the coming together of all the major themes of its sexual discourses: class pride and evangelism, moral certainty and social anxiety, the double standard and 'respectability', prurience and moral purity. Victorian morality was premised on a series of ideological separations: between family and society; between the restraint of the domestic circle and the temptations of promiscuity; between the privacy, leisure and comforts of the home and the tensions and competitiveness of work.