ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Victorian notions of normal and perverse sexuality and looks at what people did, whether or not they talked about it and also maps out changes over time in beliefs and practices. Demographic historians use censuses and other aggregate data to gain some insight into sexual practices. Ideal male sexuality was restrained. This may seems to contradict the centrality of marriage. For the Victorians there was no contradiction, because the essence of marriage was not sex but romantic love. An important development in sexuality in the later Victorian period was the rise of the social purity movement, which flourished from about 1880 until 1914 and sought to make society more moral by making it more chaste. Laws passed in 1827 and 1828 expanded the legal definition of an infamous crime, identified such crimes as sexual acts between men, and made it easier to prosecute men for attempted sodomy and easier to prove sodomy in court.
