Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and Desire Among Working-Class Men and Women in 19th Century London

by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, John Howe (Translator)

Using firsthand documents uncovered in the archives of a London foundling hospital, Barret-Ducrocq offers a marvelously acute census of Victorian sexual and moral attitudes.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, Love, Historical

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating look into the sex and love lives of London's working poor during the Victorian Age. Francois Barret-Ducrocq stumbled across documents from the Foundling Hospital which accepted children under the age of 1 year old once their mothers had proved they could not take care of them. The documents included testimonies of the girls which detailed the affairs they had from those with their masters (usually coercive with the girls as maids) to those with butchers boys or others met around town. The incredible documents and Francoise's analysis show how varied life was and how different the reality of the working poor was from their depiction via the middle class and aristocracy.

Circumstances were different as were the choices of the women and their future prospects. While some knew that their affair might last a night others had been promised marriage after over two years of marriage.

An incredible and essential book if you want to understand what life was like for the working poor, who while depicted as being without morals and without any purpose other than to serve had hopes and dreams of their own. As I read this I furthered my opinion that life as a woman in the Victorian Age was horrendous.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

I obtained this book because I decided to order a lot of books on the subject of how people fucked 150 years ago when I started quitting smoking ten days ago. (Still off the cigarettes and plan to stay off them.) This is often what happens to me in uncertain emotional times: strange book purchases on a vaguely steamy and vaguely academic subject. I'm pleased to report that Barret-Ducroq, even in translation, has done a commendable job of sifting through letters and diaries and foundling hospital records to give us a sense of how sexuality was practiced. I was particularly struck by the phrase "seduced after the promise of marriage," which was the way that fuccbois persuaded innocents to hop into bed with them in the 19th century. The chapters on the poor abandoned women at the foundling hospital were especially moving to me, as was the vile and disgusting manner in which the people who were supposed to "help" these women demanded every prurient detail. We really have come a long way in the last 150 years, but we do need to remind ourselves of our previous history so that we don't go back to this time period of neglect, needless castigation, and vile patriarchy.

[Jewels · Rating 3 out of 5]

To give a little bit of background, I'm in the midst of working on a research paper about the Victorian age divide between morality and hypocrisy. This volume sheds a bit of light on whether or not the working classes were too depraved to be saved. On the contrary, from the evidence the author has gathered, it seems rather that the working poor had their own set of rules as to courtship and marriage, and dealing with pregnancy outside matrimony. It was an interesting look into what is often pointed to as the supreme underbelly of Victorian England, and it's not as bad as it's been made to seem.

[Robert Monk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of us have an idea of the Victorian age, and specifically of sexuality in the Victorian age, an idea formed by Thomas Hardy novels and Queen Victoria's scowl: a deeply repressed time, in which sex itself was essentially banned from the public discourse. This book tries to get at what the working class actually did, using as its resource the records of a London foundling hospital. Women who were giving up their children had to explain the details of their situation, which gives us a glimpse into what was expected (if not necessarily what was true; these women had an inducement to lie). We get, as a result, interesting anecdotes that belie the idea that there was a rigid, brutal code of sexual conduct in mid- to late-Nineteenth century England. There's not much in the way of analysis here, and there are (acknowledged) limitations to the source. But it does help give us a better idea of what people actually did back then. (Spoiler: they did have sex.)

[Abdul Qayoom · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is fascinating book

[Nikhil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author gained access to previously restricted documents from a Foundling Hospital in London. The documents, first-hand accounts and letters of working class women, their friends, family and acquaintances allow the author to examine the sexual mores and behaviors of working-class women in Victorian London.

Much of the book consists of providing detailed excerpts from these documents to rebut the dominant middle-class/bourgeois view of working class sexuality and fertility behavior. Middle-class observers/reformers/evangelists viewed the pre-marital sexual relations, births out of wedlock, and large families of working people as sins and travesties, tarnishing the Empire. In particular, much blame was attributed to loose sexual mores and promiscuity. The author rebuts these views by showing how sexual behavior and fertility among working peoples followed its own set of mores that delinked sexual behavior from marriage. Pre-marital sexual relations were condoned by families but it was implcitily understood that the men had promised themselves to the women and that marriage would eventually ensue and that financial and material support would be offered in the event of pregnancy. These mores were rooted in fertility mores from agrarian working communities in previous centuries, and were being eroded by the anonymity of the city, the volatility of employment and income in an industrial society, and the erosion of social support for unmarried women as embodied by the Poor Law of 1834.

The final section of the book, which details how women, men, family members, and employers responded once the pregnancy could no longer be concealed is particularly good. The author's exploration of how working women tried to deal with poverty, childbirth, and the necessity of working without any real ability to force men to pay child support or any assisstance in the form of maternity leave is still relevant. The inability of working women to breastfeed children at work (or the inability of working women to bring their children to work), required women to find childminders and wet nurses at substantial cost. The difficulties of reconciling industrial (and post-industrial) patterns of work with raising children remains unresolved. The book also highlights how maternity leave has different implications for women in different occupations/income levels. While only providing maternity leave (instead of family leave) can widen the wage gap and reduce women's upward mobility in skilled labor positions, for poorer women working as unskilled labor, maternity leave ensures they do not have to give up their children to make ends meet.

Men primarily appear in these narratives as individuals who abandoned the women they had promised marriage/engagement to and refused to provide material compensation to help women through confinment and the first year of child-rearing. The explanations for men's behavior are varied, ranging from the vagaries of industrial employment and financial insecurity to callousness and brutality. Regardless, the changing legal framework and options for immigration combined to allow men to leave with impunity, leading to the breakdown of the sexual mores of working peoples.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating study of adoption cases from Victorian orphanages - reveals the moralistic bourgeois view of the working classes as depraved beasts was a little more subjective than we tend to think. Useful companion volume to Mayhew, Engels. Although the book is academic in nature, Barret-Ducroque infuses it with sympathy and humanity. Thorough endnotes support his thesis, although it flies in the face of some long-accepted conventional wisdom concerning the Victorian scene.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 3 out of 5]

After an exhaustive study of the meticulous records of London's Foundling Hospital, Barret-Ducrocq wrote a book about how Victorians viewed sex and its afteraffects.

[Alexandria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Must reread to review.