Victorian prudery 2

Research into attitudes in the Victorian era does not show agreement on the general state of prudery, rather it shows there was no universal set of attitudes held by "the Victorians". There are cases of extreme prudery to contrast with cases of openly lewd and lascivious behaviour, were the moral crusaders and the campaigners for a more broad-minded society. In a world without effective contraception and with a deal of ignorance about pregnancy in general, abstinence from sex makes sense, especially with the often crippling economic burden of too many children. It would be easy to slip into the "sex is sin" frame of mind, sex brings problems so sex must be bad even if this attitude is not supportable by plain common sense. It is not the case that the Victorians were universally prudish, after all, public nude bathing was common on the beaches of the UK by the 1840's, it is that some of the more forceful people promoted prudish attitudes for a variety of motives.

A more likely explanation of Victorian prudery, one that has more power if you remember that it pre-dated the Queen, is that establishment prudery came about as a side effect of running the Empire. French colonialists made a habit of taking a local bride, indeed it was encouraged, English men in the same position often took a local mistress, especially in India. These mistresses were not accepted in English society in India but they were often celebrated in art. The English establishment saw this as a threat to their power. It was feared these foreign women would weaken the influence of the ruling white men, so fraternisation became frowned upon. As it was sex that drove these men to take a foreign mistress, sex itself was seen as be bad, it had to be stamped out. This continued past the end of Victoria's rule, as an example , in December 1908 one Mr Scoresby Routledge M.A. wrote a letter to the Times newspaper reporting that a British official in Kenya, an Acting District Commissioner, had two native mistresses. As a result of this letter, the press reacted strongly, a typical reaction being an editorial in the Spectator of 12th December where the editor wrote: "The empire will be ruined if officials use their powers to gratify their animal passions. The accepted standard in East Africa is lower than in the empire as a whole and has reached a point of peril". The uproar resulted in a Circular Directive to all overseas British officials, it was written by the Colonial Secretary of the time, Lord Crewe, warning officers "that such practices were damaging and unworthy and led to scandal and grave discredit". The Spectator editorial recorded that the "mistresses" were just 13 years old, one said to be "unwilling", the other being removed to be under the protection of a "native" policeman. In modern terms, the British official was a paedophile, but at the time the uproar was about damage to the Empire, not the poor little girl. If the empire had been safe, the fate of the girls would not have been recorded. The Government in the form of Lord Crewe, Routledge and the newspapers were not primarily driven by prudery, all worried more about the empire and the maintenance of British rule than the people involved.