by Lucy Worsley
It’s very noticeable just how much bigger Victorian families were than Georgian ones: an average of six children as opposed to 2.5. Part of the reason was a decline in the age of marriage. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most non-aristocratic women got married in their mid-twenties (having saved up a nest egg through work). They were therefore well advanced into their fertile years even before they began to procreate. (Once they’d started, though, they did not readily stop, but frequent infant deaths brought the average number of children down.) In an industrial economy, though, so much more wealth was generated that a man could go out to work and win the wages to support a wife at home. Victorian marriages therefore took place at a younger age, and more babies survived.
For those who didn’t want babies, condoms were available from the late seventeenth century onwards, and there was always the method of coitus interruptus (rather quaintly described as ‘to make a coffee-house of a woman’s privities, to go in and out and spend nothing’.) Reliable contraception in the twentieth century, as we know, has had an enormous effect on society, and to read certain newspapers infertility or ‘leaving it too late’ seems almost as big and regrettable a social issue as unwanted pregnancy.
9 – Deviant Sex and Masturbation
I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey, so of course I thought about her continually.
Nancy Mitford, 1948
A piece of pornographic graffiti pencilled onto a staircase wall by a bored page at Hampton Court Palace in 1700 shows a lady with legs akimbo, naked except for a pair of very beautifully drawn shoes. Given the sketchy nature of the rest of the depiction, and the care lavished on the footwear, it seems safe to conclude that he must have been a foot fetishist.
The main point to make in a history of sexual deviancy is that sexual preferences and orientations formed very little of a person’s social identity until the late twentieth century. So there were no labels of ‘homosexual’ or ‘lesbian’ (or even ‘child molester’ or ‘voyeur’), just people who, from time to time, performed such aberrant actions. The Earl of Castlereagh, executed at the Tower of London in the early seventeenth century for sodomising his footman, was tried and condemned by his peers. What really upset them was not the sodomy but the fact that he’d slept with one of his servants.
The beginnings of a homosexual subculture do appear in the early eighteenth century in the ‘molly-houses’ caricatured by the London writer Ned Ward. From these origins grew a whole group of people who would eventually publicly describe themselves by their sexuality.
Strikingly, lesbian actions are described in medical textbooks long before any hint is given that males might have sex with each other. Perhaps it was a matter of salacious interest for their male authors. Certainly the seedy seventeenth-century uncle of one Nicholas LeStrange would say ‘whensover he saw two women kiss, (otherwise then in the way of salutation) Oh how my breech waters at that’. Queen Anne suffered from negative rumours that she had ‘no inclination for any but of one’s own sex’. But behind the accusations lay fears that women were too powerful at her court, and that they were disrupting the flow of political advice that should stream to the queen from her male courtiers. The practice of sharing beds meant that homosexual actions were surely an accepted part of life for many of both sexes, and they only caused problems when they emerged from behind the bedroom door.
The most interesting period in the history of masturbation was the nineteenth century, when the anti-masturbatory propaganda and scare-mongering information issued to young people had much in common with the anti-drug campaigning material of today. Why did this great wave of fear grip society and cause so much guilt in the bedroom?
Excessive lust seems to have been a problem as old as humanity. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century recommended wild lettuce as a medicine which ‘extinguishes lust in a human. A man who has an overabundance in his loins should cook wild lettuce in water and pour that water over himself in a sauna bath. He should also place the warm, cooked lettuce round his loins.’ But the first book devoted to the dangers of masturbation – Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences in both sexes considered – appeared in Georgian London in 1715, where urban life was booming. One explanation for the anti-masturbation movement may lie in the fact that cities distanced people from nature. They created a growing concern with appearances and correct behaviour, and people moved from being producers to consumers. Then there was the influence of the new ‘rational’ trend in thought and habits. If you prided yourself upon your enlightened rationality, you might well have considered that sexual pleasure without reproduction was pointless and therefore wasteful and wrong. The writer of The Ladies Dispensatory (1739) thought female masturbation simply dreadful: women who’d learned to become ‘capable of pleasuring themselves’, he said, were foolishly and wrongly turning down good offers of marriage.
By the nineteenth century, young men were routinely warned of the ‘dangers’ of masturbating, and there were even devices available to make sure it didn’t happen. While it’s quite upsetting to imagine generations of youngsters genuinely believing that they might go blind through pleasuring themselves, the nineteenth-century solutions for preventing them from doing so were often amusingly and crazily Heath Robinson-like in character. The ‘Leather Jacket Corset’ (invented in 1831) included a metal penis tube and ‘prevented access to the testicles’, while ‘The Timely Warning’ was a penis-cooling device that employed cold water to cool ‘the organ of generation, so that the erection subsides and no discharge occurs’.
Now, most people think that as long as the bedroom door is closed, anything goes, and masturbation is a topic for humour not shame.
‘Dr Fleck’s leather corset’, one of many inventive Victorian anti-masturbation devices
10 – Venereal Disease
Oh! Now I have a pressing need to make water … Oh! It scalds me to Pieces … ’tis like Fire … – I have heard and read of pissing Pins and Needles, But never felt what it was till now.
So wrote a sufferer from venereal disease in a striking blow-by-blow account of his symptoms on 9 September 1710. He was experiencing its classic symptoms: pain in urinating and purulent matter dripping from the urethra. ‘These damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter are the strongest proofs of an infection,’ ranted fellow victim James Boswell in 1763. He believed himself to be afflicted by ‘Signor Gonorrhoea’, but at this point people still couldn’t distinguish between gonorrhoea and syphilis. The latter was the more serious: years after the first infection, the symptoms could reappear and culminate in flesh decay, paralysis, madness and a horrible death. Whichever of the two he had, Boswell was understandably gloomy at being confined to his bedroom for several weeks of treatment.
In common with their predecessors and successors in practically all other periods, commentators writing during the First World War thought that the morals of young people were in rapid and dangerous decline. ‘Social customs and traditions are altering rapidly in a most undesirable direction,’ thundered the author of The Changing Moral Standard, as ‘girls, unmarried women and young married women of all classes’ had started behaving like prostitutes. In the early twentieth century, the arguments of campaigners against gonorrhoea shaded into eugenics. One pamphlet issued by the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases claimed that couples who wanted to marry should obtain approval from a priest and a lawyer, but also from a doctor: ‘surely there can be no sanctity in any marriage unless blood-cleanness and freedom from infectivity are regarded as essentials?’ A printed warning issued to soldiers proposed a more practical solution to the problem of venereal disease: a visit to ‘special treatment centres … where examination is SECRET, FREE OF CHARGE, and CARRIED OUT BY EXPERT DOCTORS’. (People could find the location of their nearest centre by asking a policeman.)
An old procuress, with patches covering up her pox, takes an innocent country girl
under her wing
Syphilis first reached Europe from the New World late in the fifteenth century, and then spread rampantly through sexual contact. It could not be transmitted through the air, even though the over-powerful Cardinal Wolsey was accused of having ‘breathed’ syphilis over Henry VIII. While the humour-based concept of medicine still reigned, the recommended treatment was with mercury. (‘Five minutes with Venus may mean a lifetime with Mercury.’) The intention was to make the body sweat excessively, which would restore equilibrium. Syringes for injecting mercury into the urethra sank with the Mary Rose in 1545, to be rescued by modern divers. Otherwise a mercury ointment could be rubbed onto the skin, and there were even bizarre anti-venereal underpants coated with the chemical. The mercury did indeed cause a patient to sweat, but the resultant black saliva thought to indicate that the treatment was working was in fact a symptom of advanced mercury poisoning.
It’s often been suggested that Henry VIII’s various health troubles were caused by syphilis, and he did indeed make potions and salves of his own devising ‘to dry excoriations and comfort the member’. But at no point did he disappear from public life for the standard six-week mercury treatment, as did his French contemporary, Francis I. So the case seems unproven. (Syphilis, known in England as ‘the French disease’, was called ‘the English disease’ in France. The other conditions thought abroad to be peculiarly English were flagellation, suicide and bronchitis.)
Anyone using a prostitute in seventeenth-or eighteenth-century London would have run a high risk of getting venereal disease. ‘A Whore’, asserted one moraliser, making a good point but in a particularly unpleasant way, ‘is but a CloseStool … that receives all manner of filth, she’s like a Barber’s Chair, no sooner one’s out, but t’others in.’ No wonder James Boswell, after his visit from ‘Signor Gonorrhoea’, reluctantly decided to try the reusable animal-gut condoms that were increasingly available.
Some of the saddest syphilis cases were the wives and children infected by straying husbands. But most heart-rending of all were the victims of the strange and horrible Georgian idea that a man could get rid of his syphilis by having intercourse with a small child, even a baby. His young partner would remove his disease, it was thought, leaving him clean and cured.
Since the 1950s, it’s been easier to control syphilis, and if detected early, the patient will make a full recovery. But be warned: the numbers of new cases being reported today are on the rise!
11 – What to Wear in Bed
What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel No. 5, of course.
Marilyn Monroe
As bedrooms were communal places throughout so much of their history, people were used to being seen in their nightclothes. Instructions written for a medieval pageboy describe how he should undress his master and get him ready for bed. (They have the amusing effect of making the master/king/lord in question sound rather like a doll.) When your sovereign lord wants to go to bed, the page is told, you must spread out a foot sheet for him to stand upon, and take off his robe. Then you put a cloak on his back, before pulling off his shoes, socks and hose. (‘Hose’, or leg coverings, consist of ‘upper hose’, or breeches, and ‘nether hose’, or stockings.) You should throw the hose over your shoulder before combing his head and putting his kerchief upon it, then putting on his nightgown.
This kerchief, wrapped around the head, would develop into the nightcap. The thought of sleeping with an unprotected head was abhorrent in an age when sickness was thought to travel through the air in a cloud of evil ‘miasma’. People really believed that they might die from sitting or sleeping in a draught. They were paranoid about keeping their heads warm (but without overheating: some nightcaps had a hole in the crown, so that ‘the vapour may go out’). My own mother wasn’t allowed by my grandmother to leave the house with wet hair even in the 1950s.
Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s minister, was the son of a humble Ipswich innkeeper and butcher, yet rose through the ranks of the church, one of the few careers open to young men of modest means. He revelled in his rich cardinal’s robes of red, but during his frequent work binges he stayed in his nightclothes all day. His talent at statecraft and his industry under pressure were both enormous: during negotiations with the French in 1527, Wolsey worked for twelve hours continuously from four in the morning, yet ‘never rose once to piss, nor yet to any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his nightcap and kerchief on his head’.
Most people slept in a shirt (men) or shift (women) just like the one they wore as underwear in the daytime; sometimes even the very same one. A family forced from their beds by a fire in their house on the old London Bridge in 1633 took to the street with ‘nothing on their bodies but their shirt and smock’. Those with the money bought special nightshirts with slightly fuller sleeves and a deeper neck opening than those worn during the day.
A surprising number of daytime fashions started out as bedroom wear. Anne Boleyn was bought nightgowns by Henry VIII, notably one of black satin bound with black taffeta and edged with black velvet. Something like a modern dressing gown, ‘nightgowns’ such as Anne’s were warm, loose and often hooded garments. They were worn over other clothes, and taken off at the point of getting into bed.
Being snug and practical, nightgowns made their way out of the bedchamber and into public areas (rather like ‘housecoats’ in the twentieth century). Count Egmont wore a ‘red damask’ nightgown to his own execution in 1568, while in 1617, Lady Anne Clifford even went to church in her ‘rich night gown’. In time, the nightgown evolved into the smartest and most formal dress ever invented: the eighteenth-century court mantua, a dress with an enormously wide hooped skirt. The mantua began as bedroom wear, but developed into a stylised and strangely fossilised uniform for formal occasions. In the slow-moving world of the court it was still worn in the 1760s, but looked like an extreme parody of the off-duty outfits of nearly a century earlier.
The nineteenth century saw the development of specialist nightgowns, and voluminous white cotton was the textile of choice in the age when Britain’s mills dominated the world. No woman would have worn pyjamas until after the First World War. In the 1920s, the influence of Hollywood films brought about a revolution in bedroom wear. When the stars appeared in scenes set in bedrooms, they were put into satin so that they’d shimmer in the studio lighting. Around the same time, Madame Vionnet’s invention of the ‘bias’ cut allowed clothes to cling more closely to the body, so a generation of shiny, slinky, peachy or flesh-coloured nightgowns appeared. They could also be made out of the new synthetic rayon for those who couldn’t afford silk. However glamorous your very own Hollywood-inspired, peach-coloured 1930s boudoir might have been, though, in Britain it probably still lacked central heating, and those bias-cut silk nightgowns would have disappeared under thick, quilted, satin dressing gowns.
Pyjamas also became standard wear for female Hollywood stars, inspired by decadent, exotic, Chinese garments rather than the striped cotton pyjamas of conventional male nightwear. Shanghai and Hong Kong were glamorous travel destinations, reached by cruise ships on which pyjamas were considered appropriate leisure wear for the fashionable.
Since the 1920s, pyjamas and nightdresses have evolved in line with contemporary cut and choice of fabric, but there has been no real revolution in nightwear for the last few decades. Perhaps the surprising thing is that, with central heating and duvets, anyone needs pyjamas at all. Certainly the dressing gown has an archaic air, and belongs more to the communal world of the hotel or house share than to most people’s private bedrooms.
The first generation of pyjamas for ladies, from a 1920s ladies’ magazine
12 – Sleeping with the King
The crowd is ushered through the King’s chambers to view a … magnificent bedchamber hung with fine canopies.
César de Saussure, visitor to London, 1725
We’ve heard about royal dressing ceremonies, and there was a similar kerfuffle in the even
ing when the king or queen wanted to go to bed.
The origins of the royal putting-to-bed ceremony can be seen in the preparations performed for a medieval knight or squire. These were identical wherever he happened to lay his head as he travelled from castle to castle upon a journey or progress:
See his sheets be clean, then fold down his bed, and warm his night kerchief and see his house of office be clean, help off his clothes, and draw the curtains, make sure the fire and candles, avoid [chuck out] the dogs, and shut the doors.
The middle-class fifteen-year-old French housewife to whom the advice book Le Ménagier de Paris is addressed must similarly serve her husband’s needs at night, with extras thrown in too. Her duties include:
Removing his shoes in front of a good fire, washing his feet, offering clean shoes and socks, serving plenteous food and drink, respectfully honouring him. After this, she puts him to sleep in white sheets and his nightcap, covered with good furs, and satisfies him with other joys and amusements, intimacies, loves and secrets about which I remain silent.
A royal levee. The king is ceremonially dressed before his courtiers
Royal ceremonies were along exactly the same lines, but multiplied vastly in terms of complication and the number of people involved.
Henry I’s household accounts mention many of the numerous people who prepared the king’s bedchamber, including the ‘porter of the king’s bed’, who received an extra three halfpence for his ‘man and a packhorse’ (remember the bed was still being carried about from castle to castle). The king’s ‘ewerer’ got a penny for drying the king’s clothes, and ‘when the king has a bath 3 pence’. (But the accountant didn’t know everybody’s wages: ‘Touching the laundress there is a doubt.’) All these people who worked in the bedchamber together made up the innermost department of the royal household.
