So you think Victorians were prudes? When it came to the birds and the bees, our ancestors had little knowledge – yet enjoyed very racy sex lives, says Maddy Fletcher

• Hannah Dolby opens up about her journey of learning about Victorian sex-ed
• Author reveals that literature on the topic was both confusing and inaccurate 
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Like most British schoolchildren, Hannah Dolby did not have an especially rigorous sex education. The Scottish author remembers being plonked in front of a projector at school and shown a video of a man and a woman standing naked in a field. ‘Then, they lay down in the field,’ says Dolby. ‘And that was it.’

At least it was more than Victorians had.

Last month Dolby, 50, published her debut novel, No Life for a Lady, about Violet Hamilton, a 28-year-old single woman in Victorian England. Her mother, before disappearing from Hastings Pier, ‘very briefly’ told her – ‘in a slightly confusing manner’ – about sex. Violet is curious.

So, Dolby’s job was to trawl through libraries and books to find out what sort of Victorian sex advice her fictional heroine would have had access to. In short: very little.

The first thing Dolby learned was that the Victorians spoke and wrote about sex with a total lack of clarity. One book from 1893, Self and Sex Series: What a Young Girl Ought to Know, is promisingly titled but thoroughly disappointing. It instructs the reader to learn about intercourse through the ‘most delightful book of all’: nature.

Dolby’s job was to trawl through libraries and books to find out what sort of Victorian sex advice her fictional heroine would have had access to

‘Read the lives of plants and flowers as they grow in the garden, read the experiences of living birds in the trees.’ It’s all clear as mud.

Other advice was more detailed, if plainly mad. Dr William Fox’s 1897 book The Model Botanic Guide to Health claimed that ‘self pollution’ (masturbation) would lead to insanity.

‘I have seen more cases of idiocy from this cause alone, than from all the other causes of insanity,’ wrote Fox. It gets worse: ‘Self pollution,’ he said, ‘fills the mind with lewd and corrupt images, and transforms its victim into a filthy and disgusting reptile.’

Fox offered some deterrents for those wanting to ‘self-pollute’, but they don’t sound promising: read books on chastity or apply cayenne pepper to the loins.

The Victorians had other ways of distracting themselves from sex, too. Dolby found a book that advised women to avoid certain foods as they could ‘stimulate the reproductive nature’. (Eggs, oysters, peppers and condiments were all considered high risk.)

It also discouraged females from going to the theatre, reading ‘salacious books’, looking at naked statues or participating in ’round dance’, to avoid ‘impure thinking’.

And as for double beds? An overly erotic disaster, wrote Dr Dio Lewis in 1875: ‘A very large part of our wretchedness and perilous excess is the natural result of our system of sleeping in the same bed. It is the most ingenious of all possible devices to stimulate and inflame the carnal passion. No bed is large enough for two persons.’

‘Victorian England was probably the most sexually repressive society one can imagine,’ says author Neil McKenna, ‘but it was also one of the most sexually active.’ 

McKenna, 61, has written biographies of Oscar Wilde and ‘Fanny and Stella’, a pair of cross-dressing men who were arrested in 1870 for ‘committing the abominable crime of buggery’.

But hindering intimacy had no proper impact. The Victorians simply loved sex – encouraged or discouraged, legal or illegal, good or bad. (On that last part, McKenna is clear: ‘Let’s face it, dear, if you’re gagging for it, even bad sex is sex,’ he says down the phone, before trailing off. ‘Oh, so sorry, the carpenter has just walked in!’)

In Dr Kate Lister’s 2020 book A Curious History of Sex she says that the Victorians made pornography, published erotic magazines (The Oyster, The Pearl) and sold ivory dildos. In 1880 one sex-toy seller wrote in The Pearl: ‘I have a stock of fine, soft, firmly made dildos to make up for the deficiency in males, which, alternated with the real article, will enable us to thoroughly enjoy ourselves.’

If it all sounds rather jolly, there was a serious side, too. ‘If you went to the West End – Haymarket, Coventry Street – there would be thousands of female prostitutes,’ says McKenna. The sex work wasn’t safe and STDs were rife. ‘Of course, most of the people who got the raw deal were the women – and mostly they were working-class women.’

In 1864 the Contagious Diseases Act was passed to regulate, in the law’s words, ‘common prostitutes’. It allowed police to arrest female sex workers, forcibly inspect them for STDs, then put them in a ‘lock hospital’ – probably a bit like a workhouse – until cured. ‘It certainly wasn’t a very nice place,’ says McKenna.

When Dolby started reading Victorian sex advice, she found it ‘hilarious’. In her book, one character cannot bear to say the word ‘penis’, calling it a ‘Matterhorn mushroom’. But, she says, ‘When you think what it must have actually been like to read that advice, you do feel for those Victorian women. They just wanted to know what sex was!’

That is the point of her novel. Violet does get the answers to her questions, sexual and otherwise. When Dolby wrote No Life for a Lady, she could see her heroine clearly. And from her writing room in 21st-century London, there was huge satisfaction in giving this clueless Victorian creation some proper advice: ‘I was trying to right the scales.’

No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby is out now (Head of Zeus, £16.99*)

*TO ORDER A COPY FOR £14.44 UNTIL 16 APRIL, GO TO MAILSHOP.CO.UK/BOOKS OR CALL 020 3176 2937. FREE UK DELIVERY ON ORDERS OVER £20.

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