THE GIRL WITH THE SWANSDOWN SEAT (263 pp.)—Cyril Pearl—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.95).
It seems that more things went on behind Queen Victoria's billowing black bombazine skirts than her spiritual grandsons have been led to believe. It is probably too late to set matters straight, but Australian Cyril Pearl has made an industrious try at striking "Victorianism" from the lexicon as the synonym for middle-class prudery.
The legend of Victorian domestic virtue and strict private morals was literally a fiction. Pearl suggests. Dickens, the prose laureate of the era, and Trollope, who boasted that "no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before,'' handed down a false moral portrait of the Victorian middle and upper classes which has persisted to this day. They were abetted. Pearl argues, by biographers and historians who "suppressed and distorted shamefully," in a "conspiracy against truth."
A Seraglio. The Victorian era, according to Pearl, was "an age when prostitution was widespread and flagrant; when many London streets were like Oriental bazaars of flesh; when the luxurious West End nighthouses dispensed love and liquor till dawn; when fashionable whores . . . rode with duchesses in Rotten Row, and eminent Victorians negotiated for the tenancy of their beds; when a pretty new suburb arose at St. John's Wood as a seraglio for mistresses and harlots." In the rising tide of Victorian morality, one female Londoner in every 16 became a whore; there were 6,000 brothels and about 80,000 prostitutes*(the Lancet's estimate).
Dickens installed his mistress in a "bower in Ampthill Square." Richard Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), who proposed several times to Florence Nightingale, compiled such an extensive mass of pornography for his Yorkshire home that he called the place Aphrodisiopolis. Queen Victoria's favorite poet and laureate, Tennyson himself, enjoyed rude limericks—those five-line exercises in lubricity that still enjoy a large oral circulation. Algernon Swinburne had a great taste for erotica ("Shall I tell our visitor about the man of Peru?"). Whistler's saucy Finette, who introduced the cancan to England, was clearly not his mother. The Queen herself comes out of Pearl's researches unscathed (save for a regal tendency, noted by Gladstone, to spike her claret with whisky). But Edward VII, her son and heir, was such a celebrated patron of the tarts that La Goulue (Lautrec's model) would call out at the Jardin de Paris: "Allo, Wales! Est-ce-que tu vas payer man champagne?"
The Fortunate Unfortunates. Far from believing with William Blake that "the harlot's cry from street to street shall weave old England's winding sheet," Pearl takes a dry delight in proposing that the "unfortunates," the "soiled doves," not only had a better time of it than their virtuous sisters sweating in domestic slavery or the nightmare of piecework needlework, but were better people in some ways than the severely swathed ladies and broadcloth gentlemen who regarded them as a "social evil."