The 20th century has long been fascinated by what it considers one of the odder aberrations of the 19th: Victorian morality. British Historian J.H. Plumb has aptly described "the Victorian's schizophrenic attitude—the conspiracy of silence, the excessive modesty that made the sight of a female ankle wildly erotic, contrasted with the baby prostitutes in the Strand." American Scholar Steven Marcus, in his study The Other Victorians, wrote of "a world part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination and part madhouse." Last week London was atwitter over not one but two sex scandals that came to light when some documents dating from the days when that curious world still flourished were finally unsealed. Both episodes involve a number of eminent Victorians; neither has suffered from aging.
One story comes from the private diaries of William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria's least favorite Prime Minister, who, in his avowed efforts to save prostitutes from sin, apparently indulged in unspecified sexual pleasures and then scourged himself in punishment. The other, released by the Public Records office, discloses an unsuccessful cover-up by the British Cabinet and Buckingham Palace, which tried to suppress the facts about the homosexual activities of Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the then Prince of Wales who in 1901 became King Edward VII.
Publicly, Gladstone was not the least ashamed of what he called his "rescue work" with tarts. In 1853, he permitted a would-be blackmailer to make this work public rather than pay hush money. Gladstone's political career—he was then Chancellor of the Exchequer and righteous apostle of the balanced budget —was unharmed because Victorian society preferred to regard his evening excursions as an eccentric pet charity.
Historians dealt with this aspect of his life delicately because they sensed that the real story lay bound in leather and sealed in wax in the 41 volumes of Gladstone's diary, which his sons deposited with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The volumes, covering his life from 1840 to 1854, are now being published by Oxford University Press. They show that Gladstone was so guilt-stricken over what he regarded as shameful sexual thoughts that he frequently went home after his "rescue" meetings with prostitutes and whipped himself. Then he carefully noted the episodes of flagellation in his diary with a discreet little illustration of a stick with a thong, much like a Michelin Guide to masochism.
The first of these episodes appears in 1851 —Gladstone was then 41—after a visit to a woman named Elizabeth Collins. "Received (unexpectedly) and remained 2 hours: a strange and humbling scene," says the diary cryptically.
What precisely went on in that scene probably will never be known, although before he died, Gladstone assured his son, equally cryptically, that he had never "been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed."