Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century London.

Valverde, Mariana

Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century London. By Francoise Barrett-Ducrocq, translated by John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1991. 225 pp.).

When opening this book, one finds a jacket blurb containing a statement suitable for a television series: "As the author says, this is history amazingly like real life." Mentally maligning blurb writers, one then discovers that the author actually does use the soap-opera watcher's phrase "amazingly like real life" in the epilogue. Closer examination reveals that this 'true-to-life' text was composed by juxtaposing theoretically naive statements, disconnected quotes from novels, ballads, and Arthur Munby's much-mined diaries--and, as a pleasant surprise, some sensitive and insightful comments using a single set of primary sources: the case files of the Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital for the period from 1840 to 1870.

Both title and subtitle are therefore misleading, for the sources only cover the experience of single mothers (mostly unmarried) giving up their children to the institution, in a particular city, in the decades prior to the rise of the social purity movement.

The case files are (or appear to be, since they are once again closed to historians) a veritable gold mine. They contain not only statements from the unwilling mothers but also from neighbours, relatives, employers, and lovers. Many of these statements were constructed with the specific aim of convincing the hospital to take the child (which would tend to affect the narrative in a number of ways), but some are regular correspondence between the woman and her lover, and as such precious documents illuminating working-class patterns of courtship, love, and sex. Occasionally Barrett-Ducrocq points out that women's autobiographical narratives might tend to conform to the prevailing melodramatic fiction of seduction and abandonment, and reads the stories quoted with some degree of analytical sophistication. But at other times partial narratives are quoted without even indicating whether the words were written or uttered by the fallen woman, by a Hospital authority, or by a third party. If one turns to the footnotes for enlightenment one is likely to simply find "FH" (meaning 'Foundling Hospital')--and nothing else. No date, no file number, no initials, real or anonymized. One appreciates the confidentiality requirements of the women involved and their descendants, but many historians have handled equally sensitive files from much less distant historical periods and still managed to provide a system of referencing. The absence of such a system (or rather its very uneven application, for occasionally there are pseudonyms used that allow the reader to follow a number of individual women's stories) would be easier to overlook if Barrett-Ducrocq had not already shaken the reader's confidence by making some peculiar claims in the introductory chapter (listing Beatrice Webb as a "housing reformer" is one example). This chapter attempts to set out the Victorian bourgeois view of working-class sexuality, painting it in the most lurid colors possible (colours often literally borrowed from Zola) in order to then argue that the hospital files give us a "true'picture of working-class sexuality, in contrast to the false ideology of bourgeois texts. Apart from the true history vs. false ideology questionable dichotomy, there are problems with her account of the Victorian bourgeois sexual code. To name only one, she lists homosexuality as one of the "working-class vices', claiming without a shred of evidence that homosexuality was associated with dirt and thus much the same as prostitution and incest (34). She seems to not know that some sexual vices were perceived to be aristocratic rather than popular.

Victorian studies scholars may still want to read this book, if only for the quotes: the correspondence between lovers and the character statements from friends and employers of the single mothers in question are particularly interesting. The material, however, is not properly analyzed. Quantitatively, we are told that many domestic servants were seduced by their employers or their sons, but not how many. Qualitatively, aside from the already mentioned issue of "fiction in the archives', Barrett-Ducrocq is extremely reluctant to expose class and gender as relations of domination. She says that "many employers turned a blind eye to a maid's pregnancy," (173) and gives two examples of bourgeois women helping pregnant maids: but on the previous page she admits that "most of the petitioners left their jobs spontaneously, as a matter of course, when their pregnancy started to become noticeable". This suggests that the two cases of understanding employers are not exactly representative, and that behind the apparent spontaneity of maids leaving their job in disgrace there was class and gender power. Furthermore, she downplays systematic male violence and persists in painting a picture of frolicking youthful sexuality wrongly portrayed by moral reformers as seduction or rape. While consensual sex was very common among the people documented in these files, rape was not uncommon, as is clear from many of the quotes. Lack of familiarity with feminist sources on the history of rape and violence thus compounds the book's theoretical naivete.

Verso is unique among progressive publishing houses in that it not only has managed to weather the 1980s attacks on the independents by Lord Thompson and other media giants, but it has even flourished. Their specialty has been and remains political theory. A number of left-wing historians, this reviewer included, were pleasantly surprised to see the translated book under review, hoping that this marked new opportunities for paperback publishing. Unfortunately, the uneven quality of the book, together with the hollow claims made on the book jacket and in the very title, have convinced at least this reviewer that the Verso editors should stick to political theory.

Mariana Valverde York University