Brilliant. I don’t care if it’s fake. It still made me laugh.
I really think the Victorians were…not “that Victorian” as we make them out to be. Otherwise how would the species propogate.
From my research into the Victorian Era, and the British Empire in particular, I’m convinced that the Victorians did exactly the same sort of stuff that we do today in that department, but they didn’t talk about it in polite company.
There was a surprising amount of Bondage & Discipline, Wife-Swapping, Gay/Lesbian Sex, Forincation, Adultery, and General Depravity going on back then. In fact, the Victorians were just as obsessed with sex as we are today; if you have a look at things like Dracula and the Illustrated Tabloids which were on the lookout for Scandal! to report to an eager public you’ll realise that they were just as keen on sex then as we are today.
There’s also a lot of nude paintings in The National Gallery. All very artistic, of course, but some with undertones of eroticism. It was OK to show naked women cavorting in various poses if it’s illustrating a scene from The Bible/Antiquity/The Middle Ages/Exotic Foreign Lands, in other words.
It didn’t take long for Photographers to start doing porn, either- Usually under the guise of “Art” but there was porn for porn’s sake surprisingly early in the picture (excuse the pun) too. If you ever get the chance to see the Billy Connolly BBC comedy-drama Gentlemen’s Relish I suggest you do so; it’s very good and deals with the double standards the Victorians had about Art, Porn, and Women in general.
Yes, the Victorians had a thing for the cane apparently. Why I’ll never know.
I can’t see that as suspicious in itself – surely the idea of “turning out” a light comes from oil and gas lamps, both of which can be extinguished by turning a knob. As opposed to electric lighting (which in any case was not at all unknown in New York by 1894), which until the comparatively recent popularity of dimmer switches, would more commonly be extinguished with a switch.
The actual phrase used is “turned off”, which may be more questionable in the context of gas or oil lamps than the more likely “turned out” or “turned down”, but it’s not an improbable variation.
I don’t disagree with the overall conclusion, however.
How can you guys say this is fake?
Don’t you watch sitcoms? 
Yes we do. We just don’t talk about it in polite company.
As for the Victorian obsession with sex, it was REALLY, REALLY dirty back then. Which just made it that much more fun. The Vics may have been way more kinky back then because it was impossible to have a healthy sex life (by our standards.)
Miss Manners once had a letter-writer complaining about her parent’s “Victorian attitude”, when they put her and her visiting boyfriend in separate rooms.
Ms. Martin’s reply was that this was the perfect “Victorian solution”: put people in separate rooms - and then ignore any nocturnal traffic in the hallways.
When sex is inseparable from guilt and shame, a good beating is both a relief and a sign that you have been purified and can be forgiven. Duh.
Not just fake, but obviously ridiculous. Where do people get the idea that Victorians had less sex within marriage than modern people do? Does anyone have any reliable citations that show that sex within marriage was ever discouraged in Victorian times? And I do mean reliable citations. Don’t tell me that, well, everybody knows that women back then were told to lie back and think of England. I want a citation from something printed at the time.
If anything, I suspect that married people back then had more sex than modern people do. They probably spent more time together than modern married couples do. Much of this supposed instruction for the bride sounds like a husband in a modern sitcom whining about how he doesn’t get enough sex.
Most of the citations I have heard from come from my after the Victorian era. I am sure in a future which is more conservative they will talk about how we have orgys in Hyde Park and Presidents getting BJs from interns.
It’s pretty obviously fake, but it did represent the viewpoint of my wife’s grandmother and great-grandmother.
This was gleaned by my wife, after a frank (and fascinating) discussion with her grandmother and mom on these very issues. Grandma did eventually recant this philosophy, but not until after her second husband.
Just to nitpick, even if this were a legitimate pamphlet (which I agree it probably isn’t), as it’s American, it would be incorrect to call it Victorian.
I don’t know about Victorian times, but this past weekend I was at my vacation house shutting it down for the weekend and reading a book written in 1924 or so. Since I had just read this thread I remembered the book and one of the chapters is about sex in marriage. Once section says not to have sex for 21 months after a child is born! I almost brought the book back with me, but I thought the thread would be gone. Knowing what I know about my family, no one went 21 months without sex.
From what I gleaned, after a child is born that happens anyway.
I have trouble imagining that in a big family (like, 10+ kids), it would even be possible to space them out by 21 months. Unless the mom started out as a teen, and even then I doubt that they’d show that much self discipline.
Captain Amazing writes:
> Just to nitpick, even if this were a legitimate pamphlet (which I agree it probably
> isn’t), as it’s American, it would be incorrect to call it Victorian.
To nitpick your nitpick, despite the fact that Victoria was British, the term “Victorian” is often used for this time period in the U.S.
This oft-cited passage from Dr. William Acton, Functions & Disorders Of The Reproductive Organs, is frequently seen as the classic Victorian view of female sexuality
This rang some bells in my mind re. Mediaeval attitudes to sex and breastfeeding. I managed to find one cite
I think that something like that may be the source of your book’s “21 month” rule.