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Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian Britain, by Trevor Fisher; pp. ix + 179. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1995, L18.99.
Portrayals of sexual travesties among male politicians basking in-or cringing under-the public spotlight have garnered much media attention in recent years. Trevor Fisher's selection of scandals of assorted sexual improprieties in the latter decades of nineteenth century Great Britain bears some resemblance to the woes that betide state celebrities these days. So too does the idea of Victorian values and sexual restraint resonate in contemporary culture. The chief focus of the book's argument is the notion of sublimated male sexuality in the interests of family and work tested against accounts of, as Fisher words it, "what contemporaries were actually doing" in the late Victorian era. I stress "male" sexuality because Fisher's project revolves around the interface of politics and sexual scandals keyed to the lives of upper-class men. He is less interested in how gender or class politics shapes attitudes about acceptable sexual behavior for middle-class men.
Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian Britain opens with a brief discussion of what Fisher terms "the mythology of `Victorian values"' as a cliche that has once again achieved purchase as a social ideal to be reclaimed. Recalling "a lost paradise of self-reliance and upward mobility," the idea of Victorian values" conjures up a profitable program of rigid sexual morality in concert with hard work, sobriety, and thrift (1). This myth, Fisher summarizes, maintains a vision of a society anchored in an unshakable ethic of work and family where male sexual desire was deferred in the interests of bourgeois respectability. He points out that despite the frequent acknowledgment by historians that the Victorian era presents a continual struggle with prostitution supported chiefly by middle-class men, this myth of puritanical Victorian values persists in most accounts of the period, whether as a cherished ideal showcasing the sacredness of family, as part and parcel of capitalist ideology...