Steven Marcus
MR. ACTON OF QUEEN ANNE STREET,
OR, THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS
[The following essay is the first chapter of a study whose
subject is writings about sex and sexuality in mid-nineteenth century
England. The largest part of that body of literature consists of writings
of a pornographic character, and it is toward an examination of such
works that this essay moves.
I have undertaken, in other words, to study one part of the
sexual culture-more p'Tecisely the sexual sub-culture-of Victorian
England. Because most of the material I
deal
with will be unfamiliar
even to the educated reader, I have had to include longer passages
of direct exposition than is usual in a critical essay. Such passages are
compatible, however, with an intention which is at least in part
anthropological, and I am aware that my use, in this connection, of
the terms culture and sub-culture carries with it something of its
anthropological sense.
In studying a sub-culture one ordinarily begins by setting or
locating it in a larger and mor,e familiar context or field of reference.
The following essay also tries to effect such a location.]
Since this
is
a study of human fantasies, it may be useful to
begin it by considering that official fantasy which in the mid-nine–
teenth century went by the name of scientific knowledge. I use the
word fantasy not
in
a belittling or deprecatory sense but to describe
the quality of thinking or of mind that one meets -with in scientific
or medical accounts of human sexuality in the English nineteenth
century. This thinking, one soon learns, rests upon a mass of unargued,
unexamined and largely unconscious assumptions; its logical pro-
