The Rest Is History - 24. Sex in the City

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Everything you wanted to know about sex in the 18th and 19th Century but were afraid to ask. Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Covent Garden Ladies and the multi-award winning The Five joins Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook to discuss this fascinating subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History, the podcast which hurtles from ancient Rome to the 1990s at warp speed, cheerfully calling in at Troy and China along the way. This is also a podcast happy on occasion to lift its skirts and show a little flesh, which is handy as joining Dominic and I today is the historian and author Hallie Rubenhold who has specialised in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and particularly in the sexual dynamics of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Dominic, I should reveal at this stage that I actually met Hallie first not through her history but through her fiction because Hallie, the first book of yours that I um read was uh a novel um Henrietta Lightfoot it was called fantastic mistress of my fate mistress of my fate yes yes that's right yes and and she was she was an 18th century uh kind of following the the Hogarth the uh the harlot's progress um and very very kind of unreliable narrator that's right just tell us something a little bit about her well it's i so i wrote the book i wanted to use really every 18th and early 19th century dramatic trope there was and um and so i i wanted to create a book which

was like tom jones which was like um barry lyndon which was like um fanny hill which was like Tom Jones, which was like Barry Lyndon, which was like Fanny Hill, which was like Jane Austen, but told completely from a woman's point of view and told in a way which was unashamed and, you know, just very front About what women would have experienced Having fallen from I'm not going to say great height Because she was the illegitimate daughter of an earl But having fallen from Respectable society

And then having to make her way As a courtesan And what that was like And the reason why I wrote this was that i have spent a lot of time reading what were called well what are known as whores memoirs um and it's a whole it's a whole genre and it's just absolutely brilliant written 17 18 19th century confessionals um where written by written by actual wh actual halls sometimes by women who engaged in sex work so um Harriet Wilson uh and if you remember Harriet Wilson and and her relationship

with the Duke of Wellington and uh publish and be published and be damned that's right and and so she actually did write her memoirs, but she's one of the few, and there are lots of other women along the way who men basically voiced their experiences for them. And this became a type of pornography which men could buy. It was very titillating. Sounds like Fanny Hill, right?

Yeah, well, exactly. Exactly, Fanny Hill. You know, it's a perfect example. You know, what women would have experienced. And what I just couldn't believe was that, you know, I knew that a woman's experience in this world of sex would have been so completely different than the way the men experienced it. And I was just desperate to find that voice I mean there's Harriet Wilson and

and when women write it like Harriet Wilson does she's writing it predominantly for a male audience to a male readership to titillate um but you know the reality of this is that it's going to be so bloody awful for women in many cases and in some cases to be very empowering for women and um and you know and and and every every degree and every shade in between those two things as well and no one ever talked about that so i thought i wanted to write basically an 18th century novel which used again all of those devices and everything but did it in such a way in that we get that other side where she's talking about well this is what happened to me and this is how i survived and you know and actually hate these men

and and you know and i just lie there on the bed and he can do whatever he wants to me and then i'm done and then you know and it's that sort of stuff it's so it's really unromanticized sex in many ways because hallie this this this brings up one of the kind of long-running themes of this podcast which is that um because i write about ancient history where basically you know we know almost nothing and dominic writes about recent history where there's so much dominic presumably you know you've got all these kind of sex surveys and yeah tons kinds of things so if you're writing a history of sex in post-war britain which lots of people have done have no lack of material whereas

yeah yeah if we're trying to trace if we're trying to trace the course you know the way that sexual attitudes change over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries hallie's a kind of indeterminate because there's kind of material there but yeah but nearly as much as there is in the modern day. So where do you find it? Where do you find it, Hallie? Where do you go to? Oh, God. I mean, it just, it's really, well, lots of diaries and lots of memoirs and letters and things like, you know, really personal stuff, which is just so thrilling when you find. And I know it sounds like, oh, you know, oh, titillating thrilling I mean thrilling as in you get I mean this is to me this is what drew me to studying sex historically is that

there is nothing else which cuts into the psyche and the deeply deeply personal experiences of people in the past of what it was like to inhabit their heads of what it was like to inhabit their heads of what it was like to inhabit their bodies because i mean there is nothing so personal as sex you know and what happens between two people in a bedroom or more than two people in a bedroom or wherever you know is so you know tells you about the personality it tells you about you know what their beliefs are you know are they religious are they what are they afraid of all of these things just kind of come tumbling out and so it's i just think it's a really really direct way into studying the person and here's a question for you how can you

i mean people are famously um dishonest about their own sex lives. So how do you know when people are being, in their letters or their diaries, how do you, do you just, do you assume that in their diaries, for example, people are being honest or might they be lying to themselves or to some putative reason? Well, sometimes they are lying and that's part of it. I mean, sex is performance, you know, for a lot of people. And, but, you know, know again it's all about context and what you know reading casanova's memoirs you know is it you know is a completely different experience than reading the letters of lady caroline lennox you know who uh with with her sister you know

who's talking about you know married sex and and and you know, who's talking about, you know, married sex and, and, and, you know, what it's like and joking that they're not virgins anymore and they can talk about these types of things. And, you know, so that, and you have to weigh it up. And again, you know, there are all sorts of other things in between. I mean, William Hickey's memoirs, I just think are absolutely fantastic. And Boswell. I mean, I actually, I mean. Boswell. I know, Tommy, you were going to. A Batman.

A Batman, surely. Okay. Yeah. So one of the things that I've been doing over the lockdown is following the lines of buried rivers across London. Yes. So it's something you can do. You can walk. So you go out and you follow the line of a buried river.

And what I find again and again is that um basically red light districts are along the banks of these kind of lost rivers so i've followed the line of the bloomsbury ditch which goes obviously from bloomsbury across what's now the strand and down to uh down to the thames and this was a favorite haunt of Boswell's. He was always there with his... Well, the Strand. The Strand. Well, because you go across the Strand and there was this kind of great snarl of streets, wasn't there?

I think it's Holywell Street, which was notorious as the pornographer's street where you'd go and buy condoms. And so presumably that's where Boswell went and bought his... What was it? His kind of cheap gut or yes yeah yeah yes yeah yes yeah um and and then it all got swept away in the um i think in the 1890s and and made into this kind of you know the old which is one of the most antiseptic places in

the whole of london you say this but you know i mean the thing is you know you mentioned the strand the strand is such an interesting thing and actually the geography of of prostitution in london is is fascinating to follow because the strand has always been a haunt of streetwalkers i mean really since i mean the 18th century 19th century even into you know the early 20th century as well so and but you know the the type of streetwalker changes. You know, so you have, you have, oh, kind of almost in the 18th century, almost a lower middle class type of streetwalker. And then, you know, and then comes, you know, well, I mean, I was going to say they were varying degrees of. So the Covent Garden ones and the Poshwells.

Well, at various times. Again, you know, okay, so actually I need to read... Well, in Boswell's time. In Boswell's time. Boswell... Well, okay, let me explain. So what was going on? You know, I mean, it's a kind of movable feast.

And the interesting thing about sex work is that you can trace, you know, the development of London and the movement of sex work. And it tells you something about, well, first of all, how integrated sex work was into the fabric of society. And, you know, Dan Cruickshank has written about how London was built on the back of sex work. And, you know, that is, I think, largely true. So much money was invested in it.

But also you can trace the growth of London through where elements of the sex industry relocated to. So, for example, at the time that Boswell was out and about, yes, most of it was centred in Covent Garden. So this is kind of 1760s, 1560s. By the time you're getting mid-later part of the 18th century, really the better class of sex worker and the courtesans have all moved, and the movement was starting really by 1760s, into Piccadilly, St. James especially, you had the nunneries, the high-class brothels on King Street, King's Place. And you had, for example, you go into somewhere like St. James Square, whatever, Barclay Square, and you will have the Duke of so-and-so and the Earl of so-and-so's townhouse, and then across the road will be somebody-and-so's townhouse. And then, you know, across the road will be

somebody's mistress living in a townhouse. So it's, you know, it's all completely integrated. But what's actually I think is more interesting is the more prosaic aspect of this. It's neither the really high class nor the really low class. It's the, like what's happening in fitzrovia for example because you know as fitzrovia becomes really middle class you also get like the you know the the sex workers for cabinet makers and grocers and china sellers and you know these these middle

class women who work as sex workers living in... I walk around places like Charlotte Street and all of the streets around there and I still look up at these buildings and I think, oh, that's where Miss So-and-So lived. Because it was so woven into the fabric of London and the geography of London. It was so normalised and it was so much a part of everyday 18th century life. Hallie can I ask you a question can I jump in and ask you a question um so you talk about being normalised is this a profession that people would choose

voluntarily or was it one in which that which they were to which they were driven by circumstance or by penury or by a pimp or whatever it might be. Both. Absolutely both. And from a variety of classes, certainly in the 18th century. I mean, this again, you know, when you start to examine this, you realise how, first of all, what society says and what they actually do are two totally different things and that to me is utterly fascinating because you know you get the lip service you get you know if you if you read um you know a lot of the um a lot of the uh moralizing tracks the educational tracks and things and books that were written at the time you talk about you know oh a woman falls off the path of virtue and she's ruined and actually if you examine that's not true at all that actually um wasn't the case so you have things like

you have lower middle class girls who um and i'm gonna use a friend of william hickey's thomas vaughn who had something like seven daughters and and he was a solicitor. And there's this whole bit in Thomas Hickey's memoirs, which he's talking about, Thomas Hickey, William Hickey, William Hickey's memoirs, where he's talking about Thomas Vaughan's daughters. You know, he's bemoaning the fact that he has so many daughters

that some of them are going to have to turn out whores. Now, by that, he means he doesn't have money for dowries. And this is one of the problems is if you know, if you are, if you see yourself as upwardly mobile, or if you, if you desire to move up in a social class, you have to have the money to push your daughters into that social class. And if you don't, you've got a real problem because you've got superfluous females on your hands and that superfluous female problem isn't going to be one that's really going to be addressed until about the 1870s 1880s in this country so what do you do with these girls they can't marry a man of their class so they're going to have to basically become like a concubine. And so that's what happens in some cases. You know, and then you have poor women who end up falling into it. And then you have women, girls who were born in brothels.

You know, you talk about, you know, the, you know, family values or family values are also criminal values. And a lot of families made a lot of money through the sex trade and um you know girls were raised in brothels to become um sex workers so you know there was no entry point specific entry point um there were a lot of entry points so that raises a question that we got on twitter tom um from jpa which i think if we can ask jpa's question now jpa said what happened about pregnancy so was it a career ender um it wasn't jpa says not hardly helpful short term for marketing and resulting you know it's a forced leave yeah was it difficult to prevent so so what happens with that yeah that is an occupational

hazard oh it totally is and this again you know coming back to the novel that i wrote um this is you know i address this in the novel quite a lot you know if your career well at a time when there is no effective birth control if your career is based on a lot of sex having a lot of sex frequently and you're a fertile woman you're going to get pregnant pretty regularly so what what do you do now this is where really you know the bits that people don't talk about and even people suppress this uh and felt uncomfortable talking about it in their own era which is abortion and abortion i'm not talking about you know, what we think of as backstreet abortions, where you're like four, five months along.

But this is, you know, a woman has kind of missed her period. And before you feel the quickening, and the quickening is, I think, about three months where you start to feel the child inside you, it was believed that it wasn't a child. And there were all sorts of home remedies you could take that would, as they said, clear the womb. In fact, these were so readily available that they were advertised in the front page of most newspapers hoopers female pills um and um i think some of these hoopers female pills were analyzed um not that long ago and they found to have very high levels of metals in them and and that was metals you know it's it's what you're doing is taking a low level poison which then makes you really sick and your body expels everything

um and and yeah for servant girls who are the other kind of the classic way that you become a prostitute is you work as a servant girl and then the master gets you pregnant then you're thrown out on the street. Classic. Presumably, is this also, are they resorting to abortions? Yeah, absolutely. Pills in the same way? It was, you know, it was so prevalent. This is another, there's an interesting anecdote about when Regent's Park was opened. And, you know, they have a herb garden regents park and they found that it's

like i think within a day of opening regents park with with the herb garden all of the aborter facing herbs were gone so all all the pennyroyal was stripped away um uh that's that's how prevalent it was okay okay hallie that i mean that is an amazing note I think on which to go for a break um when we come back I've got a question for you from Michael Ronson who says what precipitated the shift from the randy restorationers to the sexually neurotic victorians sounds like horrible histories assuming there's any truth in that characterization I ask that because I want to put that in a slightly different way, prompted by my own recent reading.

So perhaps we could just leave that hanging. We'll come back to it after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking to Hallie about sex in the 18th and 19th centuries. And Hallie, we have this sense that, well, I mean, basically, the understanding of sex and the understanding of the relationship between men and women, it seems to me, changes very, very radically over the course of this period. And it's kind of so i as

dominic well knows he may not have picked up on this but i've read this history of christianity oh my god that is that is ridiculous that is ridiculous i think so i so i read a lot about i read a lot of puritan yeah and in the 17th century you have a definite sense that um that men think that that women are are vastly more licentious than men that that they're predatory you know give them a chance they'll try and sleep with you um and recently i've been reading dickens so i've been reading a lot of dickens novels and in dickens essentially it's tarts with hearts tarts prostitutes are fallen angels. Women are morally superior.

They're essentially kind of asexual. It's always the men who are the predators, men who are the more sexually active. That's, I mean, a massive cultural change in terms of how people understand both sex and prostitution and the kind of the relative natures of men and women so what is what's happened over the course of i mean really that those two centuries well that's i mean that that's that's like a whole book in itself and i think and also i think there are lots of ways in which we can we can question this again i think in some senses you know i want to try to maybe subvert this question slightly before i really answer it which is um what you're recording what you're talking about is the sexual behavior and uh practices and viewpoint ideologies of illiterate class of people from the 17th to the 19th centuries um yeah they were not the majority

so how the majority of people lived their lives and the type of behaviors and practices they engaged in were probably in well were entirely removed from what the literate classes were writing about so we have actually two histories here and and and you know so one thing that we know about is that in fact the sexual behavior of the working classes didn't really change that much, you know, so there was sex outside of marriage. Often when a woman was pregnant, then the marriage would be that then, you know, there would be a certain pressure to get married. A lot of times, people abandon each other. You know, after a marriage, sometimes people didn't get married nobody actually even checked necessarily to see if a couple had been married just saying you were married was enough

um and so you know sometimes you had a a whole um a situation where a woman for example um had her partner her partner left her and they may or may not have been married, she may have had a child with him, then she recouples with another man, and then they split up, and they find, you know, and so you have a whole succession of partners. Well, that's totally different from, for example, from, you know, what, you know, this, you know, what Dickens will be talking about, and how Victorian women will have behaved, you know, so that's the ideal and that what I'm discussing is the reality for the majority. Now addressing more to the point what you were saying about this whole kind of the larger

overlying issues, the overlying ideas behind how sex changed. I mean, there are lots of things that happened. It's the introduction of, you know, love in the 18th century, this idea of compatibility, the idea of nature. So that's Rousseau. Yeah, Rousseau. And, you know, that couples, that sex should be companionate, that, you know, there's lust and it's women who are lusty and in fact um all you have to do is have sex with a woman she loses her virginity and then she becomes insatiable and and then the man's duty is to kind of control that

lust by marrying her but that's that's changed by the victorian period that starts well actually well that yes i mean that has changed a little bit because little emily in david copfield you know famously falls but she still remains pure despite the fact that yeah i mean but now but now i mean is that just a weird dick yeah well no but now we're... I mean, is that just a weird Dickens thing? Yeah, well, no, but now we're bringing in some very complicated, you know, Dickens' personal complicated notions of the fallen woman. You know, Dickens had his own refuge for fallen women at Urania House in Hammersmith. Do you know about this?

Do you know about... Yeah. Yeah, and... And his own mistress. And his own mistress. You know, so, you know, do as I and and his own mistress and and his own mistress you know so you know do as i say and not as i do um and you know and but the kind of the idea of the angel in the house i guess that that that for victorian men and i'm very aware that i'm providing the male gaze here but that that for middle class victorian men women are seen as somehow almost kind of

asexual that but that's that's very upper middle and middle classes and then the working classes who's the um who's the victorian guy who has an ongoing affair with his scullery maid and ends up marrying her and takes loads of photos oh yes arthur mundy that's right and he yes his obsession with muscular women and uh and servants and uh working Hannah Cullick yes yes yes that's right but but but because I'm wondering in the context of all the work you've done on um Jack the Ripper and the East End is there a sense in which um you know the gentleman in the opera cloak going to the East End, is it the fact that the women there are poor?

Is that part of what makes it exciting for the men? I mean, I suppose it's impossible to know. Well, it's, you know, I mean, I think you're talking, what you're talking about kind of crosses over into this phenomenon of slumming, which was when people from the west end or wealthy people would go to the east and almost as tourists really and try to engage in the life and participate in the life and go to the pubs and have sex and do all these things and then get back in their carriages and go home to belgravia um and um i think this is you know i I mean, as with all of this stuff, it's really, really complicated. I mean, sex in Britain especially is totally bound up with class and you can't really detach the two.

So that, you know, the attitude towards women and, you know, this obviously goes all the way back, is that working class women are the bottom of the pile and also working class women really don't have to worry that much i mean it about you know keeping themselves pure for marriage and their disposable commodities they're they're not valued as much and it's believed that they're sexualized so you know often a young man's first experience, like I'm thinking Walter, you know, My Secret Life, if you're familiar with these incredible, I mean, they are, what is it? I think it's 11 or 12 volumes written in around 1888,

but all the way through, I think, 1889, 1890. And where it's just this kind of almost stream of consciousness, this man remembering what... I mean, he's obviously a sex addict, and a lot of this is embellished by his imagination as well, but, you know, it's just volume after volume of kind of sex with women and a lot of them most of them are of a lower social order and the whole attitude towards lower class women

is they're there to be used and disposed of and that's that's libertinism you know i mean that that's you know what's being written but that does go back to the restoration, doesn't it? Yes, that's right. That's the rake and then the Byronic hero. Yeah. Hallie, can I jump in and ask a question? You're talking about Walter and you've talked about, we talked about people who lived 100 or 150 years earlier and were slightly sort of, there's always a danger of lumping them in together.

And what I'm curious about is whether all of these people had the same tastes or whether practices change over time so in other words what people are recording in their diaries in the 1750s or the 1850s have people always done the same things oh yeah yeah people i mean people people always you know people like sex it's you know it's a human impulse it's a human instinct but there aren there aren't things that, there aren't, there aren't, as it were, fashions. Yeah, things that change. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, they're all fashions.

I mean, first of all, I want to say that, you know, we've been talking about straight sex as well. And there was a whole subculture of gay sex. And, of course, the way lesbians were viewed was entirely different um because it was believed that you know for women this was something the way in which you you can become sexualized is you have sex with a woman first and then you learn to have sex with men so it was like like a progressive so honey can i just yeah interrupt with a question from chris thales who

says what was the biggest moral panic around sex during this period and what would peoples of the 18th and 19th centuries make of our attitudes towards sex in the 21st century and I'm guessing I mean would you say that the biggest moral panic around sex is homosexuality I would in in Britain I would say that around kind of 1800 definitely I would definitely say that's one but then the other thing is you know when a moral panic around sex i mean it's also bound up in you know in other things like like marriage and there was a great moral panic around criminal conversation um in the late 18th and early 19th century where criminal conversation is adultery and um all of these adultery suits being brought and this was

happening the same time as the french revolution and it was believed it would undermine um britain's confidence in their in their ruling class because you had all of these stories coming out about lady so-and-so in the hedgerows with somebody and and um you know and all these people were gallivanting around and doing you know what the french aristocrats were doing and and and losing their heads as a consequence. And so that was that was also a moral panic around sex. And, you know, and also the thing is about criminal conversation. I mean, people were queuing up around the block to, A, go into the trials and listen to them at the king's bench and then B, to go and buy the transcripts so they can actually read about lady so-and-so with her skirts above her head and her hedgerows um so that you know but i guess

that's yeah i i guess i i guess kind of you know in you know sex tapes and things i mean that is something that that perhaps we would but i do i mean i do wonder the the thing about homosexuality that um you know it's been in the news recently with Naomi Wolf's new book and Matthew Sweet's response to it. But it is the case that men in the early years of the early decades of the 19th century were being executed for sodomy and i guess that that you know you took someone from 1800 and said well you know you look at britain in 18 in in 2021 i mean that would seem an unimaginable change and i'm kind of interested in that because i uh did a lot when i was young did quite a lot about byron and there's a kind of enduring thesis that the reason that Byron goes abroad is because he basically is, you know, he wants to sleep with boys. And the risk of doing that in England is that he will face a capital

charge. And as a peer, that's a kind of, that's an absolute no-go, whereas abroad, and the English are kind of notorious for being incredibly bigoted about this. So I, you know, even by the standards of, well, I mean, particularly by the Turks, I mean, this seems to have. Yeah. So, you know, even by the standards of, well, I mean, particularly by the Turks, I mean, this seems to have been Byron's, you know, the great appeal for Byron is that the Turks had a much more tolerant attitude. And it's kind of interesting how completely the pole has swung,

that for us, the kind of the Islamic world is, it's all about repression and homophobia and so on. And we're much freer. Yeah, it is. But it's also, you know, there's also the great tradition. Again, this, you know, ties into libertinism, you know, the great tradition of going abroad to sow your wild oats. And, you know, that's as much with boys as it is with girls. And, you know, the grand tourists who would go around Italy and, you know, they like going to Venice because apparently the Venetian

women were much more liberal with their favours and then you end up leaving a whole load of illegitimates that you don't have to worry about because nobody can find you after you've left and come back to England and you know that's great you go on your merry way there's that amazing conversation that Boswell has with Rousseau where boswell you know is is basically wants rousseau to tell him that everything he wants to do is great and and boswell's saying you know wouldn't it be all right if i have kind of 30 30 wives and i you know they all have children and i just kind of dump them somewhere wouldn't that be all right and rousseau to give him credit he's saying no that's terrible i boswell was kind of palpably disappointed that rousseau isn't saying yeah go ahead and do it

well you say you know that's really interesting you know this comes back to the question that was asked what would they think of us today and um i i think you know i think they would be horrified i think most they would be horrified at I think most, they would be horrified at women, you know, at the way, I mean, all women, we would all be whores. That, you know, to an 18th century man, all of the women would just be whores. But then at the same time, they'd be absolutely thrilled about that

because it would mean that they wouldn't have any responsibility. And I think they would be pretty horrified at our our sexual freedom let's do some questions ali we've got tons of questions from the um from our listeners um so we can probably get through most of them i reckon before the end of the program so stephen clark let's start with stephen clark stephen clark says to what extent was there ever really a victorian taboo about sex? And if so, among which groups and when did it develop and why?

So he's basically he's asking about six questions in one. Yes. But do you want to do you have some thoughts on on some or any of these? A Victorian taboo around sex. You know, I think it's really complex and I don't I'm not sure i can give a very pithy answer to this i think you know what started happening certainly even towards the later georgian period is that attitudes towards sex started changing a bit but having said that then that oversimplifies how the georgians viewed sex so um you know usually people will say it accords with the growth of the middle class the literate middle class and the aspirational middle class and the bigger the middle class became um the more they reached for respectability and um and that was that was part that was the motivating force around that i think um uh and

uh but that isn't to say that there ever was a time when you know again i think we try to say that oh the victorians were so repressed actually they weren't they They weren't progress. Any more than, you know, the Georgians were licentious. I mean, you know, it depends what class you were. It depends what your experiences were. So are these just sort of narratives that we've imposed on these periods? Yeah, they are. And they wouldn't have recognised these versions of themselves? Is that what you're...

It depends who you were talking to, you know. Ruskin, John Ruskin. Oh, well, that's a different story altogether. Yes, John Ruskin, I think not... Too many Greek statues. Yes, not perhaps the best person to ask about that, but Effie may be another story. Yeah, or Dickens. mean Dickens you know he

overlaps with Ruskin and his obviously his experience is completely different than his yeah it's Walter Walter I was gonna say Walter you know I mean there you go I'll tell you an amazing thing there's a question from James Hancock how influential mainstream was the Marquis de Sade in his time there's an amazing detail that that um Tennyson who in many ways seems the embodiment of kind of um you know high Victorian attitudes to sex when he met with Henry James they talked about the Marquis de Sade and you can't really imagine I mean well Henry James Henry James there So will. Henry James. There's a lot going on under the surface with Henry James. Yes, I agree. Yes, yes, yes. Never underestimate, never underestimate, you know. Just, I think, you know, of course men talked about sex.

Of course Victorian men talked about sex. Whether they recorded it, you know, particular men recorded it, is another question. But Hallie, isn't, is this this an unfair is this again am i providing the male gaze here my sense is that men were kind of expected to know about sex and women were not yes yes i and i'm talking about middle classes here um you know the the novel writing novel reading class well yes i mean is that yes yeah part. Yes. And in fact, we still we still see that. I mean, all the way into the Edwardian era as well, when women become much freer and, you know, and there are lots of...

Lie back and think of England. Yeah, lie back and think of, you know, and again, this is this is where the Georgians differ. So, you know, there was a really fine line where an unmarried or a girl of marriageable age in the Georgian era, she had to know a certain amount, but she couldn't know that much. She had to let the man who was courting her get close enough to her, but not too close. And, and if something went wrong, it, you know, she was ruined. You know, and so there's always that fine line. I think it's the same, you know, Victorian women weren't supposed to know that much, really, because, you know, really, if you had sex outside of marriage, I mean, it was unequivocal.

You were ruined. You were a fallen woman. And, you know, unless in very bohemian circles or whatever, having said that, you know, again, there's always, there's a rule and then there are all of these contradictions with everything. And, you know, and I think, you know, it's, again, it always goes back to there's what people said and then what people did and how they adapted to that. So, you know, this idea that if you have sex outside of marriage, you know, you'll ruin your spoiled goods. Lots of men married their mistresses, you know.

Well, here's a good question. So the late Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson is on Twitter and he says what caused the shift away from public figures having widely acknowledged mistresses so at what point did mistresses as it were go in back in the closet if that's not the wrong expression but you know what I mean yeah yeah that's that's that's a that's a really good question I mean obviously through the Georgian period it was it was acceptable. I think, you know, even in the Victorian period, it was acceptable for men to be seen out and about with women like Skittles Walters and, you know, some of the big name Cora Pearl and the big name courtesans.

But obviously when a man got married, you know, he had to have at least a veneer of respectability which didn't mean that he wasn't he didn't still have a mistress somewhere and a house um i i you know i think it's just it's kind of the tyranny of of of middle class um uh so respectability yeah yeah well hallie hallie does i mean this is a serious question although it may not sound it does the career of boris johnson shed light for you on the mores of the georgians it's a good question because actually the thing the thing that's interesting about him is is that it's the kind of shamelessness. Yeah, it is. He doesn't seem to worry particularly about it. And so people just kind of take it for granted.

Whereas if Theresa May. I know, I know. I think about this all the time. I think about it. And, you know, and you can say the same about Donald Trump as well. Yes, Trump as well. Yeah. Yeah.

It's I just think it's, you know, it's if anything, it sheds light on just how much of the double standard is still with us, which I find quite worrying, quite sad in many ways. It's a really good, he's a really good sort of litmus test of where we are with our acceptance of sexuality and different arrangements in the 21st century. Because I think at any other time, somebody living with their partner and having children in number 10 would just be just like, it wouldn't have happened. I don't even, you know. Unimaginable. Yeah, unimaginable. It wouldn't have even, it wouldn't have even happened in the Georgian era either. I mean, you would have kept your mistress somewhere else.

Hallie, you said something fascinating a few minutes ago. You talked about big name courtesans. Yes. So I wanted to ask about that so that's like sort of emil zola's nana or something yeah you know these sort of so it's are these people genuine celebrities and do they acquire a kind of respectability because they're of their big name and how do you become a big name are you particularly good at the job i mean what is what is it that makes you a big name courtesan i think it's a case of creating a certain sort of allure um it's like your marketing is very good

in many ways and it's it's it's who who you manage to um hook up with um and uh all of the buzz around that, you know, if you are outrageous, like Kitty Fisher, for example, this whole thing about eating a banknote between two pieces of buttered bread and drinking champagne from somebody drinking champagne from her slipper and all that makes her very desirable because she's fashionable and people want to be with her and they want to be seen with her and it's and and and um quarter sands can be status symbols as well and um you know you give it's the joke something about giving your wife pearls and your mistress diamonds or the wife gets pearls and she turns to the husband and she says well what did you give your mistress um mistress? And it's because it's a way of displaying your wealth as a man. Look, I'm so powerful that I can afford to keep this most desirable woman. And I think actually, you know, I mean, if you're going to be in the sex trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, really that is the only way to live your life is like that because you do

as a woman have a lot of agency you you can choose who your keepers are and um and a lot of women you know played their cards very well and very wisely and a lot of them didn't and went off the rails and ended up dying in complete penury as a result well hallie rather than thinking about women dying complete penury i would like to end this by thinking about them drinking champagne actually a much more much more positive note on which to end i can't thank you enough for this incredible tour over such a kind of complex fascinating range of material can't thank you enough. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back next week. Do keep an eye out on Twitter for our subjects, what we're going to be discussing. Send us your questions, your comments, even your corrections. Thanks very much for listening. Bye

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