Sex and the Working Class

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 intellectual disciplines causes him to slight to some degree the depth and development of their thought. To return, however, to my opening estimate, this is a well done book that students of the period will find valuable. Bruce Bashford ___________________ SUNY at Stony Brook Sex and the Working Class Françoise Barret-Ducrocq. Love in the Time of Victoria. Sexuality and Gender in Nineteenth Century London. John Howe, trans. New York: Verso, 1991. 225 pp. $37.50 THE "FALLEN WOMAN" was often the subject, directly or indirectly, of late Victorian and Edwardian novelists. The sexual factor, especially sexuality outside of marriage, pervaded the Victorian psyche because it was, despite our misconceptions, prevalent in nineteenth-century Britain . It was a recurrent theme in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and the young Somerset Maugham. It has since been the subject of intensive research by sociologists, social psychologists, and social historians (such as Leonore Davidoff, Peter Gay, Steven Marcus, Pat Thane, Louise Tilly, Judith Walkowitz, and Jeffrey Weeks). Mme. Barret-Ducrocq's study of the sex lives of unmarried working class women, based on the virtually unutilized archives of the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, provides another dimension to the concept and understanding of Victorian sexuality and sexual mores. This saga of the düemmas and fate of working-class women who faced single parenthood as a result of love affairs and unwanted pregnancies has in part already been dealt with by Ann R. Higginbotham's The Unmarried Mother and Child in Victorian London, 1834-1914 (1985)— not referred to by Barret-Ducrocq—but not on the basis of research in the Coram Foundation archives. The Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital was established in 1741 by a high-minded philanthropist, the master shipbuilder and merchant, Captain Thomas Coram (1668-1751), although the institution did not function until its arcaded building in Southampton Row (Central London ) was completed during 1745-46. Following his return to England, after several years of successful business ventures in the American colonies, Coram was appalled by the vast number of abandoned dead and dying babies which littered the ditches, gutters, and dustbins in and 358 BOOK REVIEWS near London. With some friends (including Hogarth, Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and Handel), Coram labored for seventeen years soliciting funds and securing a royal charter for a hospital/home for unwanted infants. When the project evoked fears during the 1760s that it might encourage immorality and sexual license, the hospital restricted admissions to the children of abandoned wives and war orphans. But in 1801, the hospital again began to take the young children of unmarried mothers, but on the basis of some very strict requirements which involved a searching interview and the completion of a very detailed application form (in which sexual intercourse was referred to as "criminal congress"—"crim. con.")· In her application, the mother was required to demonstrate that "her good faith had been betrayed" by her seducer, that she had submitted to "crim. con." only after the promise of marriage or against her will, that she had no other children, and that "her conduct had always been irreproachable in every other respect." Hence these forms contain and provide a wide range of information which, although not completely reliable, reveal (as Barret-Ducrocq illustrates) "a world made opaque by poverty, wordlessness and a critical paucity of first-hand documents." But, more specifically, the "faded blue files" in the archive show (1) that by far most of these young women applicants were, in the Victorian sense, respectable, honest, and hardworking until seduced by men who either pledged or intimated marriage; (2) that the vast majority of the women were involved in courtships of more than six months and often over two years duration; (3) that (as often portrayed in the literature of the era) a very large percentage of the young women were (as seamstresses, chambermaids, milliners, and dressmakers) seeking relief through their love affair and the prospect of marriage from the drudgery of long hours of unremitting labor; (4) that only a small number of these women "in service" were seduced or raped by their middle-class...