The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650- 1850, and: Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (review)

Roy Porter and his team have again produced two outstanding, readable volumes, this time in the history of sexual knowledge. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950, coauthored with Leslie Hall, and Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality, coedited with Mikulás Teich, are not, as we might expect, about epistemology. Nor are they primarily about sexual identities, or gender, or medicine, or even the institutional relationships between authors and physicians and their readers and patients. Rather, these projects address “the codification of sexuality” (Facts, p. 4). This might strike some readers as just another, but a narrower, spin on the ever-growing history of sexuality. The two volumes, however, are neither duplicative nor narrow, but vibrant and expansive, much-needed analyses of the texts that have asserted authority over sexuality and reproduction.

The Facts of Life evaluates which British works held authority, what they claimed about sexuality, pleasure, reproduction, and “deviance,” and how they can be contextualized and interconnected. In his inimitably entrancing style, Roy Porter covers the first 150 years of the story, with close readings of Aristotle’s Master-Piece and other often-cited but sometimes misinterpreted early modern works of sexual advice. Porter situates his sources, showing how such advice books and erotica, medical works, quackery, and antimasturbatory diatribes reflected broader ideals of the age. Bawdy, loud, happily embracing principles of personal liberty, blithely accepting of raucous, even violent, behavior toward women, Porter’s Georgians created and used sexual texts in an Enlightenment quest to understand and take pleasure in human nature. While they endorsed men’s personal liberty, they also underscored social commitments, and thus treated masturbation as a dangerously solitary pleasure. Despite their enlightened, even progressive stance toward gaining sexual knowledge, Georgians treated female sexuality ambivalently.

Porter ends his section of the book while the English were still enjoying themselves sexually and writing frankly about what they knew about the topic. But then The Facts of Life jumps to the early years of Victorianism, when both sexual activity and texts appear more restrained. Aside from a too-brief discussion of Malthus connecting the two periods, there is a vague transition here between the 1790s and the 1850s. The authors argue that in these intervening years “no new hegemonic texts appeared” (p. 126), yet the question remains how raucous Georgian texts were replaced by works inspiring stereotypes of Victorianism.

Despite this chronological and explanatory omission, Lesley Hall’s coverage—beginning with William Acton’s well-known Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857)—is illuminating. Like Porter, Hall contextualizes, interconnects, and closely analyzes central texts, asking how sexual knowledge interacted with cultural expectations about gender, “normalcy,” and “deviance.” Hall compares the various modern disciplines that claim authority over sexual knowledge: research science, sexology, psychology, the law, feminism, women’s health care, popular knowledge. In the modern era, some of these fields were built by gathering information from surveys and readers’ responses. Hall shows how Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis, and other researchers discovered a vast gulf between popular knowledge of sexual matters and the knowledge that physicians, birth-control advocates, and psychologists hoped to disseminate. Testimony from rural respondents in the 1930s describing “‘not knowing where the baby was going to come out,’ . . . and ‘not even [being] told it was painful’ before going into childbirth” (p. 253) dramatically reveals how popular knowledge of sex can remain untouched by the seemingly incessant sexual discourse in modern psychology, medicine, birth-control reform, feminism, and even popular culture.

The Facts of Life modestly warns that “there are bodily responses and social practices which are by no means so...