James Hinton and Victorian Individuality: Polygamy and the Sacrifice of the Self

James Hinton was a charismatic thinker who influenced the mid-Victorian concept of altruism and later sexologists such as Havelock Ellis. Secretly, he also believed that polygamy would solve the problems of sexual frustration, prostitution, and female poverty. His obsessions with polygamy are evident in five volumes of largely unpublished manuscripts found in the British Library. However, in examining the roots of Hinton’s beliefs, we can see that Hinton should not be understood only as a precursor to later sexual radicalism; rather, he should be anchored in the very different context of mid-Victorian struggles over individualism in religion and culture.