Volume 7, Number 2 · August 18, 1966
The Secret Life
By Frederick C. Crews
The other Victorians: A study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
by Steven Marcus
Basic Books, 292 pp., $5.95
W.E. Gladstone was not only a shaper of Victorian England, but also one of its exemplary figures. This is to say that he was morally fearsome and a trifle draft. If there was one thing he enjoyed more than chopping down trees (his passion by day) it was accosting prostitutes by night, enticing them home for tea, money, and condescending Christian lectures, and sending them back into the streets, presumably to sin no more. It was an odd was for the great reform minister to tackle a social problem. But the problem, of course, looks from our own perspective like Gladstone's as well as his society's. We know from a famous essay by Freud that 'rescuing' low women is a classic Oedipal compulsion. No wonder the gossip of Gladstone's enemies and the scandalized pleas of his advisers failed to make him behave more prudently. How could these innocent Victorians—how could Gladstone himself—appreciate that he was really smudging the refurbishing unconscious images of his parents? (Even those felled trees begin to look familiar.)
Review, 2234 words
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