Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
Under the Victorian Bed
By Noel Annan
The Making of Victorian Sexuality
by Michael Mason
Oxford University Press, 338 pp., $27.50
Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld
by Theo Aronson
John Murray, 246 pp., $17.99
Some studies of society resemble a garden laid out by Le Nôtre. You saunter down broad avenues, you know where you are going and where you will emerge. Michael Mason's excellent book on Victorian sexuality is the very reverse. Reading it is like entering a dense forest, where whatever path you take, you have to fight your way through thickets and scramble over fallen trees. The tangle, however, serves a purpose, for Mason's scruples get in your way and stop you from coming to hasty and false conclusions. No sooner does he generalize than he produces a qualification. Still, his prose is always readable, free from jargon, and it is clinically detached: he is not a journalist nudging, winking, and using four-letter words.
Review, 4655 words
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