For a witness let's summon Professor Strange, under whose name I contributed a few columns to Clinical Psychology Forum. This one was in the February 2004 issue:
The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boots.
The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’
No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.
Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go than the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.
The truth - and this is me, as Mike Yarwood used to say - is that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we moderns imagine. They were, for instance, much more relaxed about male nudity than we are.
Here's Ronald Hyam writing in his Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience:
Not until 1890 did the Amateur Swimming Association rule that bathing drawers must be worn in competitive schoolboy racing. Cambridge and (even more successfully) Oxford were among the last pockets of resistance to swimming costumes.
Gwen Raverat's rhapsodies about nude swimming in the River Cam reflected a dying practice. It was frowned on by the city fathers after 1894 and finally banned from the town bathing sheds in 1910, although screened and segregated nude sunbathing survived until (ironically) the mid-1960s.
Indeed - my mother (who was born in the Edwardian era) always pooh-phooed the story about table legs being covered because of Victorian prudery. In working class households table legs might well be covered, but that was because the men would often be wearing heavy, nailed boots, and the covers were to stop them kicking the legs and damaging them.
ReplyDeleteAnother urban myth:
ReplyDelete"Little more than a century ago, Queen Victoria refused to believe that such a thing as lesbianism existed, and declared it was pointless creating laws against it."
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