Losing your heart or your nose

Bevis Hillier

LASCIVIOUS BODIES: A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY by Julie Peakman Atlantic Books, £16.99, pp. 348, ISBN 1843541564 114.99 (plus 12.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 1 f a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver's pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit.

Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley case of the early 1960s and the subsequent relaxation of censorship. Novelists felt that, because they could now cram their books full of eroticism, they must. Eventually things settled down and the writers just brought in sex where, as they say, the plot required it — where poor Thomas Hardy would have liked to deploy it, and nearly did.

About ten years later, raging feminism simmered down in much the same way. There was the Women's Lib movement of the early Seventies — Germaine Greer and all that; then supervened the years of what were sneeringly referred to as .Wimmin's Studies'. (These even affected art history; as Michael Holroyd has recently reminded us, there was a time when Gwen John's art was 'reckoned' more than that of her womanising brother Augustus. No doubt Gwen had a better chance than Augustus of getting through the Pearly Gates, but his draughtsmanship was incomparably superior.) Today there are signs of a new balance: of the grinding of axes by battleaxes there is an end.

How completely that wonder has been worked is seen in this book by Julie Peakman. Her subject — sex in 'the long 18th century, about 1630 to 1830' — offers endless chances to have a go at awful men. Admittedly it is hard to exaggerate the degree to which women were done down in 18th-century society; but Peakman nothing extenuates nor sets down aught in malice. She has no interest in pressganging history into a partisan campaign. She records every disadvantage of women; but still she is fair to men — sympathising with cuckolds, for example. Quite apart from her level-headedness, Peakman is a rarity: a scholar with all the

credentials honorary fellowship, tribute paid to tuition by Roy Porter, everything referenced in notes — who knows how to write a popular book. (There is only one greater rarity: a tabloid journalist who can create a work of scholarship.) Primary sources are relied on more than secondary. Deep research and erudition underpin all her allegro vivace discursiveness, insights and levity. She is like an artist who has drawn from plaster casts, then in the life class, before allowing herself off the leash for a bit of 'self-expression., Tiepolo-like bravura. One of my 1960s history tutors, the great A. J. P. Taylor, was thought risque when he ended a lecture on Sir Charles Dilke's Victorian sex scandal, 'You can take it from me: there were three people in that bed!' But he was never quite as pop as Peakman, who heads one of her sections 'The First Gay Porn'.

Peakman has not written the book to titillate, though some readers may be turned on by certain sections, according to taste. The material is well organised. Chapters one to six are about male and female heterosexuality, with sections on the memoirs of British libertines and courtesans, (The book largely confines itself to Britain, though Casanova gets a look-in because he came to London, and Holland because the Dutch law was tougher on 'abnormality' than English law was.) The second half of the book, chapters seven to twelve, examines the sexual practices considered curi ous or 'abnormal' — men with men, women with women, cross-dressing, bestiality, auto-asphyxiation and so on. All sexual groups get a fair crack of the whip — yes, including the flagellants.

The book starts with an Ackroydian sketching-in of 18th-century London, with young people arriving from the country in search of work and fun; Hogarthian bawds; coffee-houses; Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens; brothels; public baths or tagnios' and — as early as page 1 — an old woman 'who carried a basket of dildos disguised as dolls. Instead of legs, these dolls had a cloth-covered cylinder about six inches long and one inch wide.' Venereal disease was pandemic: Lord Chesterfield advised his son, 'In love, a man may lose his heart with dignity; but if he loses his nose, he loses his character into the bargain.'

Women were 'slaves to marriage', though some were high-spirited and ready to fight for their single status. In the poem 'Kick Him, Jenny' (1787), a young maid resists the advances of a country swain, abetted by the lady of the house, who cries out the words of the poem's title. Then again, there were 'adulterous diversions', much more acceptable in men than in women. Discussing the memoirs of two libertines, William Hickey and James Boswell, Peakman gives some credit to the former because 'he loved women and saw them as equal partners in his amorous adventures', but none to Boswell, who 'treated the young wretches he picked up on the streets with contempt'. Casanova also gets high marks because 'he knew how to manipulate a woman's intellect as well as her body'. Peakman, who is herself a wit, also applauds Casanova for teaching a parrot to say of a courtesan known as La Charpillon, who had given him the runaround, 'Miss Charpillon is a greater whore than her mother.'

Sensibly, as the serious social historian she is, Peakman does not, in general, concentrate on celebrities and aristocrats — though they get some space because they were, after all, part of society, and because, being literate, some of them kept diaries. (Anne Lister, a wealthy Yorkshire lesbian, kept an encoded diary, in which she wrote, ''Tis well I have not a penis. I could never have been continent.') You will not find here the usual suspects who turn up in books about the 'scandals' of the 'rumbustious' 18th century, such as Elizabeth Chudleigh, the bigamous and frigamous Countess of Bristol and self-styled Duchess of Kingston; or William Beckford, who after sexually molesting young William Courtenay of Powderham Castle, had to flee the country.

Where Peakman does deal with aristos, it tends to be as a class or in groups; and her scholarship is seen at its finest in chapters on the Monks of Medmenham — the group of upper-class roués around Sir Francis Dashwood — and above all in the section on 'Scottish Secret Sex Societies', on which she has done original and tenacious research. She does not miss the political implications of the Medmenham set, in which John Wilkes figures. When she writes about the Beggar's Benison Society of Scotland, whose well-born members (so to speak) were expected to ejaculate into a pewter dish in the initiation ceremony, she realises that they did not meet just for sexual frolics, but for 'questionable business reasons', such as smuggling. Members of the still more exclusive Wig Club, also Scottish (they had to kiss a wig made of pubic hair) were involved in 'tax evasion and the support of free trade'.

Moving into the second half of her book, Peakman notes that the British found sodomy 'abhorrent' and regarded it as a nasty foreign import. This feeling became linked with anti-Catholicism: a Protestant pamphleteer grumbled that, with Roman Catholics, 'the Tax for Eating Eggs in Lent is greater than that for Sodomy'. A man could be hanged for sodomy. More often, his punishment was the pillory. One sodomite wore armour in the pillory in 1727, but it and his clothes were torn off and he nearly died.

Peakman has much on the selling and buying of sex — sex as a commodity — including homosexual:

In 1780 Wiliam Proctor, a grocer, and Thomas Readshaw, an undertaker, were both caught in an indecent situation. Proctor had approached Readshaw with the question, 'What do you think of a good prick?' The answer came, 'I don't do much in that Way, but when 1 do, I have five guineas, but as I have taken a liking to you, I'll oblige you for two.'

The word 'lesbian' was only very rarely used in the 18th century: `tribade' and 'Sapphist' were preferred. One of Peaktrian's examples in this category is Mrs Anne Damer, the daughter of Horace Walpole's cousin, General (later FieldMarshal) Henry Seymour Conway.

[She was] suspected of 'liking her own sex in a Criminal Way'. She had married at IS, but nine years later, after her husband had shot himself when he fell into debt, she adopted men's garb and become known for her preference for women, most notably the 35-year-old Mary Berry.

You won't find any of that in the entry for Mrs Darner in the Dictionary of National Biography; but perhaps Peakman &light have mentioned that she was a celebrated sculptress. It might also have been germane, and a neat link, to mention that Horace Walpole had been sweet on Henry Seymour Conway. When, in 1764, Conway was dismissed from the command of his regiment, a pamphleteer named William Guthrie justified the dismissal in his Address on the late Dismission of a General Officer. Walpole rushed to Conway's defence in a Counter-Address. Guthrie was not slow to detect the fire behind the smoke, and sneered:

The passionate fondness with which the personal qualities of the officer in question are continually dwelt on, would almost tempt me to imagine, that this arrow came forth from a female quiver...

Walpole doted on Anne Darner, his beloved's daughter, telling a correspondent, 'she writes Latin like Pliny'. In his will he left her his house, Strawberry Hill, and much besides.

In 'Strength to Wear a Dress' and 'Women in Breeches', Peakman discusses cross-dressing with deft pen-portraits of the sexually apathetic Chevalier d'Eon whom everyone thought a woman, though he wasn't, and the Chevalier De Choisy, who seduced young girls while masquerading in petticoats. Some women dressed as men 'to obtain the financial independence that came ... in a world largely dominated by men': Peakman considers some female cross-dressers as 'the first feminists'. Under the heading 'Jolly Jill Tars', she writes of female pirates. In the section on Pains and Pleasures of the Birch' we at last find one instance in which 18thcentury women were treated better than men, though it can have been small consolation: by the end of the century, female offenders were flogged in private, men in public.

Julie Peakman ends her book with a very fairly set out historiography of 'The Gender-Sex Debate', In the last decade of the last century, she holds, -women's history mutated into gender history'. She astutely analyses the different factions into which historians of sexuality have divided themselves — for example, there is a 'highly charged debate' between those who see homosexuality as being 'made up', or constructed, by society (constructionalists) and the opposing team who regard homosexuality as an intrinsic part of a person's character or biology ('determinists' or 'essentialists'). Peakman's own view, in considering the whole subject of sexuality, is characteristically tolerant and modestly tentative:

Maybe the way forward is to look at sexuality en masse, rather than in four or five labelled boxes (lesbian, homosexual, heterosexual, etc.), and attempt to pick out each strand of differing sexualities in order to build up a sexual map (rather like DNA strands in the genetic code, only on a social, cultural and individualistic level).

That reminds me of what Matthew Parris once wrote about the labels 'heterosexual', 'homosexual' and so on. It went something like this: 'I believe that one day they will be thought as crude and misleading as "the Humours" are now.'

Peakman's book is not large, but it is most impressive. If any future historian of sexuality devotes a chapter to the historiography of the subject, he or she will probably recognise the publication of this work, this year, as the moment when sanity entered the debate.