Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health’. Twenty-first century parents doubtless would put it slightly differently, but we probably all agree that what consenting adults get up to in their bedrooms is their own business.
That is a very recent idea. The presumption that sex was a private matter was born in the eighteenth century. Before then, except within marriage, it was illegal, and people were punished for it — flogged, imprisoned, fined, publicly humiliated, and worse. The last execution for adultery in England took place in 1654; the last prosecution for it as a public crime appears to have been in 1746.
Ever since, we’ve been grappling with the question of where to draw the line between the private and the public. Unsurprisingly, the first and loudest advocates of sexual privacy were naughty politicians. It was nobody’s business whether or not he was faithful to his wife, harrumphed the fourth Earl of Sandwich in the 1780s, having spent decades sleeping his way around London. Other people should ‘forgive my weaknesses, when they do not interfere with my conduct as a public man’. ‘Public conduct’ and ‘private character’, it now was argued, were two ‘distinct, irrelative things’.
Unfortunately for the politicians, this was also exactly the moment at which the mass media emerged. The end of censorship, the rise of the newspaper, and the explosion of urban life created a huge interest in sexual celebrity and sexual scandal. So, rather paradoxically, from this point on sex also became much more public than ever before. This was especially bad news for politicians who jilted their mistresses. In 1781, the actress, author, and feminist Mary Robinson, who also happened to be one of the most celebrated courtesans of her day, publicly threatened to publish the letters of her former lover, the Prince of Wales, until she was granted a ‘reward’ of £5000 and a life pension. By 1806, when the Duke of York foolishly cast off his mistress Mary Anne Clarke without an adequate financial settlement, kiss-and-tell stories had become big business. Ms Clarke set to work extracting her revenge. First, she colluded in several ghost-written pamphlets excoriating the royal family. Then she penned and had printed 18,000 copies of a sensational memoir, complete with the duke’s love-letters to her. Her reward was a gigantic pay-off: a lump sum of a million pounds in today’s money, and a generous pension for life.
The royals themselves were no better. When, a few years later, George IV tried to divorce his wife, Queen Caroline, for infidelity, she struck back with a huge campaign of public mudslinging about his own affairs that was waged in every medium of public print. It all makes Charles and Diana’s little tiff seem rather tame.
My favourite sexual entrepreneur of all was the great courtesan Harriette Wilson, who cleverly maximized her profits through a combination of extortion and titillation. First she announced the imminent appearance of her memoirs, which caused consternation among her innumerable former lovers, including the king. Next she wrote privately to each man, threatening to expose him unless he immediately sent her hundreds of pounds. This tactic alone netted her several thousand pounds. Then her advance publicity advertised the names of those clients who were included in the book, building up a huge buzz of anticipation. Finally, the work was published, in instalments, to overwhelming success, bringing her many thousands more. Now that is a successful marketing campaign.
Dr. Faramerz Dabhiowala is the author of The Origins of Sex (Allen Lane, £25) out now. He will be talking about the subject at Intelligence Squared on Wednesday 15th February.
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