2. Victorians weren’t easily-shocked or overly-prudish – in fact, we have 20th century writers to blame for this unfair stereotype
According to one popular myth, the Victorians were so repressed that table legs were often covered up to prevent men from becoming around by the sight of curves and notches. As we’ve seen, this was far from the case. So, where did this unfair reputation for prudishness come from? According to some scholars, it most likely emerged in the opening decades of the 20th century. The so-called authors and poets of the Modernist movement, most notably Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, were eager to present themselves as forward-thinking, liberated and progressive – and so, naturally, they presented the generation that came before them as the exact opposite of this.
It was only really in the 1970s that this idea of the Victorians being repressed started to be questioned and effectively challenged. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, published The History of Sexuality in 1976. In it, he effectively argued that it was the Victorians who began taking matters of intimate relations seriously. He credited them with passing a series of progressive laws and overseeing the emergence of sexology as a serious academic subject. Despite this and numerous other academic studies, the Victorians have struggled to shake off their reputation for prudishness.
