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Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of the middle class in 19th-century Britain, the Victorian era.

Victorian values emerged in all classes and reached all facets of Victorian living. The values of the period—which can be classed as religion, morality, Evangelicalism, industrial work ethic, and personal improvement—took root in Victorian morality. Current plays and all literature—including old classics like Shakespeare—were cleansed of content considered to be inappropriate for children, or "bowdlerized".

Contemporary historians have generally come to regard the Victorian era as a time of many conflicts, such as the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint, together with serious debates about exactly how the new morality should be implemented. The international slave trade was abolished, and this ban was enforced by the Royal Navy. Slavery was ended in all the British colonies, child labour was ended in British factories, and a long debate ensued regarding whether prostitution should be totally abolished or tightly regulated. Homosexuality remained illegal.

Slavery

Main article: Abolitionism in the United Kingdom

Opposition to slavery was the main evangelical cause from the late 18th century, led by William Wilberforce (1759–1833). The cause organized very thoroughly, and developed propaganda campaigns that made readers cringe at the horrors of slavery. The same moral fervor and organizational skills carried over into most of the other reform movements. Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, only four years after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. The anti-slavery movement had campaigned for years to achieve the ban, succeeding with a partial abolition in 1807 and the full ban on slave trading, but not slave ownership, which only happened in 1833. It took so long because the anti-slavery morality was pitted against powerful economic interests which claimed their businesses would be destroyed if they were not permitted to exploit slave labour. Eventually, plantation owners in the Caribbean received £20 million in cash compensation, which reflected the average market price of slaves. William E. Gladstone, later a famous reformer, handled the large payments to his father for their hundreds of slaves. The Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic Ocean, stopping any ships that it suspected of trading African slaves to the Americas and freeing any slaves found. The British had set up a Crown Colony in West Africa—Sierra Leone—and transported freed slaves there. Freed slaves from Nova Scotia founded and named the capital of Sierra Leone "Freetown".

Abolishing cruelty

Cruelty to animals

Main article: Animal welfare in the United Kingdom

William Wilberforce, Thomas Fowell Buxton and Richard Martin introduced the first legislation to prevent cruelty to animals, the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822; it pertained only to cattle and it passed easily in 1822.

In the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, "fighting or baiting Lions, Bears, Badgers, Cocks, Dogs, or other Animals" was made a criminal offence. The law laid numerous restrictions on how, when, and where animals could be used. It prohibited owners from letting mad dogs run loose and gave police the right to destroy any dog suspected of being rabid. It prohibited the use of dogs for drawing carts. The law was extended to the rest of England and Wales in 1854. Dog-pulled carts were often used by very poor self-employed men as a cheap means to deliver milk, human foods, animal foods (the cat's-meat man), and for collecting refuse (the rag-and-bone man). The dogs were susceptible to rabies; cases of this horrible deadly disease among humans had been on the rise. They also bothered the horses, which were economically much more vital to the city. Evangelicals and utilitarians in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals persuaded Parliament it was cruel and should be illegal; the Utilitarian element added government inspectors to provide enforcement. The owners had no more use for their dogs, and killed them. Cart dogs were replaced by people with handcarts.

Historian Harold Perkin writes:

Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical. The transformation diminished cruelty to animals, criminals, lunatics, and children (in that order); suppressed many cruel sports and games, such as bull-baiting and cock-fighting, as well as innocent amusements, including many fairs and wakes; rid the penal code of about two hundred capital offences, abolished transportation , and cleaned up the prisons; turned Sunday into a day of prayer for some and mortification for all.

Child labour

Main article: Child labour

Evangelical religious forces took the lead in identifying the evils of child labour, and legislating against them. Their anger at the contradiction between the conditions on the ground for children of the poor and the middle-class notion of childhood as a time of innocence led to the first campaigns for the imposition of legal protection for children. Reformers attacked child labor from the 1830s onward. The campaign that led to the Factory Acts was spearheaded by rich philanthropists of the era, especially Lord Shaftesbury, who introduced bills in Parliament to mitigate the exploitation of children at the workplace. In 1833 he introduced the Ten Hours Act 1833, which provided that children working in the cotton and woollen mills must be aged nine or above; no person under the age of eighteen was to work more than ten hours a day or eight hours on a Saturday; and no one under twenty-five was to work nights. The Factory Act of 1844 said children 9–13 years could work for at most 9 hours a day with a lunch break. Additional legal interventions throughout the century increased the level of childhood protection, despite the resistance from the laissez-faire attitudes against government interference by factory owners. Parliament respected laissez-faire in the case of adult men, and there was minimal interference in the Victorian era.

Unemployed street children suffered too, as novelist Charles Dickens revealed to a large middle class audience the horrors of London street life.

Sexuality

Main article: Victorian era § Moral standards

Historians Peter Gay and Michael Mason both point out that modern society often confuses Victorian etiquette for a lack of knowledge. For example, people going for a bath in the sea or at the beach would use a bathing machine. Despite the use of the bathing machine, it was still possible to see people bathing nude. Contrary to popular conception, however, Victorian society recognised that both men and women enjoyed copulation.

Verbal or written communication of sexual feelings was also often proscribed so people instead used the language of flowers. However, they also wrote explicit erotica, perhaps the most famous being the racy tell-all My Secret Life by the pseudonym Walter (allegedly Henry Spencer Ashbee), and the magazine The Pearl, which was published for several years and reprinted as a paperback book in the 1960s. Victorian erotica also survives in private letters archived in museums and even in a study of women's orgasms. Some current historians now believe that the myth of Victorian repression can be traced back to early twentieth-century views, such as those of Lytton Strachey, a homosexual member of the Bloomsbury Group, who wrote Eminent Victorians.

Homosexuality

See also: Labouchere Amendment and Oscar Wilde

The enormous expansion of police forces, especially in London, produced a sharp rise in prosecutions for illegal sodomy at midcentury. Male sexuality became a favorite subject of study especially by medical researchers whose case studies explored the progression and symptoms of institutionalized subjects. Henry Maudsley shaped late Victorian views about aberrant sexuality. George Savage and Charles Arthur Mercier wrote about homosexuals living in society. Daniel Hack Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine covered sexual perversion. All these works show awareness of continental insights, as well as moral disdain for the sexual practices described.

Simeon Solomon and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, as they contemplated their own sexual identities in the 1860s, fastened on the Greek lesbian poet Sappho. They made Victorian intellectuals aware of Sappho, and their writings helped to shape the modern image of lesbianism.

The Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, for the first time, made all male homosexual acts illegal. It provided for two years' imprisonment for males convicted of committing, or being a party to public or private acts of homosexuality. Lesbian acts—still scarcely known—were ignored. When Oscar Wilde was convicted of violating the statute, and imprisoned for such violations, in 1895, he became the iconic victim of English puritanical repression.

Prostitution

Prostitution had been a factor in city life for centuries. The reformers started mobilizing in the late 1840s, major news organisations, clergymen, and single women became increasingly concerned about prostitution, which came to be known as "The Great Social Evil". Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London in the 1850s vary widely (in his landmark study, Prostitution, William Acton reported that the police estimated there were 8,600 in London alone in 1857).

While the Magdalene asylums had been reforming prostitutes since the mid-18th century, the years between 1848 and 1870 saw a veritable explosion in the number of institutions working to "reclaim" these "fallen women" from the streets and retrain them for entry into respectable society—usually for work as domestic servants. The theme of prostitution and the "fallen woman" (any woman who has had sexual intercourse out of marriage) became a staple feature of mid-Victorian literature and politics. In the writings of Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, Charles Dickens and others, prostitution began to be seen as a social problem.

When Parliament passed the first of the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD) in 1864 (which allowed the local constabulary in certain defined areas to force any woman suspected of venereal disease to submit to its inspection), Josephine Butler's crusade to repeal the CD Acts yoked the anti-prostitution cause with the emergent feminist movement. Butler attacked the long-established double standard of sexual morality.

Prostitutes were often presented as victims in sentimental literature such as Thomas Hood's poem The Bridge of Sighs, Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton, and Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. The emphasis on the purity of women found in such works as Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House led to the portrayal of the prostitute and fallen woman as soiled, corrupted, and in need of cleansing.

This emphasis on female purity was allied to the stress on the homemaking role of women, who helped to create a space free from the pollution and corruption of the city. In this respect, the prostitute came to have symbolic significance as the embodiment of the violation of that divide. The double standard remained in force. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 allowed for a man to divorce his wife for adultery, but a woman could only divorce for adultery combined with other offences such as incest, cruelty, bigamy, desertion, etc., or based on cruelty alone.

The anonymity of the city led to a large increase in prostitution and unsanctioned sexual relationships. Dickens and other writers associated prostitution with the mechanisation and industrialisation of modern life, portraying prostitutes as human commodities consumed and thrown away like refuse when they were used up. Moral reform movements attempted to close down brothels, something that has sometimes been argued to have been a factor in the concentration of street-prostitution.

The extent of prostitution in London in the 1880s gained national and global prominence through the highly publicised murders attributed to Whitechapel-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, whose victims were exclusively prostitutes living destitute in the East End. Given that many prostitutes were living in poverty as late as the 1880s and 1890s, offering sex services was a source of desperate necessity to fund their meals and temporary lodging accommodation from the cold, and as a result prostitutes represented easy prey for criminals as they could do little to personally protect themselves from harm.

Crime and police

Main articles: History of law enforcement in the United Kingdom and History of the Metropolitan Police Service

After 1815, there was widespread fear of growing crimes, burglaries, mob action, and threats of large-scale disorder. Crime had been handled on an ad-hoc basis by poorly organized local parish constables and private watchmen, supported by very stiff penalties, including hundreds of causes for execution or deportation to Australia. London, with 1.5 million people—more than the next 15 cities combined—over the decades had worked out informal arrangements to develop a uniform policing system in its many boroughs. The Metropolitan Police Act 1829, championed by Home Secretary Robert Peel, was not so much a startling innovation, as a systemization with expanded funding of established informal practices. It created the Metropolitan Police Service, headquartered at Scotland Yard. London now had the world's first modern police force. The 3000 policemen were called "bobbies" (after Peel's first name). They were well-organized, centrally directed, and wore standard blue uniforms. Legally they had the historic status of constable, with authority to make arrests of suspicious persons and book offenders before a magistrate court. They were assigned in teams to specified beats, especially at night. Gas lighting was installed on major streets, making their task of surveillance much easier. Crime rates went down. An 1835 law required all incorporated boroughs in England and Wales to establish police forces. Scotland, with its separate legal system, was soon added. By 1857 every jurisdiction in Great Britain had an organized police force, for which the Treasury paid a subsidy. The police had steady pay, were selected by merit rather than by political influence, and were rarely used for partisan purposes. The pay scale was not high (one guinea a week in 1833), but the prestige was especially high for Irish Catholics, who were disproportionately represented in every city where they had a large presence.

Causation

Intellectual historians searching for causes of the new morality often point to the ideas by Hannah More, William Wilberforce, and the Clapham Sect. Perkin argues this exaggerates the influence of a small group of individuals, who were "as much an effect of the revolution as a cause." It also has a timing problem, for many predecessors had failed. The intellectual approach tends to minimize the importance of Nonconformists and Evangelicals—the Methodists, for example, played a powerful role among the upper tier of the working class. Finally, it misses a key ingredient: instead of trying to improve an old society, the reformers were trying to lead Britain into a new society of the future.

Victorian era movements for justice, freedom, and other strong moral values made greed, and exploitation into public evils. The writings of Charles Dickens, in particular, observed and recorded these conditions. Peter Shapely examined 100 charity leaders in Victorian Manchester. They brought significant cultural capital, such as wealth, education and social standing. Besides the actual reforms for the city they achieved for themselves a form of symbolic capital, a legitimate form of social domination and civic leadership. The utility of charity as a means of boosting one's social leadership was socially determined and would take a person only so far.

The Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin connected Victorian morality to the rise of the bourgeoisie. Benjamin alleged that the shopping culture of the petite bourgeoisie established the sitting room as the centre of personal and family life; as such, the English bourgeois culture is a sitting-room culture of prestige through conspicuous consumption. This acquisition of prestige is then reinforced by the repression of emotion and of sexual desire, and by the construction of a regulated social-space where "propriety" is the key personality trait desired in men and women.

Demystifying Victorian Morality

It seems necessary to clarify that the sense of moral exceptionality shared by Victorians did not come into being the moment that Queen Victoria took to the throne. Before the Victorian Era, there had already been some foundation — built upon decades and centuries of evolving ideologies and discourses — for a Victorian culture of dignity, restraint, and moral goodness to emerge. Moreover, just as the Victorians were not the sole originators of the social rules that governed their society and political climate, they were also not beholden to them to the same rigid degree as the modern-day person may think. That is to say, practices on the ground associated with the Victorian Era morality — a gendered public and private binary, for example — did not always align with abstract ideals found in contemporary documents and literature. In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault rejects the notion that power relationships emanate from a single source or have any solid foundation capable of imparting legitimacy. He writes that the viewpoint from which one understands power “must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate” that, rather, power is “the moving substrate of force relations… always local and unstable.” Foucault forces a reimagining of power that requires a rejection of normative narratives and blanket analyses of historical eras and entreats us to destabilize entrenched understandings. The established concept of “Victorian morality” seems vulnerable to such a treatment.

Feminine Virtue: Georgian Women and the Breakdown of Victorian Gendered Pathologies

A case study of Eliza Fay — well-known Georgian-Era woman traveller, woman author, openly self-initiated divorcée, and enforcer of imperialist and gendered pathologies — provides a nuanced and varied look into a woman who, on paper and through her words, endorsed proto-Victorian ideas of feminine propriety and racial superiority but who, in action, did not perform the gendered behaviour expected of a Georgian woman. More importantly, the positive reception to and subsequent preservation of Fay’s published letters detailing her travels across the Middle East and India speak to the possibility that so-called “alternative” British women like Fay were not unusual for their time.

Eliza Fay’s Letters to India demonstrate how a white, upper-middle class, Christian woman might navigate the codes of morality expected of her. On one hand, Fay illustrated that British women had a hand in reinforcing imperialism through her celebration of Britain’s civilizing mission and “unique” moral superiority. In Fay’s estimation, every space that was not English was a breeding ground for deviancy: the Middle East was a “Paradise of thieves” whose population “may be divided into two classes of them: those who adopt force, and those who affect their purpose by fraud” and India was a land of wife-burners, insidious rebels, and bumbling fools who are “no estrong like English; one, two, three Bengal men cannot do like one Englishman.” Given that a majority of British Georgians and Victorians formed their opinions about the racial and ethno-religious “Other” based upon the writings of ethnographers and first-hand travel accounts, Fay actively contributed to a pro-colonialist narrative that dictated peoples elsewhere must be tamed, civilized, and brought into the folds of a middle-class, white, Christian milieu.

Before the mid-twentieth century, there had been few attempts at separating biologically-driven imperatives from culturally constructed expressions of gender. In the Georgian- and Victorian-eras, it was widely believed that biological sex informed male and female subjectivities — meaning that acting “like a woman” (accommodating, ultra-moral, sentimental, etc.) at this time was not considered a conscious imitation of other women, but an embodiment of the destined traits inherent in the female sex. In this context, the gendered body becomes a political statement: what a woman chose to do with it or not do with it in accordance with codes of feminine propriety spelled out an act of compliance with, or resistance against, social prescriptions. Even the most innocuous actions carried with them meaning in the context of a British woman’s highly gendered, class-conscious, and racialized world.

With that being said, Fay demonstrated how British Georgian women themselves reinforced gendered pathologies, both for women at home and overseas. When remarking upon the phenomenon of Indian widows forced to commit ritual suicide, Fay asserted that a real feminine sacrifice was when a woman — in accordance with her biological imperatives of womanly deference and patience — endured her husband’s marital transgressions and offered to him instead the emotional comfort found only in a female body:

The most specious sacrifices are not always the greatest, she who wages war with a naturally petulant temper, who practises a rigid self-denial, endures without complaining the unkindness, infidelity, extravagance, meanness or scorn, of the man to whom she has given a tender and confiding heart, and for whose happiness and well being in life all the powers of her mind are engaged; — is ten times more of a heroine than the slave of bigotry and superstition, who affects to scorn the life demanded of her by the laws of her country or at least that country’s custom; and many such we have in England, and I doubt not in India likewise: so indeed we ought, have we not a religion infinitely more pure than that of India?

This purported womanly duty was framed not as a learned trait, but rather one that naturally occupied “all the powers of her mind” — and, conveniently, aligned with British nationalistic and religious values. In espousing this specific non-delineated theory of sex and gender, Fay doubly reinforced a colonialist narrative wherein white, Christian, British men and women were inherently more knowledgeable of a universal right and wrong in their own gendered ways and thus capable of “teaching” these values to the rest of the world: a conviction that persisted well into the Victorian era.

Nuance can be found, however, in that, as an openly self-initiated divorcée, Fay simultaneously furthered her written support of gendered pathologies but also followed an alternative lifestyle for a Georgian woman. When a Georgian (and later, Victorian) woman married, her identity became subsumed into her husband’s, leaving her dependent on him for social, financial, and marital stability; that Fay divorced her husband, and quite explicitly in her writings, would have seemingly served as a cardinal transgression of her gender. Fay justified her divorce of her husband by explaining that she hadn’t ended her marriage out of a fickle impulse or as a result of unfaithful urges, but because she objected immensely to her husband’s comradery with Indian independence fighters — enemies to a good, Christian, British rule. In this context, Fay demonstrated a steadfast commitment to her morals; rather than rejecting the institution of marriage and denying herself the female desires her body craved, she instead showed herself to be the ultra-feminine woman by obeying her biological imperatives: moral righteousness with a backdrop of sentimental anguish.

Moreover, Fay’s status as a woman writer who financed herself off her public image contradicts the prevailing picture of leisurely middle-class Georgian/proto-Victorian women ensconced within the home, kept away from the public sphere of masculine money-making. The positive response to Fay’s published writings suggests three things: that perhaps the binary of public/private was never as strict as Victorians constructed it to be, that there were more “alternative” middle-class women like Fay writing at the time than have been currently discovered; that the Victorians’ predecessors hadn’t necessarily cared to enforce the rules of propriety they set out for themselves.

As a female traveler who documented herself leaving the home and entering situations latent with potential “virtue threatening” forces, Eliza Fay anticipated and refuted Victorian notions of feminine propriety. Fay’s writings, in fact, hinged upon a sense of danger deriving from mystified locales such as Middle East where, from a European perspective, vice and sexual coercion ran amuck in every corner, and no woman was safe from falling to prosmiscuity, rape, and ruin. As Fay voluntarily recorded her journey as a solo-traveler replete with instances where she was without a male chaperone, it can assumed that the reception to a woman’s actions outside of the home operated on a class line. Georgian woman traveler/author Elizabeth Marsh, for instance, was an unmarried woman of an emerging middle-class whose position in society was by no means secured through her father’s occupation or granted through a husband’s protection: in traveling alone, cohabitating with unrelated men, and being taken captive by a Moroccan sultan and his harem, Marsh jeopardized her reputation as a woman. Because of her socially-marginalized status, Marsh lacked the social tools to negotiate her “transgression” against feminine subjectivities. Eliza Fay, in contrast, was a married (or formerly married) upper-middle-class British woman, meaning that despite her harrowing travels, she remained availed of accusations that threatened her respectability. Her femininity became tinged with class privilege; in the face of situations that would call to question a woman of lower status’s virtue, Fay escaped relatively unscathed.

Female Authors and Autonomy through the Pen

The Victorian Era, the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until 1901, ushered in the concept of Victorian morality or Victorian sensibility, characterized by typical, Christian, strict gender and societal norms. There resulted in an increase in police presence, an emphasis on Christian values of monogamy and temperance, and a focus on the male sphere of influence. Nonetheless, the society was deeply socially and economically hierarchical. The top down society valued traditional gender norms, separating a gender binary into two distinct spheres of influence.This case study will focus on the construction and emphasis of this gender binary and social norms, using Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh and Marsh’s own The Female Captive to demystify Victorian morality. These various lenses will deconstruct Victorian exceptionality and provide a new lens on the Victorian Morality.

With the beginning of industrialization, men began to leave the home to enter the public sphere (factories, stores, and offices), leaving the women home to oversee the domestic sphere. Leonare Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class details the construction of the domestic and public spheres. Hall defines the importance of history, specifically, gender history five years after the originally release of Family Fortunes writing:

“We wanted not just to put the women back into a history from which they had been left out, but to rewrite that history so that proper recognition would be given to the ways in which gender, as a key axis of power in society, provides a crucial understanding of how any society is structured and organized”

Additionally, in Laura Lee Down’s Writing Gender History, she ties Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortune: Men and Women of the English Middle Class directly to the topic of Victorian morality. It discusses the Victorian model of the gender binary: “gender and class are perpetually constructed and reconstructed in relation to one another and in the context of the gendered separation of public and private. And this, in turn, implies that the class consciousness of both men and women must, of necessity, take gendered forms.” The men in the public sphere and women in the domestic sphere. This model sets Elizabeth Marsh up to be a candidate of breaking through the glass ceiling of Victorian sensibility. (

Historian Linda Colley’s scholarship pieces together an unknown history, creating a vivid masterpiece of historical literature in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh. “An uncommon tale about a woman, uncommon for her time, who took charge of her life—and succeeded,” wrote The Washington Times. This review itself summarizes the show-stopping adventure of Elizabeth Marsh as she breaks through expected notions of Victorian womanhood. The story is broken into three stories: (1) Marsh’s travels as she ventured farther and more dangerously than any account of women of her time, (2) Regards her extended family, her parents, uncles, brothers, husband, children, etc., (3) A global story of the violent phase of World History that contextualizes the feat that was Elizabeth Marsh’s life.

Born into a family line of shipmakers, mariners, markers of chapters, and maps, she was connected to the Royal army. Marsh was conceived in Jamaica and born in England. Marsh might have been of mixed-race, born to a Jamaican mother and English father, but there is no photo or written evidence. Showing that from the beginning of her life, Marsh was in motion. The portion of Marsh’s story that I will focus on in order to demystify Victorian Morality is her time in and after Morocco.

After convincing her father to allow her to embark on a journey at sea in 1756, Elizabeth Marsh was taken to Morocco by force and encountered Sultan Sidi Muhammad “penetrating to the heart of his palace complex at marrakech and barely escaping sexual enslavement.” Even Marsh’s captivity was defined and affected by her gender, altering her life more than the other male captives. James Crisp, a male captive, had been posing as her brother to provide “some little protection” but after convincing Marsh masquerades as his wife to be in “less danger of an injury” in Morocco. This contextualizes the perception of women as valuable once attached to a man. Moreover, during her captivity she was “dehydrated and malnourished, surviving for the most part on eggs and milk, and now persistently reminded of her exposed female status.” Even in the face of starvation, Marsh was reminded and categorized her threat level by her female state. (Grace)

Elizabeth Marsh is the first woman to record her experiences and the first woman in history to write at length about Morocco in English. Her publication of The Female Captive, a retelling of her captivity, and the context in which she published further demystifies Victorian sensibilities. When she returned to England, she married James Crisp because there would be salacious rumors regarding her virginity (and thereby social value) upon her return from Morocco. When Crisp goes bankrupt, driving him to flee England for India, Marsh embarks on a new adventure: publishing her story as a woman. The Female Captive was published anonymously in London in May of 1769.

The works of women like Elizabeth Marsh and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, author of The Turkish Letters, show how their historically documented experiences are rare and demonstrate the importance of the recovery of women’s history. In her preface, she wrote “I am malicious enough to desire, that the world should see, to how much better purpose the LADIES travel than their LORD.” Montagu’s preface calls-out to the Victorian sensibility that drives men into the public sphere and women into the private. Even for the women who were able to keep track of their travel, publishing their work was not a celebrated or accepted behavior. Mary Wortley Montagu could not publish The Turkish Letters until after her death due the likely negative effect it would have on her reputation. The fact that personal accounts of a woman could ruin their reputation demonstrates why women’s voices have been largely ignored throughout history.

Returning to Marsh’s publication of The Female Captive, her social status in Victorian society affected her route of printing her story. The title denotes the exceptionality of her experience as a female traveler, defining herself as female. Even the title page emphatically reads “WRITTEN BY HERSELF”—another powerful self-assertion of autonomy in a society where female autonomy was few and far between. Due to her economic condition (her husband being bankrupt), Marsh was placed in a weak negotiation position with her publisher, Cathles Bathurst. This forced her to ask family, friends, and acquaintances to sponsor The Female Captive by buying a copy before its publication. This meant her anonymity was no longer secure amongst her own circles. Even though she remained anonymous on the title page, Marsh was forced to protect her reputation, in some regards, carefully wording her work to stress that she had “not been enslaved, and her theme throughout is resistance: how she overcame fear, hardship, physical danger, a hostile landscape, and attempted seduction by the most powerful man in Morocco.” While one could argue that this is Victorian pressures infringing on her story to protect her, Marsh is continuing her streak of autobiographical autonomy by taking a hold of her own narrative.

Orientalism and the Challenges to the “Normal”

Historical treatments of “Victorian Morality” often do not capture the inter-cultural exchanges that solidified and amplified moral norms. The personal and private writings of women in the British and Ottoman empires points to the active and continuous mutual construction of identity between these two groups. Rather than the simple and uncomplicated subjects of moral “essences” women participated substantially in “the cultural production of gender and national ideologies” as they defined themselves in opposition to the other. Just as Victorian Morality did not spring out of nothingness, so too was it not the exclusive product of white, western moral intuition. Rather, the normative moral and social order was a generative, fluid project stemming from conflict. It becomes clear that the historical picture of the western woman freed from labor and languishing on a day bed was a fabrication rather than an exacting presentation of reality. By constructing these images, western women “could avoid confronting their own powerlessness and gender oppression.” These painterly illustrations of western society are deeply tied to a hyper-gendered war of culture between powers and is always misunderstood when taken at face value. It should be especially noted that opposing perspectives on gender and sexual relations (present in the Ottoman Empire) presented a threat to the hegemony and perceived “truth” of existing power structures within Victorian society. Travelling through Egypt in the mid-19th century, acclaimed fashion designer Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon sent letters home that painted Ottoman morality as “barbarism." Her observations sent back to the empire highlight the pervasive perception of eastern institutions (such as the Ottoman Harem) as morally bankrupt for their contrast to "civilized" gender modalities. The self-adulation of the west for its morals originates in its ability to position itself as the natural end of all social progress. Standing as an alternative to what was given as natural, the social arrangements of Ottoman society forced an idealization of western society that simultaneously ignored and instrumentalized the oppression of “the fairer sex.” It is not a mistake that orientalism cast Egyptian women as pitiable and secluded, it was a necessary simplification needed to simplify the west’s own reality. Imagining the unbearable “enslavement” of non-western, non-Christian women created a photo-negative picture of Europe that made its brand of patriarchy an object of desire.

Contemporary Contestations

Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby are figures that present challenges to the normative treatment of Victorian society. Hailing from opposing ends of the class hierarchy, Cullwick and Munby represent a wildly different conception of empire and gender that challenged, albeit in isolation, the authority of the Victorian moral order. Arthur Munby was a well-off man of the empire who encountered maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick on the street. In the years following, they partook in a clandestine relationship that lasted decades . Most obviously transcending class boundaries, the couple wrestled with nearly every theme of oppression and empire in their sexual entanglement. For Cullwick, fetishism was an attempt “to negotiate the boundaries of power.” In her submission to Munby as both a lover and “slave” (she addressed him as “Massa”) Cullwick was able to feel seen in a way that had become impossible in the hyper-classed and hyper-gendered contemporary picture of society. The developing ideal of modern British women being “freed from labor” meant working women became anathema. Despite their labor being necessary for upper-class women’s “liberation”, working women’s visibility became grotesque and embarrassing. In her journals, Cullwick writes after sweeping a chimney:

"I swept lots o’ soot down and it came all over me and I sat there for ten minutes or more, and when I’d swept all around and as far as I could reach, I come down, and I lay on the hearth in the soot a minute or two thinking, and I wish’d rather that Massa could see me. I black’d my face over and then got the looking glass and look’d at myself and I was certainly a fright and hideous all over, at least I should o’ seem’d so to anybody but Massa.”

She makes plain the disgust society at large holds for her work, for the dirtiness it entails. Munby, however, revels in it. By fetishizing dirt and integrating its symbolic power into their most intimate moments, the pair refused the disappearance of women’s work. Cullwick made her labor essential to her womanhood and felt recognized by a man of the class and culture that was so vehemently repulsed by her. She found solace in her “slavery” to Munby and could act her class role with a fervent absurdity that questioned society’s authority to set boundaries and draw borders. Cullwick showed a “sustained determination to negotiate power within constrained circumstances of great limitations” Her first-person account of a working women in the Victorian era offers illustrative insight into the imagined “nature” of gender and its extreme consequences on the possibilities made available to everyone. In the case of Munby and Cullwick, reality was more dynamic than pictures of 19th century Britain let on. In the enclosed space of the bedrooms and secret hideaways of Munby and Cullwick, the scripts of the moral order were cast out; the foundation of western moral thinking shattered. Many histories dismiss cases like Munby and Cullwick’s as “deviance”, yet it would be difficult to argue that Cullwick was the only woman to experience and do these things. Isolating her as a one-off case means regressing into reliance upon the cultural theatrics of her day for truth. The more compelling solution is demythologizing the constructions of the British Empire and approach them as simply the products of a society attempting to project moral, racial, and cultural supremacy.

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