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Dance Halls of Early Victoria,
1859-1866		  
 
 
European Ideas Of Sexuality

          Even though everyone thinks of Victorian sexuality in relation to the fact the Victorians were supposedly so prudish that they covered the legs of their pianos, it is important to remember that the reason they were covering their piano legs is that the gently curving legs were considered so erotic that they were indecent.  This stereotypical image of the prudish Victorian is just another example of folk wisdom proven wrong as soon as one moves past the surface and examines the underlying realities.  It is only because the first historians who explored the topic of Victorian sexuality discovered the “macabre assortment of impotent men, frigid women, secret addicts, and masturbators drained to death,”* present in the advice literature of the day that the folk wisdom version of Victorian sexuality arose at all. 


            In reality, Victorian society was one of sharp contrasts; it was split between the proper daytime culture of covered piano legs, and the more sensual private lives of the average Victorians.  Even though polite society preached and required impossibly high morals and “Victorian moralists preached asexual ideals, red light districts flourished,” and men were tacitly allowed to visit them.*  Indeed, Victorian prostitution clearly reflects this dichotomy.  That a woman should be sexual enough to be a prostitute was considered a major departure from normalcy—“in common parlance a prostitute was called an 'unnatural woman'.”*   Yet prostitution—among other vices—was an accepted norm in society, albeit one that moralists attempted to rid society of. 

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