But in addition to all this, there are times when a voyeur inadvertently serves as a social historian. This point is made in a book I had read recently called The Other Victorians. It was written by Steven Marcus, a biographer, essayist, and professor of literature at Columbia University. One of the main characters in Marcus’s book is a nineteenth-century English gentleman who was born into an affluent upper-middle-class family and apparently overcompensated for his repressive upbringing by having voyeuristic experiences, as well as directly intimate ones, with a vast number of women—servant girls, courtesans, other men’s wives (while having a wife of his own), and at least one marchioness. Professor Marcus described this gentleman as leading a life of “stable promiscuity.”
Beginning in the mid-1880s, this individual began writing a sexual memoir about his liaisons and voyeuristic recollections, and a few decades later his efforts had expanded into an eleven-volume work of more than 4,000 pages. He called it My Secret Life.
While he concealed his identity as its author, he did arrange for it to be privately published in Amsterdam, and from there it gradually achieved notoriety as pirated editions and excerpts were circulated through the literary underground of Europe and the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, as obscenity laws became less oppressive, an American edition of My Secret Life was legally published for the first time, in 1966, by Grove Press, and it was commended by Professor Marcus as a work containing important insights and facts relevant to the social history of that period.
“In addition to presenting such facts,” Marcus wrote, “My Secret Life shows us that amid and underneath the world of Victorian England as we know it—and as it tended to represent itself to itself—a real, secret social life was being conducted, the secret life of sexuality. Every day, everywhere, people were meeting, encountering one another, coming together, and moving on. And although it is true that the Victorians could not help but know of this, almost no one was reporting on it; the social history of their own sexual experiences was not part of the Victorians’ official consciousness of themselves or of their society.”
Since the anonymous author of My Secret Life pays special attention to London’s prostitutes, often presenting them as well-rewarded pragmatists responding to the desires of the marketplace—one prostitute had several servants and a brougham, and earned between fifty and seventy pounds a week—Marcus suggests that the author’s sentiments and scenes drawn from the “underbelly of the Victorian world” stood in contrast to the more “positive values” promoted by the era’s novelists. “What Dickens does, of course, is to suppress any references to prostitutes and to censor his report on the language of the dockside,” Marcus wrote, adding, “The first thing we learn, then, from such scenes (and there are hundreds of them in My Secret Life) is what did not get into the Victorian novel, what was by common consent and convention left out or suppressed.”
What is also learned from the author of My Secret Life is much about personal hygiene and toilet habits as practiced by the Victorians. Before the mid-1800s, few public toilets existed in the city, and, in such places as Hampton Court Park, men and women would relieve their bladders in the bushes, and, in the evenings, also in the streets.
“The police took no notice of such trifles,” wrote the author, “provided it was not done in the greater thoroughfare (although I have seen at night women do it openly in the gutters in the Strand); in the particular street I have seen them pissing almost in rows; yet they mostly went in twos to do that job, for a woman likes a screen, one usually standing up till the other has finished, and then taking her turn.”
He also reported that women did not wear undergarments, but, alas, sometime in the mid-1900s “more and more this fashion of wearing drawers seems to be spreading . . . whether lady, servant, or whore, they all wear them. I find they hinder those comfortable chance feels of bum and cunt.”
The author’s obsessive curiosity about women, their bodies and bodily functions, which began during his youth in the 1820s when he was surrounded by maidservants—one of whom laughingly “put her hand outside my trousers, gave my doodle a gentle pinch and kissed me”—continued throughout his lifetime and prompted him to write: “Some men—and I am one—are insatiable and could look at a cunt without taking their eyes off for a month.”
Professor Marcus adds, “Another form that this impulse takes is his desire to see other people copulating; and in his later maturity he goes to great lengths and considerable expenditure to assure himself the experience of such sights. His chief visual obsession, however, is his need to see, look at, inspect, examine, and contemplate . . .” As the author himself put it: “Man cannot see too much of human nature.”