Sex and desire in the Industrial Revolution

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IntroductionNeither ‘sex’ nor ‘desire’ appear in textbooks of the Industrial Revolution and yet contemporaries, as well as subsequent historians, talk about them endlessly. Thomas Malthus made the seemingly irrepressible power of sexual desire the central axiom of his work on population, one of the foundational texts of nineteenth-century political economy. The classical sources on the social history of the period – Engels, Gaskell, Kay-Shuttleworth, not to speak of parliamentary investigations, medical tracts and novels – revel in observations on the subject: on prostitution (newly christened the social evil); on lasciviousness among the young and especially young working-class girls; on scarcely novel domestic practices like the sharing of beds and sleeping rooms by parents, children of both sexes, and lodgers which now deeply shocked middle-class witnesses; on masturbation; and generally on a diffusely but powerfully felt loss of social control over sexuality.Moreover, as contemporaries well understood and philosophers since Nietzsche have emphasized, sexual desire is not simply a measurable biological property but itself a product of historical forces. It is both generated and deployed by social practices and by the vast array of often contradictory literature of which it is the focus. Factories, cities, shops, markets, novels and medical tracts were all themselves engines of desire and not just sites for indulging or writing about it.

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