Michael Mason

Christianity, in a literal sense, is not true. And every adult citizen, of either sex, is entitled to a vote. In modern Britain both these views are very widely believed. Our society is a secular and democratic one, with secular and democratic ideas running so deep that it is impossible to imagine them being dislodged – impossible to imagine, for example, that any political group that wanted to restore a supreme authority to the Church and to abolish universal suffrage could make the slightest headway. But how can this be? Didn’t the Britain of only 150 years ago have a completely different set of values? How can a reversal of attitudes so extreme and apparently permanent have come about?’

Among the people who almost certainly took comfort from the tone of the national discussion of events in Cleveland in the summer of 1987 were three middle-aged men from a housing estate in Congleton, Cheshire. As emerged in their trials earlier this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty. One man had raped his sobbing five-year-old daughter, as she was held down by her mother, and buggered his three-year-old son. The other two had indecently assaulted and buggered children between the ages of five and nine. It is reasonable to suppose that these men would have applied the Cleveland affair to their own situation quite thoroughly. While sexual assaults on children are no doubt sometimes unpremeditated, the literature is full of cases where the activity is a highly conscious project, often the project of a lifetime, even when the behaviour that is planned is of the most cruel and selfish variety. Men do, in real life, get married in the spirit of Humbert Humbert – sometimes with much younger and more defenceless targets in view than Lolita. They do – pace the incredulity expressed about certain diagnoses of Dr Marietta Higgs – deliberately get themselves accredited as fit to foster children with the intention of abusing their charges. In the case of Congleton it appears that some fifteen other adults may also have been involved in child sex: it was a ‘sex ring’ – a vague expression which is nevertheless surely correct in its implication of group commitment to a particular sexual practice.’

Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored. The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing weight of primary research: there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of Place himself, worked simultaneously as a night security guard – even now his main employment is said to be ‘as a computer manager and commercial researcher’).’

One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary. Everything about the jacket of ‘Men’ or Men suggests that what Weidenfeld and Nicolson favour about this book – that is, what they find commercially promising – is its author rather than her text. It is not just that Ms Ford is given great emphasis in the bled-off photograph of her that fills the back cover: the jacket strives to personalise the text inside, implying it to be interesting only, or chiefly, because of who wrote it. The background is pure white, the lettering scarlet and black. Not the expected livery for a book subtitled ‘A Documentary’ (but, as it happens, exactly the jacket colours of a recent mass-paperback humorous compilation by a woman about men). That subtitle does make its way onto the jacket (insofar as authors compose titles, there is a limit to the publisher’s power to drive the appearance of a book and its content apart). But the MEN above it dominates in letters more than six times taller – and then those inverted commas are sneaked in to discredit further the suggestion of objectivity or factuality which the subtitle might regrettably have carried. The reduction of Anna Ford to the thinking man’s Jackie Collins is complete.’

Human cultures in the historical period are intimidatingly complex affairs, and it is usually very difficult for the cultural historian to achieve generalisations that are reliable and also interesting. But middle-class sex in the Victorian period, one might think, is an exception. Surely cultural history can say something definite, but not trivial, about this subject. Not only academic self-respect but, in a sense, the self-respect of 20th-century Western attitudes at large are tied up in the question. If ‘Victorian’ does not correctly connote a special point of view about sex, at least one prevailing among the Victorian middle class, an alarming instability starts to make itself felt. One of the most secure ideas, apparently, that we have about the recent past, which enters even very informal discourse on countless occasions, looks dubious.