A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Thanks to everyone who gave me recommendations for getting started reading Dickens. I finished A Tale of Two Cities last night. My favourite character turned out to be the villain! I can't help but think if the book had been written by a different author, perhaps a French one, the same character in exactly the same situation would have been the heroine. I maintain that she was great!

I found that I did enjoy it quite a bit, then end was very exciting and I just really wanted to find out how it all ended. I liked the character development and the cyclical nature of the story. I think that the actual revolution and horror parts weren't done as well as Anatole France. There seemed to be no political or ethical explanation for what the French were trying to do. Which was a bit disappointing, no one faced any internal conflict, they were the way they were and that was that. I think that might be why I didn't connect with the book the way I do other 19th century literature that I love, such as Thackery, Wells and Hardy and probably why I felt it to be a bit juvenile, in that you never saw inside anyone.

I find I did enjoy it much more than I was expecting and am quite tempted to go and get some more Dickens that was also recommended to me by people on my friends list. (As soon as I've caught up with some of the massive backlog of my "to read" pile).

The Making of Victorian Sexuality by Michael Mason

I found this book shortly after the lecture at Tradwells. While not one that had been recommended to me by oursin it was published by Oxford University Press and was written by an English lecturer at UCL so seemed fairly trustworthy. It was incredibly interesting and informative, particularly for a novice on the subject like me. Even though it was written by an English professor Mason did not draw his examples and evidence from the literature of the time, rather he took a historical methodological approach using mainly non-fiction sources, and statistical data analysis that provided quite an insight into the time. He also drew heavily from other studies and examined their use of correlation between statistics and figures. One example of this was how the number of illegitimate births correlated to a younger age for marriage. This might be opposite to what would appear to be intuitive, that if a lot of people married young there would be less babies born out of wedlock, however what this actually shows is that the average age of sexual consummation is simply lower. It was interesting to see how much sex in Victorian times was a part of "courtship", very different to the middle class drawing rooms found in literature. I think it was something like a third of all brides getting married were pregnant.

The book begins with a look at where the idea of the "prudish" Victorians came from, and how this developed. Mason tried to analyse and see what the changing attitudes towards sex were during the long reign of Queen Victoria and how these views were in line with earlier ideas and in what way they changed. Rather than try and identify any deviant or fringe sexuality, even homosexuality was ignored, Mason focused on the prevailing attitudes of heterosexual premarital and extra-martial sex. He also examined attitudes towards sex among married couples, for instance the use of contraception and the idea of limiting family sizes. He examined not only the differences between classes, but also the differences between town and country life.

There was a large section that focused on the lives of prostitutes, however only women prostitutes were addressed and nothing was said about male prostitutes at all. Still I found it to be very interesting and enlightening. Location was key to the business and it was interesting to see which areas grew in popularity and how the prostitutes moved about. Mason used the changing locations to help to explain the different views on how many or how few prostitutes there were. The work was very detailed and made me really want to do my own study on Tang dynasty prostitutes in China, as there were so many of them, and they were frequently associated with Taoism. Unfortunately I don't think the sources would support such a study, however definitely something to keep in mind for the future.

The last chapter, Quantifying sexuality, I found rather hard going but apart from that I did enjoy the book a great deal. One of the things that I found most amusing about this book was a description of the different decades, the 60s were described as a much more liberal time where sex was viewed much more openly, and in the 70s many young people flocked to skating rinks where they could intermingle between the sexes freely and unescorted. It was funny to see the comparisons between the 19th and 20th century.

About half way through the book Mason started talking about issues he would be addressing in volume 2. Unfortunately until that point there was nothing to indicate that the book I was reading was only part 1. But as I was liking it so much I did manage to track down volume 2 on Amazon which I'm also looking forward to reading.