Hi historians, im currently doing an independant research project and have come to a bit of a struggle in finding academic literature and scholarship on this topic. Obviously foucault is a good place to start but other than that scholarship seems to be rather scattered. I have found a few sources however none are uber specific to in particular victorian kink and fetish culture, instead focusing on sexual deviancy in masculinity, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.
the main issue as well is that the scholarship doesnt interact with each other, as my advisor criticised
“I would like you to follow up with me as I want to make sure your bibliography is appropriate and constitutes a field of enquiry and not random sources that are not scholars talking to each other.”
ouch, but pretty much the issue with this field of inquiry
this is a list of sources that i have obtained around this field, feel free to peruse
Foucault, M. (1976). The History of Sexuality.
Marcus, S. (2008). The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Transaction Publishers
Mason, M. (1994). The making of Victorian sexuality. Oxford University Press
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman’s Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, us people who study niche aspects of history must stick together <333 thank you very much
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A large part of your problem, obviously, is sources; these are rare for almost any sort of extramarital sexual encounters in this period, more so if you are going to restrict yourself to “kink” and “fetish” culture, and indeed I think one very relevant question you might pose is how much evidence there is that such a culture actually did exist in this period.
Anyway, I can suggest at least a couple of potential further leads that might be worth following up on. The first is the diaries of Arthur Munby, which are in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Munby was a well-off upper middle class solicitor, working for the Ecclesiastical Commission, who had a fetish for dirty and sweaty servant girls. His diaries explore the relationship he developed with Hannah Cullwick, a working class servant who indulged these fetishes (how much she got out of their role-play is, inevitably, much harder to know, but you might like to know that she did keep her own diary, at Munby’s insistence). Munby eventually married her, to the considerable scandal of both families, and the diaries have been the subject of at least three academic studies, so there is some element of academic discourse present. See:
>Diane Atkinson, Love and Dirt: the Marriage of Arthur Mundy and Hannah Cullwick (2003)
>Leonore Davidoff, “Class and gender in Victorian England: the diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979)
>Barry Reay, Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror, and Bodily De-Formation in Victorian England (2002)
Mundy does emerge from these studies as an isolated one-off, hence my curiosity about kink “culture” in this period. Is there really any parallel to the straight “sporting-man” persona identified and described by Timothy Gilfoyle in his City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialisation of Sex, 1790-1920 (1992), which was further explored in contemporary sources in Horowitz, Cohen and Gilfoyle’s The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (2008)? That latter work depended on the chance preservation of some highly ephemeral cheap print, so potentially not.
The second case study that exists is that of child prostitution, which first emerged into prominence as a result of the Mrs Jeffries case in the early 1880s. I wrote about this topic – adding a preliminary bibliography that might interest you – in relation to an enquiry here about King Leopold II’s involvement in it. The topic subsequently became a significant cause célèbre in the 1880s as a result of the controversial work of the muckraking journalist WT Stead on the notorious Eliza Armstrong case of 1888. In this case, as is fairly well-known, Stead sought to prove that trafficking in child prostitutes existed by actually buying a girl himself for the sum of £5.
This, of course, may well not meet your definition of “kink” and “fetish”, since, clearly, it involved very horrible and non-consensual acts – but it produced a major scandal and much evidence at the time and, hence, has also attracted academic interest. If not, however, you might like note that, as a sidelight on the Jeffries investigation, it emerged that this prominent society madam owned and ran two “flogging shops” in the London area, which attracted some apparently very high-class patrons to the BDSM services that were offered there. While, to the best of my knowledge, almost nothing is known in detail about the activities that went on there, I suspect that this is a historical thread that might yield material of interest if you pulled at it. For example, the secret diaries written by “Walter” in his My Secret Life in roughly the same period also contain descriptions of his participation in this sort of kink, and there is some coverage of this side of things in Ian Gibson’s The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shaming in Victorian England (1979). Note, however, that Gibson’s identification of “Walter” has been fairly comprehensively demolished by Pattinson’s brilliant “The Man Who Was Walter“, Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002).
In addition, although this might be a little too mainstream for you, there is a small literature on sexual slumming in this period – meaning “descents” by upper class people into working class districts in search of sexual experience. The two main authorities in this field are Cheap and Koven; between them they have developed at least the germ of some theory here. See
>Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (2009)
>Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2004)
Finally, I would have thought any bibliography focused in this field ought to acknowledge Judith Walkowitz’s highly influential City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1992), even though, again, most of the material in the book is likely to be too mainstream for your study. This is because Walkowitz kicked off one lowish-key historical debate by portraying sex work as a potentially empowering. Other scholars, such as Julia Laite, have countered by arguing that – certainly in the Jeffries brothels she has studied – “pervasive class, gender and political inequities played out and were magnified by gross sexual immorality and perversion.”
Some further suggestions that I’ve pulled from the reading list of an undergrad history paper I did about 15 years ago on “Sex and Sexuality in Modern Europe” – they’re fairly generalist from memory; but I do recall the difficulty of nailing down sources for specific subtopics.
Stepchildren of Nature – Kraft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Nature of Sexual Identity (2000) by Harry Oosterhuis
Imperial Leather – Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) by Anne McClintock