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For the generation of Bloomsbury, Victorianism represented the stern father of civic and religious piety, who asked obedience of his children in the service of social and religious stability: Edmund Gosse's father prohibiting fancy and fiction to the child in the name of the Calvinist ministry, James Mill giving pedagogy where John craved affection. This father, embodying the inflexibility of the Hebraic god and the social ethic of Harrow, had to be slain so that the new generation could live. With Lytton Strachey waiting at the crossroads, he was attacked and fell.
That battle of the generations won, it has been possible for the grand- and great-grandchildren of the Victorian paterfamilias to see the “old boy” as something less than all superego; or at least to see superego at war with Eros. Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians gets at that other (or under) side of Victorian patriarchy and proves what might have been surmised all along…heightened inhibition is the bedfellow of impulse.
With methodological brilliance, Marcus compares a representative spokesman of repressive Victorian culture…the physician, William Acton …with the eleven-volume masturbatory autobiography My Secret Life (housed at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, the sponsor of Marcus's undertaking), and shows that the sexual vision of the latter is implicit in the former: “And though Acton regards with apprehension what is pornography's raison d'être, in both the same process is taking place…the complete sexualization of reality.”
As well as participating in the complete sexualization of reality, Acton also subscribes to the capitalization of sexuality, as does the author of My Secret Life: “And the model on which the notion of semen is formed is clearly that of money. Science, in the shape of Acton, is thus still expressing what had for long been a popular fantasy: up until the end of the nineteenth century the chief English colloquial expression for the orgasm was ‘to spend.’”