Bing we to Rumville

'Victorian repression was represented not only by young girls lovingly embroidering gentleman's braces or making skirts for pianofortes, not only by the nudes of Victorian high art parading in a never-never land of fanciful mythology and the hundreds of thousands of obscene photgraphs and prints still locked up in private collections, but also by the seemingly indestructible architectural fantasies like St Pancras station. In its agonised steeples and tortured passageways it is a living metaphor of Victorian sex.'
Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: the World of Victorian Sexuality (1969)



As Britain has returned to the default setting of the 19th century, it is always worth knowing your enemy. So not totally contradicting, but certainly making rather more lurid Foucault's demolition of the 'repressive hypothesis, the above book has some invaluable details. Seemingly written by a retired colonel, it tends to dismiss such interesting figures as Edward Carpenter (deviser of the 'intermediate sex') and Annie Besant as silly pinko cranks, yet the sheer weight of stuff makes it worthwhile.



Such as the formation of the 'Female Middle Class Women's Emigration Society' in the 1860s in response to the shortage of governess jobs leading to an increase in daughters of the bourgeoisie deciding to become 'kept'; or the existence of a privately printed book entitled Flash Cove's Slap-Up Reciter. Or the glossary, which has for whore in a brothel 'Academician', and for 'go to London' the phrase which serves as our title.