We are apt to think of authoritarianism in emotional and sexual life as pre-eminently Victorian. It was an outcome, we tend to believe - if indeed we think of it historically at all - of the unrelenting imposition of middle-class conformism on the easier, opener attitudes of the English peasantry. 'Earthy' is the word we most often use of the way the peasants carried on. But listen to this:

LRB 24 January 1980 | PDF Download