Culture March 22, 2011

I haven’t had sex since starting Deborah Lutz’s book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. Now that I’ve finished, I’m still in recovery. It’s only fair, you say, to look for other causes, but, I’m sorry, the correlation is too strong. These interwoven tales of Victorian high jinks include some piquant stories: Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his poems from his wife’s grave, Algernon Swinburne scurrying off to be “birched” by prostitutes near Regent’s Park, Richard Burton (the explorer) trying to wake the British out of their sexless sleep. But there’s a problem.