The enduring effects of Malthus' original remarks, on lack of moral restraint as the cause of population growth & its consequences, have I think been underestimated & under appreciated. Although Malthus' arguments still underlie, often subconsciously, our modern concerns about global population growth, his effect on sexual behaviour as well as attitudes towards womens role has been, I shall argue, even more profound; Malthusian concerns eventually turned into, by way of justification for the moral restraint which C19th Britain adopted as the favoured method of birth control, the belief that women do not enjoy sex. There is no evidence that this belief, widespread by the centurys end, was at all common in the first half of the C19th. As is often the case, however, the generations born in the early C20th century took the beliefs of their parents as representing what had always been.
Victorian middle classes worried about Malthus at the wider national & social level as well as at the level of the personal & of the family. They realised the importance of education as a means of maintaining economic growth to cope with the unprecedented increase in population, but education was expensive, business often precarious, & there were few sources of secure employment which would provide a guaranteed income for those who did not hold land. Whether as a private family expense or as a public tax burden (to provide for education of the masses), the costs needed to be kept within bounds, & the only obvious way to do this was to limit the number of children requiring to be educated.
Why moral restraint should have been the method adopted for contraception remains a mystery however - physical methods were certainly known about & advocated by Radicals in pre-Victorian times; but Queen Victoria, who was certainly no marital prude & disliked being pregnant only because it interfered with her sex life, who had a scientifically-minded husband & undoubted access to the best advice if required, nevertheless seems not to have even considered the use of contraceptives; she accepted that a large family was the price of self-indulgence.
Evidence that a large family was regarded as a sign of lack of self restraint can be found in the papers of John Bright. This widely travelled orator & MP spent relatively little time with his wife yet still fathered a family of 8. His brother Jacob, father of one, remonstrated with him about this. Of course as the co-owner of the family business, and the one who bore most of the responsibility for its management, Jacobs concern would have been at least as much financial & economic as moral, because of anxiety about how to provide adequate maintenance & inheritance for so many. John Bright relied largely on his income from the family firm, since MPs were unpaid, though he was also the beneficiary of an unusually large number of public testimonials, & he did not always appreciate the need for economy & financial restraint.
Evidence that women were not regarded as straitlaced creatures without sexual appetite is provided in the Diaries of Absalom Watkin, Manchester merchant & radical. In 1827 he & like-minded friends entertained Richard Carlile who had recently been released from a 6-year prison sentence for publishing Tom Paines works & The Republican magazine. Carlile had also written Every Womans Book to promote the contraceptive sponge, already in use by members of the upper classes, such as the duchess who never went out to dinner without carrying one in her reticule.
For Watkin & his friends the insuperable objection to the sponge was that its widespread use of would lead to 'extreme profligacy among unmarried women' & to a lack of fidelity in wives - or at least it would destroy a husbands faith in his wifes fidelity. Watkin does not deal with the problem of a wifes faith in the fidelity of her husband, with or without the availability of contraceptives, so we do not know whether he & his friends were motivated by a mans need for faith that he was a father, or by some misogynistic belief in woman as temptress & devil. Perhaps the concept of moral restraint came to the fore as a solution to this conundrum. What is most interesting however is their clear belief in every womans need for an active sexual life; they believed for example that abstention could lead to death from consumption or other disease, & recognised that their rejection of the contraceptive sponge meant that unmarried women faced an invidious choice between the ill health associated with virginity & the social disgrace of unmarried motherhood.
Evidence that restraint was used to limit family size is found in the life of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. He & his wife, though still in love, deliberately abstained from sexual relations precisely to guard her from any further pregnancies after they had had 3 children; the middle one of which lived only 3 weeks. What spoils this story is that during this separation he was consoled by a mistress, the first of many.
Charles Dickens felt happy with four children; he also felt, as did so many Victorians, overburdened by financial responsibilities, not just toward his own children but to his parents & siblings. He therefore regarded with mixed feelings the birth of a fifth child, but proceeded to father another five in eight years. The need for self-restraint in his case was also eventually expressed in an extraordinary way. Just before Christmas 1857 he moved from the marital bedroom to the adjacent dressing room & arranged to have the communicating door blocked up & covered by a bookcase. Although he expressed his disgust at his wifes increasing fatness & sloppiness, this was the only way to control his own urges, or possibly his wifes demands.
