At Home - Bill Bryson [176]
Fortunately, science was standing by to help. One remedy, described by Mary Roach in Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science (2008), was the Penile Pricking Ring, developed in the 1850s, which was slipped over the penis at bedtime (or indeed anytime) and was lined with metal prongs that bit into any penis that impiously swelled beyond a very small range of permissible deviation. Other devices used electrical currents to jerk the subject into a startled but penitent wakefulness.
Not everyone agreed with these conservative views, it must be noted. As early as 1836, a French medical authority named Claude François Lallemand published a three-volume study equating frequent sex with robust health. This so impressed a Scottish medical expert named George Drysdale that he formulated a philosophy of free love and uninhibited sex called Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. Published in 1855, it sold ninety thousand copies and was translated into eleven languages, “including Hungarian,” as the Dictionary of National Biography notes with its usual charming emphasis on pointless detail. Clearly, there was some kind of longing for greater sexual freedom in society. Unfortunately, society at large was still a century or so away from granting it.
Penile Pricking Ring (photo credit 15.1)
In such a perpetually charged and confused atmosphere, it is perhaps little wonder that for many people successful sex was an unrealizable aspiration—and in no case more resoundingly than that of John Ruskin himself. In 1848, when the great art critic married nineteen-year-old Euphemia “Effie” Chalmers Gray, things got off to a bad start and never recovered. The marriage was never consummated. As she later related, Ruskin confessed to her that “he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”
Eventually able to take no more (or actually wanting to take a lot more, but with someone else), Effie filed a nullity suit against Ruskin, the details of which became a happy titillation for devotees of the popular press in many lands, and then ran off with the artist John Everett Millais, with whom she had a happy life and eight children. The timing of her virtual elopement with Millais was unfortunate, as Millais was at that time engaged in painting a portrait of Ruskin. Ruskin, a man of honor, continued to sit for Millais, but the two men never again spoke. Ruskin sympathizers, of whom there were many, responded to the scandal by pretending there wasn’t one. By 1900, the whole episode had been so effectively expunged from the record that W. G. Collingwood could, without a blush of embarrassment, write The Life of John Ruskin without hinting that Ruskin had ever been married, much less sent crashing from a room at the sight of female pubic hair.
Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn “under a certain condition of insanity,” and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.
Effie Ruskin’s escape from her unhappy marriage was both lucky and unusual, for nineteenth-century divorce acts, like everything else to do with marriage, were overwhelmingly biased in favor of men. To obtain a divorce in Victorian England, a man had merely to show that his wife had slept with another man. A woman, however, had to prove that her spouse had compounded his infidelity by committing incest, bestiality, or some other dark and inexcusable transgression drawn from a very small list. Until 1857, a divorcée forfeited all her property and generally lost the children, too. Indeed,