Culture

‘How we perceive the past, what we see in it and what we ignore, depends on our current perspective’, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at the end of his hotly-anticipated The Origins of Sex. Well, quite. In seeking words to describe Dabhoiwala’s history of sex, though, none could be more appropriate. The book resounds with sundry modern truths, so much so, in fact, that when Dr. Dabhoiwala finally poses the question, ‘How far, then, have we come?’ The answer, ‘Not very, sir, since 1800’, springs to mind.

Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health’. Twenty-first century parents doubtless would put it slightly differently, but we probably all agree that what consenting adults get up to in their bedrooms is their own business. That is a very recent idea. The presumption that sex was a private matter was born in the eighteenth century. Before then, except within marriage, it was illegal, and people were punished for it — flogged, imprisoned, fined, publicly humiliated, and worse.

The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they are too busy picking the corpses of the first world war to attend to an earlier conflict with altogether more ambiguous historical overtones. Andrew Miller’s Pure strides with admirable self-assurance into the pyretic atmosphere of Paris in 1785. We meet our hero in the Palace of Versailles, an ambitious young man supplicating himself to the ancien régime.

I've spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don't actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you've finished it' problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can't accidentally leave things between the pages for subsequent owners to find. Because, of course, there won't be any subsequent owners. One of the joys of a secondhand book is unexpectedly chancing upon someone's makeshift bookmark trapped between pages 118 and 119. A friend recently gave me, as a present, a copy of More Manners for Men, one of those bum-clenchingly snobbish etiquette guides from yesteryear. The specific ‘yester' in this case was 1908.

from ‘Windsor Forest’ See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs, And mounts exulting on triumphant wings: Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound, Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes, His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes, The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold? [...] In genial spring, beneath the quiv'ring shade, Where cooling vapours breathe along the mead, The patient fisher takes his silent stand, Intent, his angle trembling in his hand; With looks unmov'd, he hopes the scaly breed, And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.

Tomorrow is the bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and Fleet Street’s literary editors devoted much of their weekend pages to man who called himself ‘the Inimitable’. Penguin has run a poll on the nation’s favourite Dickens character; the Guardian reports that the winner is Ebenezer Scrooge, who saw off the likes of Pip, Fagin, Sydney Carton and Miss Havisham. Scrooge’s story is one of redemption. I can’t improve on the Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol, which said: ‘In short, the grasping, grudging money-muck, is transformed into a merry-faced, open-handed, warm-hearted old fellow.