Modernity, vice, and the problem of nakedness

Abstract

In the words of Alison Smith, 1885 was a key year in the “social purity crusade against the nude in art and society,” with the Church of England Purity Society and the White Cross League both actively campaigning against the use of nude female models in art classes. At the same time, a lively exchange of letters in The Times debated the propriety of exhibiting nude paintings in respectable art venues, a debate in which social purity ideas were pitted against aesthetic judgment. But it was not only in the world of art that social purity campaigning made its mark in Britain in that year. This was, after all, the same year in which the Criminal Law Amendment Act both raised the female age of sexual consent and – by a notorious amendment to that act – criminalized “gross indecency,” a vague term used primarily to prosecute same-sex activities among men. It was also the year William Coote established one of the dominant social purity societies of its era, the National Vigilance Association, dedicated to raising the female age of sexual consent, establishing tighter obscenity laws, and stamping out prostitution. Only a year later in 1886 campaigners against Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts, whose protests had included a sturdy critique of rampant male sexuality, won their domestic repeal against laws that had rendered prostitution in certain instances not only legal but regulated by the state. Repeal was hailed as a signal victory by the social purity movement. The year 1886 also saw the first exhibition in England of what came to be called the “modern life” nude, a show that included works by, among others, Theodore Roussel (1847–1926), Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942), Henry Tuke (1858–1929), and Walter Sickert (1860–1942). In this chapter I want to suggest that what was happening in the art world and among social purity activists, read together, reveal some interesting tensions in the morality debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite the fact that the 1880s might be considered the high-water mark of nineteenth-century social purity, the debate over exhibiting nudes was already long-standing and vigorous in art circles.