The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays. However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti-Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal.