I had a friend (now dead, alas) who spent much of his academic career attempting (vainly) to explode the myth that the Victorians, poor things, were so nervous of sex that they draped their piano legs and refused to countenance anything that brought even a faint rose to a maiden’s cheek.

In fact, he argued, Victorian society was more highly sexed than any in our history. Freud, he claimed, was a Victorian (historically and spiritually). Nor was it all theory. As Freud asserts, the stronger the urge the stronger the repression.

There was plenty to repress. The Lancet in 1857 reported that there were more than 6,000 brothels in London and 80,000 prostitutes. The statistics add a gloss of truth to the Victorian porn classic Lady Pokingham: Or They all do It. They all did, apparently. And none more athletically than that most indefatigable of Victorian sexologists, “Walter”.

Walter’s My Secret Life was published in 11 volumes (abroad, necessarily), between 1888 and 1894. Some 25 sets were printed at a cost of £60 (close to £5,000 today). You can now get a Wordsworth Classic edition for 99p or, if that’s too much, the whole unzipped epic is free on the web at my-secret-life.com.

Walter uses the f-word 5,357 times, recording some facts with some 1,200 partners of every conceivable, and inconceivable, kind. And it goes on for 1,100 pages. Walter probably went to his coffin with an erection.

There is huge debate over who Walter might have been. Henry Ashbee, a bibliographer with an interest in forbidden books, is prime candidate. He would have been 24 in 1857 and, if he was Walter, alrady well-started on his erotic odyssey. There is also disagreement about how authentic Walter’s sexual odyssey was. However you look at it, this Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentlemanconfirms that the Victorian Gentleman was very interested in sex. But it was, like many activities, discreet: a thing for the diary, the smoking room, the knocking shop.

When, in the 1960s, Henry Silver’s diary of conversations at the Punch table was made generally available, Thackerayans were astonished at how bawdy the respectable novelist talked. To his comrades the author of Vanity Fairconfided that on his first day at Charterhouse School, a senior boy came up to him and peremptorily demanded: “Come to the bog and frig me.” Which the new bug doubtless did.

The floodgates of filth, as Lord Longford called them, were thrown open after the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. The deluge carried a whole library of Victorian literary and visual pornography. It included (with Walter’s doings) such journals as The Pearl, Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, eye-popping photos (a good entry point today is photography.about.com) and such long-suppressed full-length volumes such as The Order of the Rod.It was a window on to what Steven Marcus called, in his ground-breaking 1964 monograph, The Other Victorians.

The annus mirabilis for obscenity-historians is 1857. That was the year the first Obscene Publications Act came into force in Britain (and with it, oddly, the word “pornography”). It would rule for a century. In France that year there were three high-profile trials: against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Baudelaire’s poems, and Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères du Peuple.

There were two fascinatingly different moral codes displayed. The Anglo-Saxon, as laid down by the 1857 Act of Parliament, took as its defining criterion that obscenity is defined by its inherent tendency to “deprave and corrupt”. Especially, that is, the “young”. D&C extended along the range from “give a man an uncontrollable urge to commit sexual crime” to bringing a blush to the maiden cheek. In France, as established in the courts in 1857, the criterion was outrage aux bonnes moeurs – public indecency. The question was: did a work, by its encouragement to moral disorder, threaten the state?

It’s my belief that “liberalisation” is a myth where pornography is concerned. There is repression and suppression (verging, in totalitarian regimes, on oppression) in every society and every age. It simply targets different areas. We are “Victorian”, for example in matters of child pornography. We hate it and do our best to exterminate it. Quite right too. The Victorians, by contrast, had a blind spot where we have a raw nerve. As the journalist W. T. Stead demonstrated in 1885, you could buy a child virgin in London for as little as £5. Victorian pornography is replete with infantile devirgination. It was no crime, with the “age of consent” at 12.

However, Victorians would have been appalled at what is on display in our public phone boxes, or in the personal-ad pages of our newspapers. Modern London would seem like Sodom to them.

Pornography, whether in 1857 or 2007, is one of many useful litmus papers for determining what strange mixtures are at work culturally. The Victorians were not prudish, nor are we enlightened. Different times, different porn.

The “friend” to whom I refer to in the first paragraph is Michael Mason, author of The Making of Victorian Sexuality

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