In the early years of the swinging sixties, I and my young contemporaries, like twentieth-century generations before us, called all repressive attitudes towards sex, whatever their actual national or historic origins, ‘Victorian’. The scorn with which the term was used implied that the ‘Victorian’ view of the world was so outmoded that to invoke its taboos amounted to a ludicrous and pitiable attempt to return to the world of one's great-grandparents. ‘Victorian’ was regularly applied, for example, to the resurgent postwar moralism espoused by our parents, a conservative turn which was nothing if not contemporary in its impulse. Yet while ‘Victorian sexuality’ may have been, for us, an oxymoron, the persistent presence of ‘Victorian’ as the unhealthy antonym to the sexual freedom demanded – among other liberties, social and political – by progressive postwar generations, indicated a lingering belief in its residual cultural power, as well as, perhaps, a reluctant fascination with the world it evoked. For the dominant sense that the ‘Victorian’, defined as a socially coherent world view, was definitively over – twice dead after the social and political transformations of two world wars – provided a psychological as well as cultural distance that rendered the Victorian period harmless in its ability to affect the present, and, as a consequence, ripe for reassessment and renarration, a readiness marked by renewed interest in its ideas, its inventions, its political aspirations and its imaginative literature.