Nom de Plume

As a procrastinatory method, the only thing better than fantasizing about finishing your Regency romance is conducting “absolutely necessary” research.

Hence Sex in Georgian England. Despite its titillating title, however, this was a pretty dry read. One wonders if a writer about sex in history deliberately deadens his prose in order to be taken more seriously.

Still, it amused me, mainly because Harvey obviously hates Americans. “The first two volumes of Peter Gay’s multi-volume The Bourgeois Experience deal with sex in the nineteenth century … in the leisurely and expansive manner thatn characterises a certain brand of American scholarship,” he (she?) says. “My own book leaves off where his begins but in any case has been written under completely different intellectual, social and financial conditions, which have led me to conclude that the subject could be handled better in a short book than in a long book.”

Thank heavens for that. I yawned my way through it. Not to say there wasn’t some interesting information–it was meticulously researched, no question about that–but I think I would have preferred a little more leisure and expansiveness. Every paragraph was so packed with detail, citations, and scholarly pomp that one never got a real sense of the people. And that, more than anything, is what history is about.

Particularly, one would presume, history about sex.