Naughty politicians and shady ladies

Here’s one quote by Charles Dickens that I bet you haven’t read this week. As far as the male sex was concerned, he told a foreign visitor in 1848, promiscuity ‘is so much the rule in England that if any son of his were particularly chaste, he should be alarmed on his account, as if he could not be in good health’. Twenty-first century parents doubtless would put it slightly differently, but we probably all agree that what consenting adults get up to in their bedrooms is their own business.

That is a very recent idea. The presumption that sex was a private matter was born in the eighteenth century. Before then, except within marriage, it was illegal, and people were punished for it — flogged, imprisoned, fined, publicly humiliated, and worse. The last execution for adultery in England took place in 1654; the last prosecution for it as a public crime appears to have been in 1746.