VICTORIANAGEThe novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the period f not the most moral, certainly the most squeamish.�Unlike the verbal robustness of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods, the public language of the Victorian era was celebrated for its propriety and its euphemisms. As the entry for Charles Dickens shows, evasions of such words as damn, hell, and even trousers were very typical of the age, but like Laurence Sterne, he enjoyed using obvious euphemisms, actually developing a conniving relationship with his readers. Similarly, Anthony Trollope, whose novels have mainly ecclesiastical settings, shares with the reader the quintessentially Victorian spectacle of self-righteous anger struggling with decorum in Archdeacon Grantly: �Why not!�almost screamed the archdeacon . . . hy not!hat pestilent interfering upstart, John Boldhe most vulgar young person I ever met!�. . . And being at a loss for an epithet sufficiently injurious, he finished his expressions of horror by muttering ood Heavens!�in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese�(The Warden 1855, chapter 2). In a very different style Thomas Hardy concluded the tragic story of Tess of the Drbervilles (1891) by referring not to God or Fate, but by the provocative comment that he President of the Immortals . . . had ended his sport with Tess.�Although technically a euphemism, Hardy divine title is actually blasphemous, amounting to a snub to the Almighty and to notions of Christian Providence. The Victorian era is famous for its multitudinous sexual euphemisms, preferring n an interesting condition�to pregnancy, hite and brown meat�of a chicken to the leg and breast, even referring to the limbs of a piano. One of Mayhew informants categorized under the heading of Bawds, describes her all� he ight-cap�was evidently drugged, and during my state of insensibility my ruin was accomplished�(Vol. 4, 247). The use of opaque Latinisms and ingenious metaphors, already developed in the eighteenth century, continued to flourish:The tree of Life, then, is a succulent plant, consisting of one only stem, on the top of which is a pistillum or apex, sometime of a glandiform appearance, and not unlike a May-cherry, though at others seasons more resembling the Avellana or filbeard tree. Its fruits, contrary to most others, grow near the root; they are usually two in number, in size somewhat exceeding that of an ordinary nutmeg, and are both contained in one Siliqua, or purse, which together with the whole root of the plant, is commonly beset with innumerable fibrilla, or capillary tendrils. (from The Exquisite 1842)Not every reader would recognize this as a description of the penis. Those perusing Burton translation of The Arabian Nights (1886) would come across this learned description of the dildo: f the penis succadaneus, that imitation of the Arbor vit, . . . which the French [call] godemiche�(X, 239). Within the thriving genre of Victorian pornography the division of registers between rarefied Latin, foreign terms, and frank bawdy is frequently apparent, quintessentially revealed in this description: could see the lips of her plump pouting cunny, deliciously feathered, with soft light down, her lovely legs, drawers, stockings, pretty boots, making a tout ensemble, which as I write and describe them caused Mr. Priapus to swell in my breeches.�The title itself contains the same linguistic mlange: Sub-Umbra, or Sport Amongst the She481
