Footnote 14, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964; reprint 1974). Marcus's remarks follow an analysis of William Acton's popular manual, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, published in 1857: "The fantasies that are at work here have to do with economics; the body is regarded as a productive system with only a limited amount of material at its disposal. And the model on which the notion of semen is formed is clearly that of money.... Furthermore, the economy envisaged in this idea is based on scarcity and has as its aim the accumulation of its own product. And the fantasy of pornography . . . is this idea's complement, for the world of pornography is a world of plenty" (p. 22).
Last modified December 2000