Professor Steven Marcus
Academic and literary critic known for his analysis of Dickens and a study of Victorian pornography
PROFESSOR STEVEN MARCUS, who has died aged 89, was an American scholar best known for his classic bestselling study of 19th-century British pornography The Other Victorians (1964), in which he threw much new light on hitherto obscure and unmentionable aspects of Victorian life.
In 1961 Marcus was teaching at Indiana University when he was invited by the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research based there to study the huge collection of Victorian pornography contained in its archives. Marcus had just finished a book about Charles Dickens and had co-edited another about the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. As he explained in the preface to The Other Victorians, while he had his misgivings about a book on secret 19th-century sex, he would “take at least a crack” at what was then virtually uncharted territory.
In his book, Marcus (then a young professor of English) explained and analysed the change from the sexual frankness and permissiveness of the 18th century to the repression of the 19th, when currents of sensuality and even violence ran beneath the respectable surface of Victorian life.
After an exposition of the official Victorian attitude to sex (“a universal and virtually incurable scourge”), he turned his sights on the forbidden literature of the age – pornographic novels like The Lustful Turk (1828) and Randiana (1884), the vast literature of flagellation, pamphlets on sodomy and the perceived horrors of self-abuse. Quoting freely and without expurgation, he described a murky world that was “part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination, part madhouse”.
He examined the work of Henry Spencer Ash bee, the first scholar bibliographer of pornography, and dwelt at length on the notorious Victorian million-word erotic epic
My Secret Life. Its author, “Walter” or Mr X, was an unknown, rich and abnormally sexed Englishman and a veteran of more than 1,200 sexual encounters (“women of 27 Empires, Kingdoms or Countries”), mostly with prostitutes, servants or starving skivvies.
In the end Marcus, who claimed to be the only modern academic to have ploughed through all 11 volumes, was disinclined to support the theory that Ashbee himself was Mr X.
In 1969, when a Bradford printer, Arthur Dobson, was charged under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act for republishing My Secret Life, Marcus flew to Britain to testify as an expert defence witness.
Pressed at Leeds assizes to agree that “Walter’s” account of sex with a 10-year-old girl at Vauxhall Gardens was the most evil passage he had ever read, Marcus replied that 20th-century accounts of Nazi concentration camps or of 13-year-old Victorian chimney sweeps dying of cancer of the scrotum were more evil, but no one advocated suppressing this knowledge. Dobson was convicted and jailed for two years.
The prosecution also accused Marcus in The Other Victorians of harbouring prurient motives for analysing pornography. In his final chapter, Marcus likened pornographic fiction to a utopian fantasy of abundance, coining the term “pornotopia” to describe a realm where “all men … are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.” Within weeks of publication in Britain in 1966, The Other Victorians was top of the bestseller lists, outselling Nancy Mitford’s portrait of Louis XIV in
The Sun King.
Marcus’s work set off a spate of 19th-century cultural studies and books by other writers on sexuality, prostitution, masturbation, flagellation, sodomy and masochism.
The grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Steven Paul Marcus was born on December 13 1928 in New York City. Ten months later his father, an accountant, lost his job in the Wall Street crash and had to move his family to a poor neighbourhood in the Bronx.
Leaving De Witt Clinton High School at the age of 15, he won scholarships to both Columbia University in New York and Harvard, but because his family could not afford to board him at Harvard, Steven attended Columbia, where he studied under
Lionel Trilling, who would become the pre-eminent American literary intellectual of the 1950s. Marcus continued to live at home, carrying his lunch to college in a paper bag.
On graduation, he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia, submitting his master’s thesis on Henry James in 1949. After teaching at Baruch College and the universities of North Carolina and Southern California, in 1952 he was awarded a fellowship at Cambridge, where he studied with FR Leavis.
Returning to America in 1954, he served two years in the US Army before settling again at Columbia, where he earned his doctorate. He was appointed to an assistant professorship as a faculty colleague of Lionel Trilling and spent a summer teaching at Indiana University, where he toured the Kinsey Institute.
In his first book, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1961), Marcus analysed the first seven of Dickens’s major novels in their historical and political context, framing a neat comparison between England’s two most protean literary imaginations: “One of the most instructive things about Dickens’s development is that, like Shakespeare, he had an impulse to begin writing his next work in the middle of the one he was currently engaged upon.”
In the same year he collaborated with Trilling on an abridgement of Ernest Jones’s The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1961). During the Vietnam War, Marcus became a prominent peace campaigner.
In Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (1974), Marcus charted the Manchester conurbation’s swift expansion from 24,000 inhabitants in 1773 to some 400,000 by the 1840s, a doubling of the population every 16 years. He showed how Friedrich Engels, sent to Manchester to work in a branch of his German family firm, used his capitalist father’s generosity to popularise and subsidise the ideas of a young Karl Marx whom he met there in 1842.
But one British critic wondered whether the frequent errors of fact about Manchester implied that Marcus had never set foot in the city, while The Sunday Telegraph wished that Marcus had not written it with so many “far-fetched classical twitterings”.
One notable aspect of The Other Victorians was Marcus’s breezy prose, a feature of all his books intended for a general readership. One scholarly reviewer of his Representations (1975), a collection of his reviews and essays, commended Marcus’s style for its “playfulness, wit, zest, and readability,” in contrast to the “high seriousness and arch academicism of most criticism today”.
In 1988 a paranoid schizophrenic called Daniel Price heard Marcus lecture at Columbia. Afterwards Price inundated him with messages and posted him a suicide note. With his colleague Edward Said, Marcus persuaded Price to take psychiatric medication, but Price later sent death threats to both Marcus and Said, accusing them of “soul murder”, and in 1994 Marcus reported that Price had twice used a baseball bat to shatter windows at the English Department at Columbia before being arrested.
In a major reorganisation in 1993, Marcus was appointed to serve as both dean of the college and vice-president for arts and sciences, only to be restored to his teaching and research post two years later. As dean, Marcus had been criticised for being unwilling to meet students and for not using email. After being compared in an editorial in the university newspaper to a “giant severed penis”, Marcus resigned citing health reasons.
Steven Marcus’s first marriage, to Algene Ballif, in 1965, ended in divorce and the following year he married a German sociologist, Gertrud Lenzer. Their son John studied at the Juilliard school of music and became a violinist.
Professor Steven Marcus, born December 13 1928, died April 25 2018