Once a Week Is Ample: The Moderately Sensual Victorian’s Guide to Restraint of the Passions by Gerard Macdonald (1982)

Victorian advice reveals an unexpectedly comic view of intimacy

Vintage Good Condition - Rubbed and soiled covering with edge/corner wear, toned page edges and light spotting. Reprinted 1982.

Gerard Macdonald compiles quotations from Victorian sources of advice about relations between men and women, presenting their solemn warnings and prescriptions with a distinctly humorous effect. The extracts reveal the assumptions, anxieties and elaborate restraint that surrounded a subject the writers approached with great concern for delicacy and propriety. Read together, their confident pronouncements offer both entertainment and a revealing glimpse of attitudes from another era. The book's presentation lets the original advisers supply much of the comedy themselves, without requiring their claims to be taken as guidance. Once a Week Is Ample is a collection for readers interested in social history, curious old advice and the gap between earnest intention and unintended amusement.