Mark Steyn: Victor Victorians. A lesson in real morality

We have a mental image of 18th Century England as a land of very "proper" and morally scrupulous people who shuddered at the sight of a naked leg ... a piano leg. What a ridiculous misconception:

The 18th century Church of England preached "a tepid kind of moralism" disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blase even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded 7,000 women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five percent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was 16, and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of 14.
[snip]
What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience": In the 1790s a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill.

Read the whole thing.