Vanguardists in the Victorian era thought they were sexual revolutionaries. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Wilhelm Reich, the father of the sexual revolution, started out as a star pupil of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology. Reich was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1920, while he was still a graduate student, and already a radical idea was percolating in his head: that sexuality, fundamental to our being, and yet a source of shame for centuries, had the power to heal much of what ailed us, if only we would let it.

Breaking with religious teachings that the sole function of sex ought to be procreation and that any other erotic pursuit was sinful, Reich offered a new and defiantly humanist perspective, asserting that sexual pleasure was beneficial—indeed, necessary—to human flourishing, and that, when it came to orgasms, the more the merrier. As Christopher Turner writes in his new book, “Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35), Reich offered the “tantalizing suggestion that sexual emancipation would lead to positive social change.” Good sex was the path to the good society.

George Boyce would certainly have agreed. On warm spring evenings, he and a companion would roam around town looking for anonymous action with amenable young women. Their pursuits were almost always fruitful. Often, Deborah Lutz writes in her recent book, “Pleasure Bound” (Norton; $27.95), “a bold stare would suffice.” As if cruising weren’t easy enough already, there were reference guides to consult—accounts of other young men’s exploits, with suggestions for the best locations and times to score. For sophisticates like Boyce and his circle, zealous advocates and practitioners of the zipless fuck, theirs was truly an age of Aquarius, when old inhibitions and strictures could be cast off, and the sexually enlightened could enjoy what Reich called “the genital embrace” without guilt or encumbrance. These people complicate the usual story of our sexual revolution only because of an awkward bit of timing: their libidinal awakening arrived in the heyday of Victorian England. “How easy it was to find sex in 1860s London!” Lutz writes. The subtitle of her book is “Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism.”

If the popular perception remains that Victorians were hopelessly mired in repression and prudery, Lutz seeks to capture the shuddering underbelly of Victorian society—what Steven Marcus’s classic 1974 study, “The Other Victorians,” described as “a world part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination, part madhouse.” Lutz conjures a time when people like Boyce and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti revelled in free love, and when “respectable gentlemen” who had other tastes “prowled the night streets of London for young grenadiers to bend them over in a public toilet.” Sex wasn’t just a favorite recreational activity; it was a primary topic of conversation and subject of study. The adventurer, translator, pornography collector, and writer Richard Francis Burton started the Cannibal Club, in 1863, so that his friends—including such artistic eminences as the poet and avid flagellant Algernon Swinburne—would have, in Lutz’s words, a forum “to analyze ‘deviant’ sexual practices and encourage one another in personal and artistic investigations into the outer reaches of sexual behavior.” These forays into the erotic unknown would invariably take place over “rare wine, steaks, chops, mutton and all manner of meat.”

As with our own sexual revolution, theirs involved technological as well as intellectual innovation. For centuries, physicians had been treating hysteria in their female patients with “pelvic massage,” but in the early eighteen-eighties Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator, which advanced this particular medical procedure considerably. (The vibrator was made available as an over-the-counter treatment two decades later, when it was the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle; it remains the machine most important to a great many smoothly functioning households.)

Lutz’s Victorians were, as she says, “groping their way toward a new view of the sexual body.” Swinburne, in particular, was “well on his way to a new heretical questioning in his art: could a worship of the senses replace a belief in God?” This “new eroticism,” then, was far more than a matter of a few libertines’ nocturnal prowlings. Here was an era when the sciences, including the human sciences, were starting to eclipse the authority of Church and Scripture, and English freethinkers like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis—dubbed “the Darwin of sex”—wrote about the varieties of sexual experience without moralizing or pathologizing. Owenites and Fourierists had already formed communities where the sex radicals of the nineteen-sixties would have felt at home: Haight-Ashbury, with tea cozies. It would be tempting to conclude that sexual liberation was really a nineteenth-century project, that Reich was bounding along a trail blazed by his frisky Victorian forebears—if it weren’t for the fact that the eighteenth century had a sexual revolution, too.

More than a hundred years before the Cannibal Club offered, in Lutz’s words, a “freewheeling, uncensored forum to discuss the heady topics of the day: sexuality, gender, and, of course, religion,” the members of the Hell-Fire Club were on a similar mission. “They wanted sensual delights, sexual pleasure, and an alternative to religion,” Evelyn Lord writes in her 2008 book, “The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies.” These were places where, according to Lord, “hedonism ruled in a mix of sociability and rampant sexuality.” Like the Cannibal Club of the following century, the Hell-Fire Club had a name designed to shock, a membership drawn from the respectable upper classes, and a skepticism toward the religious establishment combined with a worship of the physical and the natural.

Late-eighteenth-century London even had its own fabled piece of erotic machinery, the so-called “celestial bed.” It was invented by James Graham, a Scottish medical-school dropout who learned about electricity from a collaborator of Benjamin Franklin’s when he was living in Philadelphia. In 1781, Graham moved to Pall Mall and introduced his “wonder-working edifice”: forty glass pillars surrounding a twelve-by-nine-foot electrified bed, covered by a glass dome, tilted to what Graham promised was the ideal angle for conception, and wired so that a pipe organ produced “celestial sounds” as a couple copulated upon it—the volume corresponded to the fervor of the humping. The apparatus may not have had the staying power of the handheld vibrator, but for a time it was a sexual cynosure among London’s cognoscenti. Graham’s celebrity clientele included the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Richmond, and the radical journalist and parliamentarian John Wilkes—who was also a Hell-Fire clubman.

Men and women in every generation have convinced themselves that they’ve stumbled upon something new: the erotic illuminati of the eighteenth century, with their electrified orgasms and unbridled hedonism; the voluptuary innovators of the seventeenth century, Restoration libertines like the Earl of Rochester and his circle (“Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse”); the Rabelaisians of the century before, and so on, back to the polymorphous perversity celebrated by Catullus and countless classical precursors. Everyone, of whatever era, can imagine himself to be a Cortez of coition, staring at a heaving Pacific of newly discovered erotic possibility.

We seem to have a peculiar urge to believe that the way we have sex, the thing that got us all here, is unprecedented. It’s like the familiar difficulty people have imagining that their parents had sex. The reason sex can be revolutionized again and again is that we’re reluctant to believe our ancestors could have known and felt what we know and feel. Yet what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the covers.

In the past century—as feminists discovered the clitoris, gay liberationists discovered homosexuality, and flower children discovered free love—the illusion of erotic novelty entered mass culture. Dr. Alex Comfort, the author of the international best-seller “The Joy of Sex,” first published in 1972, was convinced that his young contemporaries invented “playfulness,” asserting that it was “a part of love which could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness.” To this day, there are baby boomers who half believe that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” as Philip Larkin had it, “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”