I’d recommend the book ‘inventing the victorians’ By Matthew sweet with some reservations. He argues that our perceptions of the Victorian era are incorrect. Amongst other things he says the victorians were much more informed about sex than we have been led to believe, citing popular books and letters of the time. I feel the book is quite convincing but I have some reservations as it’s not a true scholarly work. The author holds a phd and is a journalist so he writes both to inform and entertain. Certainly he shows that many of our popular perceptions of the era are based on very slim evidence indeed. For example the story that queen victoria didn’t make lesbianism illegal because she refused to believe it existed is a recent invention. In summary an entertaining and informative work but not written to be a scholarly thesis