Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

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Radio 3. 10 o'clock on Thursday morning the 5th of April. Annie Bessent is arrested on the charge of publishing an obscene book.

A short time later, she's bought before the Guildhall Police Court. Charged was publishing the obscene panthert, Fruits of Philosophy.

The courtroom is packed with onlookers, drawn there by the scandalous and surprising charges against the seemingly respectable 40-year-old woman.

Some may have been her supporters. Others would have most certainly been her enemies. But to the early women's rights activist Annie Bessent, the only thing that would have mattered in that single moment was her absolute conviction that she was right.

The traditionally accepted view of Victorian women has been that the majority of them had little knowledge of sex.

Images spring to mind of naked table legs being covered up or young ladies lying back and thinking of England or Queen Victoria's very stern face.

We view the Victorians as repressed or prudish and in popular culture the films like hysteria and a dangerous method have reinforced this idea that sex was a confusing and male-dominated space.

There have been a number of challenges to this view. Explorations into the life of the 19th

century's greatest pornographer Henry Spencer Ashby have revealed a huge range of sexual ideas

and attitudes from this time, and examinations of newspapers from

the period will always yield really juicy accounts of scandal and sexual intrigue, much like our

gossip magazines of today. But how much sexual knowledge did the Victorians possess, living as they

did between these supposed poles of intense social repression and uninhibited sexual freedom.

Public perception has seemingly allotted only two roles to Victorian women,

the virginal and pure housewife, such as in Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem Angel in the House,

...