Victorian England tends to remind one of intense sexual repression, conservatism and uncomfortable-looking petticoats, but the porn from the era tells a very different story.

There’s a growing archive of these glorious artifacts online: dudes in top hats sit, boned-up, with their trousers down; there’s also piss play, whips and a hefty dose of Victorian-lady-on-Victorian-lady action. This isn’t to say that the mid- to late-1800s was one giant corset-opening orgy. Doctors still genuinely believed jerking off could cause mental breakdowns and gnarly diseases, and women could be institutionalized for masturbation. But it was a society just as horny as any other.

London’s streets were filthy in the early 1800s, with sewage encrusted into the cobbled sidewalks, but historians tend to focus on one in particular: Holywell Street, the go-to spot for Victorian porn, famously described as “the most vile street in the civilized world.” In the early Victorian years, there were dozens of sex shops on this one street alone, selling everything from dildos and condoms to eyebrow-raising erotica and detailed illustrations of sex scenes.

Some of these pre-dated the Victorian era, but they shaped desires of the time. The 1825 Invocation à L’amour series gives us a glimpse at what might have been on offer in 19th century sex shops. Women were fair-skinned, dark-haired and always drawn with a lovingly-rounded belly, whereas the guys were more likely to have chiseled abs. A full bush was apparently non-negotiable, and outdoor scenes were surprisingly popular (in one illustration, a man’s rock-hard boner pokes out of his mustard yellow trousers as he sits on a tree stump, his fair maiden swinging from a branch as he eats her out). The horny French quote below adds to the mood: “For me, cunnilingus is full of sweetness; when I suck your cunt, I suck on happiness.”

Photography also came of age in the mid-1800s, and it didn’t take long for smutty photos to trickle onto the streets of Victorian England, usually in the form of postcards. Think of them as sexy souvenirs, like: “I went to London, and all I got was this lousy photo of a guy with a seriously impressive mustache fucking a woman in a frilly bonnet.”

Historian Kate Lister, author of A Curious History of Sex, has written widely about the jerk-off material of the time. “Women are cumming all over the place. There’s ‘cream’ aplenty, and squirting,” she told Vice back in 2017. According to Lister, doctors of the time believed a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm, so the women in these postcards look like they’re having a great time — and often together. In one postcard, a trio of good-time gals slide down their lacy bloomers for a precarious-looking three-way, which involves balancing on ornate, floral armchairs.

It’s worth mentioning sexuality here, too. For most of the Victorian era, male homosexuality was punishable by death in the U.K., and the high-profile witch hunts of men like Oscar Wilde made it clear that guy-on-guy sex was strictly not allowed. Yet the law shied away from female homosexuality. There’s a myth that Queen Victoria thought “ladies did not do such things”; whatever the real reason, no laws ever mentioned lesbian sex by name, which makes the lesbian scenes on these Victorian postcards even more interesting.

Finally, there’s Victorian erotica. The best-known example is a short-lived but lovingly digitized NSFW magazine named The Pearl, which ran for 18 issues (around two years) before being shut down by the police. These tongue-in-cheek smut mags stuck two fingers up to religion and morality — the first issue includes “Amen,” a four-line poem that opens with: “Oh! Cunt is a kingdom and prick is its lord” — and were printed for the so-called Society of Vice.

The issues are available to read online, and they cover a whole gamut of kink, including spanking, gang bangs and XXX nursery rhymes to ruin your childhood favorites. Unfortunately, plenty of them are extremely racist, too. As the British Empire expanded rapidly in the late 19th century, countries were colonized and their cultures cherry-picked and exported as exotic trends. Naturally, this bled into porn; there’s even a Pearl section named “A Taste for Foreigners.” It’s exactly what you’d expect.

Porn was heavily censored at the time, and some pretty groundbreaking titles were banned for decades before being reissued. These include horny memoirs like My Secret Life. That said, modern porn studios have busied themselves creating remakes of the sex scenes within them, bringing the best of the past to the present — petticoats and all.