This essay is an informal attempt to chart the history of renegade erotic literature in England, from its emergence during the Restoration to the end of its legal suppression three centuries later, and consequent obsolescence as an underground subversive form. This is a complex, multi-faceted story with many overlapping elements which requires a certain amount of hopping back and forth in time (and occasionally place) to convey coherently. The Contents table below gives some indication of the ad-hoc structure I have doggedly attempted to impose over this sprawling mess of habitually dishonest, disreputable and (let’s face it) dirty source material:
— Introduction – Among My Books To My Shame
(1) Curiosa – Sixteen Classic Titles 1650-1900
(2) The Invention of Obscene Libel – Early Law 1725-1868
(3) To Deprave and Corrupt – Key Trials (i) 1868-1954
(4) Published In Paris – Olympia Press & Co. 1929-65
(5) The Great Purge and The Jenkins Act 1954-59
(6) For the Public Good – Key Trials (ii) 1960-76
(7) Redrupped – The Yanks 1967-89
(8) Soho Barons – W1 Retailers 1954-82
(9) Soho Typescripts – Homegrown Filth 1954-74
(10) Into the Provinces – The Private Shops 1978-82
(11) Credit On Return – The Book Exchanges 1954-95
— Epilogue – Dirty Bookshop Ghosts
Introduction – Among My Books To My Shame
As is widely acknowledged, the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) provides a unique contemporary insight into British social history during the Restoration. Let us take, completely at random, three individual entries from early 1668:
Monday January 13th: “Thence homeward by coach and stopped at Martin’s, my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called L’escholle des Filles, but when I came to look in it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that I ever saw, rather worse than Puttana Errante, so that I was ashamed of reading it, and so away home”.
Saturday February 8th: “Thence away to the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there staid an hour and bought the idle, roguish book L’escholle des Filles, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found”.
Sunday February 9th: “Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office doing business, and also reading a little of L’escholle des Filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world. After dinner [with four friends] we into our dining room and there to singing all the afternoon… We sang until almost night and drank mighty good store of wine, and then they parted, and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’escholle des Filles, a lewd book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake, but it hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger, and after I had done it I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame, and so at night to supper and to bed”.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, is it necessary to proceed any further? Mr Pepys has just provided us with an admirably concise summary of the entire British approach to Dirty Books. He innocently visits a shop, where his attention is inadvertently drawn to a particularly scurrilous example. He is properly shocked, and replaces it in disgust on the shelf. But he cannot get it out of his mind. After stewing over the matter for a full month he casually returns, awkwardly hanging about for an hour while plucking up the courage to buy the wretched thing. He finally gets it home and can hardly wait to get stuck in, but first has to entertain some afternoon guests. By the time they’ve gone he’s already half-pissed, but at long last is alone in his room and can fully inform himself of the villainy of the world. This has the inevitable physical effect, and he is unable to resist the urge to messily relieve himself as a result. Immediately consumed with self-disgust, he throws the offending book on the fire. The only difference between Samuel and the rest of us is that he diligently recorded this near-universal experience for posterity.
Samuel Pepys in 1666. Perhaps fortunately, his right hand is obscured.
At this point it is traditional for the historian to offer some general philosophical musings concerning the furtive appeal of his regrettable topic, but I can’t be bothered with any of that. Men like thinking about sex (particularly if they’re bored or have nothing any better to do) and pornography simply focuses that natural drive. Whether or not this is harmful is outside the scope of the present essay, and – while I don’t want to dodge the question entirely – I essentially leave this aspect for others, preferring to save time by simply defining my terms and clarifying certain frames of reference so that we’re all clear exactly what’s under discussion.
There are three (loaded) expressions that are central to our topic: Pornography, Erotica and Obscenity. The first two are effectively value-terms, since both merely describe sexually explicit material. Pornography is more pejorative, implying as it does a total lack of any redeeming social value. Erotica is marginally more respectable, implying something vaguely sophisticated, perhaps with some minor artistic or literary merit attached. Obscenity (at least in the present context) is in contrast a purely legal term, defined as the tendency to Deprave and Corrupt. If something is Obscene it is by definition illegal, and producing or distributing it is a criminal offence. (To Deprave and Corrupt was later clarified as “to make morally bad”, though many judges clearly felt this just amounted to “develop a taste for more”, an impressively circular argument).
Another informal (though widely deployed) way of distinguishing pornography from erotica is to suggest that pornography is essentially visual, while erotica is essentially literary. In other words if it features pictures it’s Porn, but if it’s text alone it’s Erotica. Although far from definitive (plenty of erotica is illustrated), this still seems a useful distinction. Literature is in the most fundamental sense a work of IMAGINATION: a fantasy which the reader has to decode, interpret and visualise for themselves. A photograph on the other hand is a record of an actual event – real people in real places doing real things. Whilst good photographs can have just as much aesthetic value as good writing (and are far more immediate in their impact), they critically do not possess literature’s Get Out Of Jail Free card: nobody was ever harmed in the writing of a book, as the participants involved exist only in the author’s (and later reader’s) mind.
So, Dirty Books in the sense intended here are almost entirely literary in character, and feature few or no illustrations (even their covers are often text-only as we shall see). Further, as relatively few examples possess much discernible literary merit, their (generally anonymous / pseudonymous) authors are not our primary focus of interest – instead we shall be far more concerned with their publishers and retailers, who were deliberately operating outside the law for much of the period in question. Obscene Libel (as it came to be dubbed) only ceased to be prosecuted in England in 1976, and the stronger examples of the form remained of dubious legal status for another decade or so, by which point demand for them had largely dried up anyway, replaced by photographic magazines and videos.
Like Samuel Pepys then, let us dismiss our friends, pour ourselves a generous glass of wine, and retire discreetly to our chamber with a box of Kleenex to contemplate the villainy of the world. It is time to furtively unwrap the secret history of 250 years of Dirty Books in England.
1) Curiosa – Sixteen Classic Titles 1650-1900
Curiosa – from the Latin for ‘curious books’ – is the traditional euphemism the Antiquarian book-trade uses to describe historical erotica. But what was the very first Dirty Book? Most scholars now agree it was probably Pietro Aretino’s satirical Ragionamenti (‘Discussions’) first published in Venice in 1534, the year Henry VIII split from Rome via the Act of Supremacy. Ragionamenti is a series of six dialogues arranged in two sets of three: in the first volume two friends, Nanna and Antonia, debate what to do with Nanna’s daughter Pippa – the three options are Convent, Marriage or Prostitution, and the relative merits of each are discussed in turn. Admitting that all involve sex in one way or another, Nanna decides that Pippa may as well be paid for her efforts, and the second volume consists of three further dialogues, this time between mother and daughter, with the older, experienced Nanna explaining the practicalities of the profession to the unworldly Pippa.
Ragionamenti is essentially a bawdy parody of several earlier (more po-faced) moralistic dialogues, and was first published in London (in its original Latin) in 1584. An English translation – ‘The Crafty Whore’ – belatedly appeared in 1658, but by that point the original was already being tinkered with. A revised Netherlands edition (again in Latin) of 1660 contains an additional, seventh dialogue between two new characters, Madalena and Guilia, separately entitled ‘La Puttana Errante’ (The Wandering Whore) and devoted almost entirely to Madalena’s amatory history (which amounts to a long descriptive catalogue of possible sexual positions and the pleasures to be derived from them). Although again credited to Aretino, this is now thought likely to be the work of his secretary Niccolo Franco. Later expanded editions additionally boasted a set of engraved illustrative plates (subsequently known as ‘Aretino’s Postures’) which cannot have harmed sales. The 1660 printing very quickly found its way to London, and is what Pepys fleetingly refers to in his diary.
Panther (UK) 1972 / Panther (UK) 1972 / Brandon House (US) 1966 / Hesperus (UK) 2013
The other three notable C17th texts all follow Aretino’s back-and-forth dialogue format. The first – L’ecole des Filles – appeared in Paris in 1655, and again features an older, experienced woman (here Susanne) explaining the facts of life to a curious young innocent (Fanchon). The tone – while frank – is light-hearted and jolly, emphasising sexual happiness and warmth of feeling (an upbeat approach notably absent in many of its successors). The history of L’ecole’s publication is unusually well-documented as it immediately hit legal trouble. Two friends, Jean L’Ange and Michel Millot, approached a printer, Louis Piot, in early 1655 with a manuscript they wanted producing in 300 bound copies. Piot dutifully engaged a binder, Louis Framery, and set to work. But printing unlicensed books was a serious offence, and as soon as they’d been paid the pair got cold feet and informed on their patrons. Millot fled, while L’Ange, swiftly arrested, bravely explained that his absent friend was in fact the author and all he’d done himself was a bit of editing to cut out the worst of the obscenities.
At the trial in August L’Ange was found guilty, fined 200 livres, and exiled from Paris for three years. Millot was sentenced to death, though (being safely elsewhere) had to be symbolically hanged in effigy instead. He appealed the verdict (via a highly unlikely alibi) and was inexplicably pardoned – all the evidence points to influential friends wanting the whole thing hushed up. All 300 copies of the book were ordered to be burned, but several predictably survived and went on to be pirated. Pepys as we have seen got hold of one in 1668, and an English translation, The School of Venus, appeared in 1680. Various chance-taking London publishers were fined or imprisoned (or both) for distributing illicit editions of this over the next century.
Holloway House (US) 1967 / Grove (US) 1970 / Luxor (UK) 1964 / Corgi (UK) 1966
The third book in this sequence reverts to Latin, though was again printed in France (probably Lyons) in 1660. Satyra Sotadica (a nod to the scurrilous Greek poet Sotades) was written by Nicolas Chorier and is better known by its subtitle The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea. (The real Luisa, a C16th Spanish noblewoman-poet, had nothing to do with it). Again it is a dialogue, this time between Tullia (older, experienced) and Ottavia (young, innocent), though the tone is very different to L’ecole – the latter’s humour and comparative jollity are absent, with a contrasting glum focus on defloration and brutish male dominance. An English translation appeared in 1676, which given both its style and content (on the pretext of instruction Tullia here physically seduces the willing Ottavia) has been confidently labelled as the first true example of domestic pornography.
The fourth and final of these early dialogues is yet again French – Venus Dans Le Cloitre (Venus in the Cloister) by the ‘Abbe Du Prat’ (possibly Francois de Chavigny, an unfrocked Benedictine monk), published near-simultaneously in Paris and London in early 1683 – the speed of the English translation suggests that its publisher, Henry Rhodes, must have known his French counterpart personally. The dialogues are here between two teenage nuns, Sisters Angelique and Agnes, with the former being slightly older and more experienced (are we getting the hang of this yet?) In fact the content is notably mild compared with what has gone before, and at one point Angelique and Agnes discuss both L’ecole des Filles and Satyra Sotadica in terms of the sternest disapproval. Indeed, the book would probably be more or less forgotten today but for its landmark appearance in the first major English Obscenity trial (which will be discussed in a moment).
We can likewise select four representative examples from the 18th century, though these will have to be dealt with rather more briefly. Defoe and Richardson basically invented the modern English novel with Moll Flanders (1722) and Pamela (1740) respectively, and the earlier ‘instructional’ dialogue-form was soon abandoned for narratives driven by the new Libertinism, deliberately mixing up sexual licence with radical politics. Three of the four texts are once again (and perhaps inevitably) French. The first to appear (in 1742) was L’Histoire de Dom B… Portier des Chartreux (Porter of the Monastery) latterly better known as The Adventures of Father Silas and ascribed to Jean-Charles Gervaise De Latouche. Its young hero is keen to gain sexual experience before joining a seminary and accordingly amazed to find monastic life bursting with endless debauched opportunities. The book’s chief target is the innate corruption and hypocrisy of the church, scarcely a new theme even then.
Franklin (UK) 1968 / Award (US) 1968 / Sphere (UK) 1971 / Star (UK) 1983
Six years later in 1748 Therese Philosophe (Therese the Philosopher) by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer was published, This is more of the same, its heroine’s boisterous adventures in (and later out) of a convent serving as a vehicle to debate some radical ideas around atheism, materialism and hedonism: religion is a fraud (though useful for keeping the working classes in line) while women are unfairly sexually repressed. These notions would be taken to their logical extreme four decades later during the Revolution itself by the Marquis De Sade (1740-1814) who surely needs little introduction here – his very name has become a synonym for calculated sexual cruelty and violence. De Sade wrote four major novels – 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Justine (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) and Juliette (1797) – all of which were considered completely unpublishable in England for the next two centuries. The first cautious attempt to breach this blockade with the relatively mild Justine (hardbacked by Neville Spearman in 1964 and paperbacked by Corgi the following year) was quickly stopped dead in its tracks by the activities of one of its earliest readers, an anonymous young Manchester invoice-clerk named Ian Brady. Following the Moors trial of April 1966 both the Spearman and Corgi editions were allowed to run quietly out of print, and no UK publisher dared try again for the next 25 years. We shall return to this (difficult) material later.
The last book of our C18th quartet is a far merrier affair and – crucially – the first major British contribution to the genre. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (originally Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) was written while its author was languishing in Fleet Debtors Prison, and was inspired partly by simple boredom and partly by a desire to make some easy money with a sensational throwaway novel. Published by Thomas Parker as two separate volumes in Nov 1784 / Feb 1785 (and advertised in the press at three shillings each) it has rarely been out of print – or indeed trouble – since.
The two volumes take the form of two long letters by Frances ‘Fanny’ Hill, now a wealthy middle-aged socialite, candidly describing her life from impoverished Lancashire orphan to unrepentant London prostitute to respectable and happily-married wife. Cleland deliberately avoids any obscene language by continuously deploying inventive sexual euphemisms, and the overall tone is cheerfully upbeat with a conventional romantic happy ending. There are, nevertheless, two episodes that would later prove problematic: in the first, Fanny witnesses a graphic encounter between two homosexuals at Hampton Court, and in the second agrees (somewhat reluctantly) to be whipped by one of her clients. The first episode quickly vanished from almost all subsequent editions, while the second (being atypically distasteful) was deliberately seized upon by prosecutors during the book’s 1964 trial (which we can again return to later). Cleland subsequently spent much of his career either meekly apologising for the novel or covertly rewriting new versions of it, as circumstances demanded.
Pendulum (US) 1967 / Luxor (UK) 1968 / Sphere (UK) 1969 / Brandon House (US) 1967
Finally in this opening historical overview we have the 19th century. The explosive proliferation of Dirty Books during this period means all we can really do here is select and catalogue eight random examples of the era’s most infamous titles. These chiefly take the form of fictional autobiographies, though a few are marginally more ambitious in structure:
(i) The Lustful Turk by Anon (1828) British. A wildly melodramatic Oriental romance, clearly influenced by Byron
(ii) Gamiani or Two Nights of Excess by Alfred De Musset (1833) French. More lustful clergy and debauched nuns
(iii) Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch (1870) German. A classic early example of sub-dom fetishism
(iv) The Romance of Lust by Anon (1873) British. Attributed to WS Potter, a vast (four volume) paean to incest and depravity
(v) Autobiography of a Flea by Stanislas De Rhodes (1887) British. A young girl’s serial-seductions as witnessed by a flea
(vi) My Secret Life by Anon (1888) British. Attributed to HS Ashbee, another huge (11-vol) and apparently genuine autobiog
(vii) Venus in India by ‘Charles Devereaux’ (1889) British. Attributed to CH Ricketts, the life of a British cavalry officer in India
(viii) A Night in a Moorish Harem by ‘George Herbert’ (1896) British. More Oriental romance with a shipwrecked English sailor,
…these can really only provide a flavour of the sort of material available to connoisseurs in Victorian England. Now however, having reached the verge of the 20th century, it is time to retrace our steps a little and turn our attention to the progress of the law’s ongoing attempts to eradicate them.
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(2) The Invention of Obscene Libel – Early Law 1725-1868