'If you do me then justice, you will esteem me perfectly consistent in the incense I burn to Virtue. If I have painted Vice in all its gayest colours, if I have deck'd it with flowers, it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner sacrifice of it to Virtue.' So speaks Fanny Hill in her final peroration to the virtuous reader, who (with a reviewer's conscience) has pursued her through all the mazes of Vice in order to arrive at this edifying revelation. So speaks too, it would appear, Mr Peter Quennell, who in his evidence before the Bow Street Court, declared that 'as far as the book has a moral, it is that love is the justification and the crown of sexual activity'. What a strange, hesitant and Puritanical plea for a book which I hope no self-respecting critic would even consider reviewing, were it not for the fact that it raises certain general questions upon which even those people most decisive in other spheres hesitate to express themselves with conviction.

But to return to Mr Quennell. He found, too, that Fanny Hill (virtuous maiden) would have been horrified by Lady Chatterley. Perhaps it is worth remarking at this point that in the introduction to the American edition of the book Fanny Hill is invited to meet Christine Keeler—an association which seems altogether more appropriate and plausible than the one suggested by Mr Quennell [British Member of Parliament.] But there is some comfort to be derived from his evidence. He goes on record as agreeing that Fanny Hill deals explicitly with 'matters of sex'. To that opinion at least one can attach a resounding amen.

So much, at the moment, for Bow Street. It is even more instructive to turn to Judge Klein, Justice of the New York State Supreme Court, and to attend to his summary of the tests applied to Fanny Hill. There is, of course, the moral test (lightly touched upon by Mr Quennell); there is the literary test, and there is the 'social value' test. Louis Untermeyer, writer, poet, critic (and editor of an anthology of erotic poetry), testified that Fanny Hill contains the three great attributes of a good novel. To quote from the case, these are '(1) treatment of the subject matter with grace and beauty; (2) skilful and eloquent charm of writing; and (3) characters coming to life'. Mr Untermeyer characterized the book as a 'work of art'. It is recorded that 'plaintiffs did not produce a single literary expert to rebut the foregoing testimony'. It would be gratifying to think that at the time all literary experts were engaged upon their legitimate business—the examination of works of literary merit—and that they were able to spare no time for the 'memoirs of a lady of pleasure'.

Then there is the 'social value' test. The Court found that 'the book herein sought to be suppressed is an historical novel of literary value'. Here, to judge by the summary of proceedings, logic deserted the case. Mr Eliot Fremont-Smith, an editor of the review section of the New York Sunday Times, testified that 'with respect to the depiction of the act of sex, the book involved in this action does not exceed the limits of candour which have been established by the publication and acceptance of books sold through reputable bookstores and reviewed through reputable publications during the past several years'. What this has to do with the 'social value' test, and in what sense it may be supposed to support a view of Fanny Hill as 'an historical novel of literary value', is certainly beyond my powers to discover.

There is a final test, the 'prurient interest' test, in examination of which one is referred, with coincidental irony, to a case dignified by the title. 'Manual Enterprises v. Day, 370 U.S., 478'. Under this test, we are told, Fanny Hill cannot be regarded as offensive 'in the light of CURRENT community standards'. We are reminded that the novel has been in surreptitious circulation since its publication, and has been translated into every major European language. It is to be found in the British Museum and the Library of Congress. Benjamin Franklin is said to have owned a copy; in the New York Public Library is a copy which once belonged to Governor Samuel J. Tilden. Fanny Hill certainly does not lack referees. Then comes the extraordinary statement that were this book merely 'hard core pornography', 'dirt for dirt's sake' or 'dirt for money's sake', 'it is extremely doubtful that it would have existed these many years under the aforementioned circumstances'.

In the last resort, of course, one can turn to facts. For John Cleland Fanny Hill was without doubt dirt for money's sake. Little is known about him, but what is known suggests that his career was both erratic and suspect. He had a diplomatic post in Smyma, then went to Bombay, which he left after some kind of dispute with the residents. He wandered the continent and returned in poverty to England in 1749. In that year he wrote Fanny Hill, which is alleged to have brought him in £10,000—a remarkable sum for those days. For publishing it he was summoned before the Privy Council. A nineteenth century biographer suggests that he might more appropriately have been made to stand in the pillory. A pension was conferred upon him, perhaps to discourage him from bringing out a sequel to Fanny Hill; he wrote a few plays and philological work distinguished by its bad spelling. Mr Quennell was right on at least one point. Cleland, he announced, was a 'minor writer'.

The arguments from the New York case set out the three main lines which have been, and perhaps must be followed in a dispute of this kind. One can attempt to justify a doubtful book on moral, literary or sociological grounds. In the case of Fanny Hill, let me say at once, all these arguments seem to me untenable. It is true that on page 247 Fanny declares herself somewhat tardily for Virtue. But listen to her own inimitable accent, and judge its sincerity, not to mention its literary quality: 'The paths of Vice are sometimes strew'd with roses, but then they are for ever infamous for many a thorn, for many a canker-worm: those of Virtue are strew'd with roses purely, and those eternally unfading ones.' I find it impossible to see how any attentive reader of Fanny Hill could accept this pious conclusion at its face value, still less describe the moral of the book in Mr Quennell's generous terms. For the facts of the book are plainly at variance with the interpretation placed upon them.

The story of Fanny Hill is admirably summed up in the words of the music-hall song 'She was poor but she was honest'. Fanny, born in a little village near Liverpool, comes to London at the age of fifteen in the company of a young woman of that city who offers her protection. On arrival in London Fanny finds herself deserted, and the result of her appeal to a stranger to help her find board and lodging is her installation in a brothel. Here she is without much delay introduced to the art (and craft) of 'love'.

From this point in the narrative onwards, any notion that we are to sympathise with Fanny for arriving in a cruel, immoral world, or that we are to regard her as the innocent victim of men's brutality, simply cannot be entertained. She embarks on the loss of her innocence with eagerness and alacrity. At first she is merely a spectator; she witnesses and describes in ruthless detail the performances of others. (This is a characteristic Fanny never loses. Even when she has accumulated a vast fund of experience she is still given to peeping and staring at the embraces of her colleagues.) Then she is seduced by the young man, who, we are invited to believe, supplies the supposed moral of the book. Charles is Fanny's first, and she insists, only true lover. For eleven months she leads, we are told, a blissful existence with him. Then he vanishes completely, having been conveniently sent abroad on a voyage. Fanny goes through agonies of grief, but it is not long before she is engaged on the busy life of 'a woman of pleasure'. For the rest of the novel (and this is by far the greater part of it) consists of a recital of Fanny's own experiences with a variety of clients, and of her observation of the performances of her friends. Every single episode is described with the utmost particularity; not a detail is spared.

Cleland resorts to some obvious tricks in order to spin out the story and multiply the incidents. One whole section, for example, consists of a conversation between Fanny and several other young women of her 'house', in the course of which each in turn tells the story of her defloration. But most significant is the fact that every episode is related by Fanny with the greatest zest. She swoons, sighs and enthuses over the delights of 'love'; she apostrophizes in the most absurd and extravagant terms the physical attributes of her partners; and with mock-modesty she draws attention to her own charms. And after all this, after an extensive hymn of praise to lust, perversion and plain nastiness, we are invited to believe that, when Charles unexpectedly returns, and Fanny shares his bed for a change, she rediscovers 'true love'. Their transports we are not to confuse with those of Fanny's successful career; though in fact there is nothing to distinguish Charles's performance (except perhaps its virility), nor Fanny's enjoyment of it, from any of her other engagements in the book. It would take more than Fanny's summing up to convince any rational person of the validity of her moral. In describing her fortunate reunion with Charles she announces, 'Thus, at length, I got snug into port, where, in the bosom of virtue, I gather'd the only uncorrupt sweets: where, looking back on the course of vice I had run, and comparing its infamous blandishments with the infinitely superior joys of innocence, I could not help pitying, even in point of taste, those who, immers'd in gross sensuality, are insensible to the so delicate charms of VIRTUE, than which even PLEASURE has not a greater friend, nor than VICE a greater enemy'. Innocence, indeed! And the 'delicate charms of VIRTUE'. Passages such as these, together with Fanny's performances throughout the novel, add up to only one word—hypocrisy. Like those of her predecessor Moll Flanders, Fanny's morals are dictated by expediency; her words and deeds are totally unrelated to each other.

The literary argument for Fanny Hill has no more to recommend it than the moral one. The statement quoted earlier that if the book were mere pornography it would not have existed for so long under circumstances of surreptitious publication is of course ridiculous. It is precisely in these circumstances that a book such as this is likely to survive; and Fanny Hill is not the only example of a work which has gone on quietly circulating, though officially it does not exist. But of more concern is Mr Untermeyer's testimony concerning 'the three great attributes of a good novel'. Firstly, he demands treatment of the subject matter with grace and beauty. It is difficult without quotation to show just how untenable this argument is; and I must content myself with stating categorically that the treatment of the subject matter in this novel is, in my opinion, designed only to stimulate a morbid interest in more-or-less normal sexual activities and in perversions. Grace and beauty are irrelevant considerations for the reader, as they were, I have no doubt, for the writer.

Mr Untermeyer's claim for the 'skilful and eloquent charm of writing' is easier to illustrate. In fact, Fanny Hill is written in a particularly heavy and turgid prose, which no competent stylist of the period could possibly have approved. It is a kind of eighteenth-century journalese, full of cliches and extravagant but essentially hackneyed images. When Charles and Fanny are reunited, Charles lays 'the broad treasures of his manly chest close to my bosom, both bleating with the tenderest alarms'. What would Swift, with his passion for the right words in the right order, have said to this sentence: 'Thus happy, then, by the heart, happy by the senses, it was beyond all power, even of thought, to form the conception of a greater delight that what I was now consummating the fruition of'? Even Dr Johnson at his most rhetorical would have laughed Cleland's efforts to scorn.

Finally, Mr Untermeyer testified to the characters coming to life. But, of course, there are no characters. The book is crammed with bodies with labels—Charles, Fanny, Phoebe, Harriet, and so on. They are suitably paired off and set to work for the reader's titillation; but as characters properly understood they simply do not exist. They might as well be animals on a stud farm. Nor, of course, are they intended to exist. Cleland is concerned with actions, not with the people who perform them; all his inconsiderable talents are devoted to the purpose of pornographic detail.

The 'social value' argument, it seems to me, can be dismissed briefly. I cannot imagine what any student of eighteenth century life would hope to learn from Fanny Hill, except, admittedly, a good deal of repetitive information about female underclothes. Again a useful point of comparison is Moll Flanders. In Defoe's novel the account of the abundant life of petty criminals in London is as important and certainly as interesting as Moll's career. The book has the same kind of environmental life as do the novels of Dickens. The world of houses, streets, and crowds is real and accurately observed. But social background and mis en scene is no more important in Fanny Hill than it is in the Decameron. Nothing could be less appropriate to the text than the illustrations from Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress which adorn the American edition. Hogarth has precisely what Cleland lacks—acute observation of social conditions and a point of view.

So my final judgment on Fanny Hill is that it is without doubt in intention and design a pornographic book. I do not accept the view that pornography can be literature and vice versa. The impulse and intention of a pornographic work is, I believe, not only to shock by crudity, but actually to stimulate feelings of a prurient kind. When Cleland describes Fanny Hill's mounting sexual excitement as she watches the engagement of two 'lovers' he hopes to produce in his reader the effect that he is describing in his heroine. This kind of aim has nothing to do with literature. A good story from the Canterbury Tales or Decameron can be frank, or even coarse and vulgar; but its direction is entirely different. One is invited by Chaucer and Boccaccio to look at the absurdities and anomalies and hypocrisies of human beings, not to stare with concentrated attention at a restricted area of the human anatomy.

For these reasons, all the arguments which have been advanced in defence of Fanny Hill seem to me specious. I can find little virtue in the system of censorship which at present operates in this country; at the same time I think the opponents of all forms of censorship have not faced the issues which are raised by the publication of a book such as this. It is produced in enormous editions and sold cheaply; its appearance is accompanied by a positive storm of publicity. Apparently responsible people lose their heads over a deservedly neglected work which falsely lays claim to historical interest, and which would certainly not be published by a reputable firm if it were written today. Less responsible people—such as the publishers of the American edition—assert that Fanny Hill's experiences 'contain little more than what the community has already encountered on the front pages of many of its newspapers' in the reporting of the Profumo affair—an assertion which in itself is entirely false, and which would be no defence of Fanny Hill if it were true.

How John Cleland would laugh if he could witness the uproar that his book has caused yet again! He would, no doubt, fully appreciate the conclusion of his American publishers: 'And so, after being an outcast for more than 200 years, Fanny Hill has finally been made an honest woman, or at least as honest as Christine Keeler'. There could be no more substantial proof that the reason why Cleland wrote the book in 1749 is the reason why it has been published again in 1963, and is being so strenuously fought for. It is an ironical reversal of Fanny's fictional role. She may have been a kept woman, but she also has the satisfaction and distinction of keeping her publishers on her immoral earnings.