a high culture associated with the middle and upper classes. Mass-cultural representations were viewed as gratifying the emotional, physical, and financial interests of their producers and consumers at the expense of a socially oriented reason. Advocates of high culture in the nineteenth century had to contend with an increasingly consumer-oriented culture. They feared that the gratifying pleasures of mass-cultural media would circumvent the less immediate routes to disinterest upon which the liberal aesthetic and by-then traditional, social order depended.

While there was an increased emphasis on consumption and sensation in aesthetics of the late Victorian period, there was, importantly, a disciplining of that consumption in accord with the earlier project of Shaftesburian and Kantian aesthetics to bring the body more overtly into the realm of culture by objectifying the senses and making them rationally intelligible. What may have appeared to be a move toward a hedonistic or solipsistic aesthetic, “Aestheticism,” which as a critical outlook distinguished itself by a lack of conviction in social utility or productive value, in fact opened the way for an ethical, productive aesthetic. This aesthetic operated by distancing readers and viewers from the sexualized representations they apprehended through a critical reception that privileged representational form rather than content. In order to produce an acceptable aesthetic of pleasured bodies, Swinburne and his supportive critics invoked a Kantian formalism by which the sexual content of his works was subordinated to an ascesis of form, a disciplining of both the subject and object of the artistic representation. As such, the sexualized representations within Swinburne's poems could be seen to serve other than physically titillating purposes.

Before addressing the aesthetic debate around Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, this chapter will show how a new, diversified reading public played a central role in provoking high-cultural anxieties about aesthetic reception and the social order. The discussion of nineteenth-century pornography that follows argues that Victorian pornography needs to be understood as a mass-cultural form that, like those who fear the demise of high culture, is preoccupied by the working-class body. The potential of the working-class body to disrupt the social order lies underneath much of the aesthetic debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and no genre makes that more clear than pornography. The blurred lines between interested and disinterested bodies in Swinburne's work thus foreground the increasingly charged dialectic between aesthetics and pornography that are the concerns of this book.

LITERACY AND THE CULTURAL DIVIDE

Until the eighteenth century high culture distinguished itself by also being literate culture. However, increasing literacy in the nineteenth century challenged literate high culture to further differentiate itself. One response, as I elaborated in chapter one, was to cultivate the aesthetic as a separate, symbolic economy dealing in cultural capital. In the nineteenth century near-universal literacy was achieved in Britain, allowing considerable access to literary high culture for many. Simultaneously, a new literary culture for the masses was created which threatened to marginalize high culture itself. Education underwent vast reforms in the nineteenth century and many of those who previously had no claim to an education, the working classes and women, gained access to one.⁸

Though the expansion of education made great strides, discrepancies between female and male literacy did not begin to level until well after the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 and the Elementary Education Act of 1870.⁹ Accurate literacy statistics are hard to come by, but one way to measure the changes in literacy is to assess the numbers of people unable to sign their own name into marriage registers. An article published in The Nineteenth Century (March 1894) tracked such changes. Its numbers reveal a decided lag in female literacy until the 1890s:¹⁰

In addition to the remarkable leveling of gender imbalances, these figures show that literacy enjoyed a steady and dramatic rise throughout the century.

While the working classes had the most to gain from the expansion in elementary education, the middle classes also benefited. The increase in industrial wealth within the gentry and professional classes created a growth in the public schooling system, founding thirty-one classical boarding schools between 1837 and 1869.¹¹ This created greater educational opportunities for middle-class boys, and essentially assured their integration into a system of elite values. Girls of the middle class were predominantly overlooked until around mid-century. When at this time it was discovered that the female population was outnumbering the male population by numbers upwards of fifty for every one-thousand males, the need for female education to ensure self-sufficiency was satisfied by the creation of colleges for women where they could prepare for careers as governesses. With the growing legitimation of such schools, public boarding schools for girls were opened in the 1860s and 1870s, and in the 1870s university education for women was accepted as an experiment that never ended.¹²

The upper classes preserved their own educational segregation by schooling their girls either at home or in small academies (as shown so well in the Brontë novels), and sending their boys to the Seven Great Public Schools (Winchester, Eton, Henry VIII, Charterhouse, Harrow, Shrewsbury, and Rugby). These schools maintained their social exclusivity through high fees and a classical curriculum. Evidence of the erosion of this exclusivity, however, can be seen as early as 1833 when E. G. Bulwer Lytton observed that:

The long established custom of purchasing titles, either by hard money or the more circuitous influence of boroughs, has tended to mix aristocratic feelings with the views of the trader; and the apparent openness of honours to all men, makes even the humblest shopkeeper, grown rich, think of sending his son to College, not that he may become a wiser man or a better man, but that he may perhaps become my lord bishop or my lord chancellor … While the rank gained by intellect, or by interest, is open but to few, the rank that may be obtained by fashion seems delusively to be open to all.¹³

Here Lytton details the role that education played in allowing the working middle class to rise socially. Whether at the Great Seven or one of the less established public schools, middle-class boys were rapidly attaining a classical, public education and earning the privileged title of gentleman along with it. At the same time the sons of the newly moneyed industrial class were internalizing the superseded values of an agrarian, aristocratic, and Christian society; adopting—in the opinion of Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith—the anti-materialist position that disguised the role they played in legitimating the burgeoning economic domination of the social class from which they emerged, the sons of the working class were receiving a much simpler education from the state that essentially prepared them for their stations in life.¹⁴

The consequence of this bifurcated educational system (to eliminate women for the moment) was to prevent the rise of a unified national culture even as economic differences between the classes were slowly eroding. As a result, a process of political socialization that could have included the working classes was prevented. The working classes were becoming literate, but they were still denied access to the values and training of gentlemen. The vast majority of women were, likewise, excluded from integration into the dominant educational values of elite males. To argue that the classes and genders were socialized discretely through formal education suggests that individuals from various classes went about their lives in hermetically sealed “class bubbles.” This is obviously not true. In fact, the increased mixing of the classes in urban centers and workplaces, and the differences between sex and class which education increasingly blurred as the century progressed, created anxiety in those who perceived that their culturally dominant position, and/or the set of beliefs that accompanied that position, were under threat.¹⁵ The very fractured nature of the socialization process promoted cross-class and cross-gender mistrust. For those socialized within the anti-materialist tradition of the public schools, all behavior save their own was suspect. Women and the working classes were believed to be tainted by the material, either in the form of material interests which threatened the economic dominance of the middle and upper classes, or in the form of a dangerous material sensuality which represented moral and racial degeneration.¹⁶

Victorian thinkers like Matthew Arnold, William Morris, John Ruskin, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, aware of the split between an idealized cultural unity and the reality of cultural segregation, reproduced in their writing schizophrenic desires for an egalitarian society based on the moral-aesthetic ideals fostered in elite, classical education. In her book, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy, Linda Dowling has argued that advocates of what she calls “aesthetic democracy,” Ruskin, Morris and Arnold, were at once motivated and repulsed by the possibility of an aesthetic sense common to all. Within the desire for a pleasure in aesthetics that could be shared by all, as expressed by Ruskin, Morris, and even Wilde, lay “an ideal aristocratic sensibility unrecognized as such.”¹⁷ For what threatened this ideal was the “loss or emptying out of meaning that occurs in any context where ‘noble’ or ‘aristocratic’ is no longer permitted to function in relation to a set of terms—the ignoble, the vulgar, the base—in opposition to which it had originally assumed its meaning.”¹⁸ In other words, proponents of aesthetics had relied on its oppositional status to popular, commercial and lower-class arts for its identity as such. What was aesthetic was necessarily elevated. The desire to see England culturally and aesthetically unified was, as Dowling sees it, the product of aristocratic sensibilities projected as a democratic endowment.¹⁹ As a result, high-cultural advocates remained ambivalent about envisioning aesthetic capacities in everyone. Judith Stoddart finds this paradox in the works of Swinburne and Ruskin, noting, for instance, that Ruskin's “Letters to Workmen and Labourers,” in Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), reveals a decided “ambivalence in its declared intention of social involvement on the one hand, and its Latin title and preoccupation with fine art and artists on the other.”²⁰ Intellectual socialists like Ruskin were in many ways the victims of their own elite educations.

Matthew Arnold's critical work similarly reveals a conflict between an egalitarian spirit and a cultural predisposition that prevented him from truly embracing the working-class people whom he called “The Populace.” While on the one hand he hoped for a national cultural renewal for all members of society based on “the best that has been known or thought in the world,” on the other hand he saw a mockery made of the ideal of perfection by the very signs of a materially based lower class. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold noted that mixed in with “the best in the whole world” and England's “unrivalled happiness” lay “a touch of grossness in our race … the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills … the gloom, the smoke, the cold,” and unwanted illegitimate children born to the young girls of the workhouses.²¹ His example of Wragg, a young girl who strangled her illegitimate child after leaving a workhouse was intended to show how England's debased nature prevented it from attaining a moral-aesthetic ideal. The elements lurking in Wragg's story, sexual relations out of wedlock and a manual-labor job at a workhouse factory, aligned her with the material, bodily existence that asserts itself as at odds with his attempt to suggest a higher mode of being in “non-practical” life. His story, like Bulwer's quote above, calls attention to the juxtaposed existence of wealth and poverty, aristocrat and trader in nineteenth-century British society. Both writers were aware that the ideological boundaries of privilege were being threatened by the very bodies that had been needed to define privilege itself.

As economic and educational circumstances began to alter dramatically the social landscape of the nineteenth century, the idea of a shared culture provoked anxiety in those who believed themselves its guardians. The modern understanding of culture as the training, development, and refinement of mind, taste, and manners is a product of the eighteenth century, but its first use is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as 1805.²² Arnold's use and promotion of the concept in Culture and Anarchy as well as other essays represents an attempt to name and demarcate culture in order to enforce its boundaries. In keeping with the project of eighteenth-century moral and aesthetic philosophy to bring individual bodies into an objectified, rational public sphere, Arnold's culture seeks to make “reason and the will of God prevail” and “places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality.”²³ As such, Arnold's project in Culture and Anarchy and his critical essays is to resituate the terms of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory back into the social sphere from which they had been disconnected after Kant. Arnold's cultural aesthetic continues the project of modern aesthetics to bring individual bodies into the realm of reason through a universal subjectivity based on the idea of culture. Arnold's aesthetic, in the tradition of Shaftesbury and Kant, works under the principle that objectified bodies abstracted from their own senses create the illusion of a universally shared public sphere.

The individualized objectives of aesthetic moralists like Arnold, Ruskin, and Morris to create a refined popular culture are but the more widely recognized examples of such efforts. The feeling that the new cultures being created by the increased wealth and literacy of the working classes had to be integrated into a worthy, unified national culture was widespread among the educated classes. Evidence of this attitude can be found in speeches, reviews, and books throughout the 1880s and 1890s. What commentators saw rising in place of their conception of culture was a mass culture that threatened to engulf the values of old. James McNeill Whistler derides the rise of a mass, popular culture in his speech “Ten O'clock,” where he says:

The world was flooded with the beautiful, until there arose a new class, who discovered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the facture of the sham.

Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the geegaw.

The taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and what was born of the million went back to them, and charmed them, for it was after their own heart; and the great and the small, the statesman and the slave, took to themselves the abomination that was tendered, and preferred it—and have lived with it ever since!

And the artist's occupation was gone, and the manufacturer and the huckster took his place.²⁴

Here Whistler places the beautiful and the commercial in opposition, just as thinkers in the tradition of Shaftesbury and Kant had done a century and a half earlier. Whistler figures mass culture as that which gratifies or charms its recipients, and in doing so corresponds to their bodies in either sensually pleasing or charming them in an occult and non-rational manner. In this way he aligns mass-cultural forms of consumption with those traditionally associated with the pornographic, those that address the senses rather than the intellect.

For the high-cultural reading public, the problem of increased literacy manifested itself in a new, self-spawning mass culture which began to proliferate in the form of newspapers, magazines, and penny fiction. Articles decrying the rise in frivolous reading materials created primarily by and for the literate working classes were published repeatedly throughout the later years of the century.²⁵ An article published in 1894 entitled “Elementary Education and the Decay of Literature” argued that while “It was with reason expected that multitudes who hitherto had occupied their leisure with degrading excitements would find in reading a more agreeable and more elevating amusement,” the true result of increased literacy in the working classes had been the growth in decadent fiction and “weekly papers of a scrappy character” which encouraged sensationalism.²⁶ Listing the most prominent new journals created between 1878 and 1892, the author marveled over their mass circulation: “Most of these publications have been published to circulations counted by hundreds of thousands, and concurrent with their growth has been the establishment of newspapers combining with the ordinary news the same scrappy and sensational elements.”²⁷ Mass culture was seen not as an acculturating panacea, but as a marginalizing threat.

The tremendous volume of printed materials circulated among the working classes was a point of almost hysterical concern for many commentators, as an 1890 review of penny fiction in the Quarterly Review makes clear:

The number of penny weekly papers, leaving newspapers, trade journals, and professedly religious organs wholly out of account, is literally enormous, and their circulation almost fabulous. There is probably no family of the classes rather absurdly described as “working” and “lower middle” in which one at least of these prints is not bought as regularly as Saturday night comes around. In many such families three, four and even more are taken by various members and lent out to one another. Including such as may be seen at the counters of public-houses and the tables of coffee taverns and cheap restaurants, we are probably well within the mark in saying that every copy sold is read by six persons. Now as one of these prints boasts a circulation of 334,000 a week (?), another modestly announces its sale as “a little under half a million” (?), a third claims a quarter of a million, and several are known to sell over 100,000 weekly—it is obvious that the family penny papers combined must be one of the greatest social forces in the kingdom.²⁸

As revealed here, the new literary industry's apparent influence over popular culture and the majority population was the source of both fear and envy for the educated elite. One article written in the North American Review and then reprinted by W. T. Stead in his Review of Reviews noted that newspapers rapidly were becoming the literature of the masses. “It is not too much to say,” Mr. E. L. Godkin asserted, “that they are, and have been for the last half-century, exerting more influence on the popular mind and the popular morals than either the pulpit or the book press has exerted in five hundred years … The new generation which the public [state-run] schools are pouring out in tens of millions is getting its tastes, opinions, and standards from them, and what sort of world this will produce a hundred years hence nobody knows.”²⁹ To the literary mind turned in upon the changes wrought by an autonomous lower-class market, the rising dominance of mass culture in the form of mass-produced, ephemeral reading materials meant the necessary erosion of the cultural memory that had been so carefully preserved through the tradition of elite education into moral-aesthetic values. In its increased marginalization, literary high culture had to seek ways to colonize the new market created by Britain's modern reading public. The difficulty arose in balancing the urge to preserve old cultural territory while seeking new.

Arnold's plea in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” for a disinterested English criticism that allows for the free play of the mind was the plea of an English gentleman raised on classical ideals, for disinterestedness is one of the hallmarks of the English gentleman (a gentleman defined as one who had attended public school and therefore knew Greek and Latin).³⁰ To counter the ill-effects of Britain's increasingly fragmented culture, Arnold proposed disinterest as a way to unite the public sphere and to deny fractious interests. In doing so he drew on the Shaftesburian and Kantian aesthetic tradition. Finding in disinterestedness a moral imperative, Arnold reconnected Kantian terminology with its generating principles in eighteenth-century British moral-aesthetic philosophy. As this suggests, disinterest did not propose to renew all segments of society, but continued to propagate the interests of Arnold's so-called “Philistines,” the middle class. By following Arnold's prescription for “keeping aloof from practice,” one removed oneself from the interests of the reformist, capitalist present, or “interest,” and freed one's mind for “play.” “Without this free disinterested treatment of things,” Arnold claimed, “truth and the highest culture are out of the question.”³¹

Arnold's prescription was indicative of the severance between cultural and practical life in the nineteenth century as fragmented segments of the middle class became responsible for both the capital and cultural realms. While high culture maintained continuity—disinterestedness as the privilege of those without economic necessity—economic necessity increasingly became the order upon which society was run. Disdain for industrialism and commercialism, one of the hallmarks of the Aesthetic movement in the late nineteenth century, was the relic of the anti-materialist, aristocratic ideals of the eighteenth century which were perpetuated by an elite educational system that tried to cut itself off from the means of production. Interestingly, disdain for the industrialism and commercialism that produced a mass culture also created an identity for the defenders of high culture.³² William Morris clearly understood these conditions in 1880 when he commented that, “The lapse of time, which through plenteous confusion and failure, has on the whole been steadily destroying privilege and exclusiveness in other matters, has delivered up art to be the exclusive privilege of the few.”³³

In contrast to the gentlemanly code of disinterestedness, working-class behavior was frequently identified by the middle classes as materially interested. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold characterized what he calls “The Populace” as “that vast portion, lastly, of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes.”³⁴ As opposed to the images of stasis and self-restraint so often favored by the middle classes, the working classes are frequently described in images that imply movement and a lack of restraint. The young Sigmund Freud, in a letter written in 1883 to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, justified lower-class material interest as compensation for the barrenness of their lives:

It is neither pleasant nor edifying to watch the masses amusing themselves; we at least don't have much taste for it … I remember something that occurred to me while watching a performance of Carmen: the mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions; we save ourselves for something, not knowing what … Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from the direst poverty and that the possibility exists of being able to free ourselves increasingly from social ills … Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? The poor are too helpless, too exposed, to behave like us. When I see the people indulging themselves, disregarding all sense of moderation, I invariably think that this is their compensation for being a helpless target for all the taxes, epidemics, sicknesses, and evils of social institutions.³⁵

While the compassion of Freud and other nineteenth-century liberals was able to justify the behavior of the masses, such observations and the numerous tracts written throughout the second half of the century on poverty and the working class, such as Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1862), Andrew Mearn's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1891-1903), and B. S. Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), continued to reinforce notions of the working-class poor as a degraded, unrestrained, pestilent group of over-breeders. Edwin Chadwick's report on the sanitary conditions of the laboring population in 1842 found that not only did “the ravages of epidemics and other diseases … tend to increase the pressure of population,” but that the adverse circumstances of poverty tended “to produce an adult population short-lived, improvident, reckless, and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratifications.” Such “habits lead to the abandonment of all the conveniences and decencies of life,” contributing to “the most abject degradation and … demoralization of large numbers of human beings.”³⁶ Associated with disease, the lower classes were seen as an aggressive, all-consuming force, threatening to eat away at the cultural body. Their perceived disease-ridden and sensually ensnared lifestyles identified them with their bodies, bodies specifically out of control and therefore signifying a potential threat to the personal, spatial, and ideological boundaries so carefully maintained by the middle class and its favored aesthetic modes.

As class identity became more pronounced, the activities of the working classes became a subject of interest to the middle and upper classes. In an article in the Contemporary Review (1886), Walter Besant worried over the leisure-time activities of the working-class youth, who typically left school at age ten or eleven:

The street is always open to them; here they find the companions of the workroom; here they feel the swift strong current of life; here something is always happening; here there are always new pleasures; here they can talk and play unrestrained, left entirely to themselves … As for their favourite amusements and pleasures, they grow yearly coarser; as for their conversation, it grows continually viler; until Zola himself would be ashamed to reproduce the talk of these young people.³⁷

Focusing on their pleasures, Besant frets that for working-class youth such experiences are entirely unrestrained. The author of The Quarterly Review article on penny fiction likewise showed anxiety over the impressionability of partially educated youth, complaining of penny papers that “this foul and filthy trash circulates by thousands and tens of thousands week by week amongst lads who are at the most impressionable period of their lives, and whom the modern system of secular education has left without ballast or guidance.”³⁸ Both articles highlight the roles circulation, interest, and pleasure play in the lives of the working classes.

In chapter one I suggested that circulation, interest, and pleasure were also central to the technology of pornography in Fanny Hill and other texts. The middle-class writers who focused on the circulation of pleasure and interest among the working classes saw such qualities as at odds with the preservation of their own cultural-aesthetic legacy. The circulation of interest and pleasure formed a separate economy that, in its alignment with the rise of democratic-capitalist society and the working classes as viable members of the economic and political community, signified a marked shift in British society from a culture of producers to a culture of consumers.³⁹ Regenia Gagnier has characterized this shift towards a consumer culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century as one that privileges an individual's insatiability rather than his rationality.⁴⁰ The diminishment of reason, to those educated into the moral-aesthetic tradition of Shaftesbury and Kant, represented a dangerous shift. Troped as disease, a material manifestation, the masses were seen by middle-class cultural defenders as a poisonous force vitiating the privileges and institutions of the entrenched elite.

In their alignment with disease, the masses shared a denomination with pornography, that most material of literary forms that worked in ways antithetical to high-cultural literary ideals. When pornography was spoken of in public discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was often figured as poison or, like the lower classes, disease. As Walter Kendrick suggests, if middle-class cultural defenders believed that good art soothes and elevates, acts as a medicine upon the cultural body for its own good health, then bad art, including pornography, was considered a poison.⁴¹ Max Nordau, in a classic example of late nineteenth-century thought on the evils of pornography, echoed this sentiment in Degeneration (1892):

The systematic incitation to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of individuals sexually overstimulated, knowing no longer any self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows the life of future generations. No task of civilization has been so painfully laborious as the subjugation of lasciviousness. The pornographist would take from us the fruit of this, the hardest struggle of humanity.⁴²

In his reference to a society composed of individuals that become “flaccid,” Nordau makes clear the cultural association between individual bodies, the body politic, and pornography. The individual bodies of the working classes, perpetually figured as “sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any self-control, any discipline, any shame,” threatened the hopes for a public sphere composed of disinterested bodies. So did pornography. The lower classes and pornography were viewed as uncontrollable, diseased, or poisonous forces that threatened to penetrate the healthy social body.

When in 1857 Lord Campbell learned to his horror that “a sale of a poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic was being openly carried out in Holywell Street,” he exemplified the entrenchment of a sensibility that Ian Hunter et al. describe as the intersection of two agencies: “First, a metaphorics of contagion and a mapping of ‘dangerous places,’” that “traced the population in terms of a set of overlapping threats to its health, decency, good order and well-being,” and “Second, the specialist knowledges of moral psychology and sexual medicine,” that, “through a moral physiology … transformed medical pathology into a source of admonitory images used for an ethical discipline of the self while simultaneously bringing the latter within the confessional sphere of the doctor-patient relationship.”⁴³ Evidence of the self-disciplining engendered by these cultural metaphors is abundant in discussions of pornography. In the introduction to his pornographic bibliography, Henry Spencer Ashbee distanced himself from its poisonous content, asserting that,

Improper books, however useful to the student, or dear to the collector, are not “virginibus puerisque”; they should, I consider, be used with caution even by the mature; they should be looked upon as poisons, and treated as such; should be (so to say) distinctly labelled, and only confided to those who understand their potency, and are capable of rightly using them.⁴⁴

To exemplify participation in the disembodied, high-cultural public sphere, Victorian readers of pornography figured themselves in the roles of critical scientist or medic.

By using a “scientific” approach, even pornography's grossly material bodies could be brought into the sphere of reason, or at least that is the gesture indicated by their high-cultural readers. For instance, Iwan Bloch observes in The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908) that, “These obscene writings may be compared with natural poisons, which must also be carefully studied, but which can be entrusted only to those who are fully acquainted with their dangerous effects, who know how to control and counteract those effects, and who regard them as a natural means of research by means of which they will be enabled to obtain an understanding of other phenomena.”⁴⁵ Bloch's concern for “poisons,” control, and observational research, suggests that by the turn of the century, the medico-moral concern for pornography (and the creation of a “disinterested” space for study of the genre—the need to scientifically classify such study revealing the anxiety inherent in pornography's gravitational pull) was still firmly in place.

Replacing a governmental concern for acts of sedition endangering the social balance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the concern for monitoring the availability of pornography became later in the nineteenth century, in part, one of bourgeois self-policing for moral and medical harm. The medico-moral concern for policing boundaries, literary, social, and personal, was imbricated within a middle-class ideology that feared contamination of the treasured cultural body. Keeping in mind the aesthetic and social alignments of pornography and the masses, I now want to explore how pornography of the period was in fact produced, and in what ways it constructed its relationship with the lower-class body. By detailing pornography's complicated relationship with the working classes and the working-class body in the nineteenth century, I will lay the groundwork for understanding the social significance of modernism's incorporation of explicit sexuality discussed later in this book.

VICTORIAN PORNOGRAPHY

It has become a truism of Victorian pornographic studies that pornography—works written with the intention of sexually stimulating their readers—was written by and for an elite, aristocratic and upper-middle-class clientele of gentleman-bibliophiles.⁴⁶ There is plenty of evidence to support this fact, residing primarily in the famous series of erotic bibliographies compiled by Henry Spencer Ashbee under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi: Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), and Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885). This privately printed set of bibliographies lists a multitude of highly priced, limited editions of pornographic works, those in Ashbee's ken. Likewise, the list of leading English collectors of erotica since the middle of the nineteenth century is said to include Campbell Reddie, William S. Potter, Frederick Hankey, Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Coventry Patmore, Henry Spencer Ashbee, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, the second Marquess of Milford Haven, Edward Heron-Allen, and Michael Sadleir. This is a remarkable list which, according to pornographic historian H. Montgomery Hyde, includes “a generous literary patron who was President of the London Library; the Victorian poet who wrote ‘The Angel in the House’ … a liberal Prime Minister, a great grandson of Queen Victoria; a fellow of the Royal Society; and a distinguished contemporary novelist.”⁴⁷ These facts together, along with a lack of concrete evidence regarding sales of pornography to the working classes, reinforce the idea that pornography in Victorian England was solely the domain of a small elite.

Evidence that contradicts this, however, are the vast numbers of pornographic materials recovered by the police and the Society for the Suppression of Vice throughout the century. Between 1834 and 1880, the Vice Society absconded more than 385,000 obscene prints and photos, 80,000 books and pamphlets, five tons of other printed matter, 28,000 sheets of obscene songs and circulars, stereoscopes, copper plates, and the like.⁴⁸ According to the Vice Society, in 1834 there were fifty-seven pornography shops open in Holywell Street (now Aldwych, near to Waterloo Bridge), the main thoroughfare for the pornographic trade, particularly in the first half of the century before the Obscene Publications Act succeeded in shutting many of them down.⁴⁹ In 1845, a raid on the premises of one purveyor in Holywell Street yielded 383 books, 351 copperplates, 12,346 prints, 188 lithographic stones, and 3,752 pounds of type font.⁵⁰ In 1874 a raid was made at the home of Henry Hayler, a pornographic photographer, and 130,248 obscene photographs and 5,000 slides were seized and destroyed.⁵¹ The vast amount of material obsconded can realistically be said to represent only a small portion of that which was actually produced and sold throughout the century. Given these numbers, the likelihood that such material was relegated solely to elite, upper-class males seems slim. According to the 1851 census, roughly 81 per cent of adult males belonged to the working classes and about one-half of the 16.9 million inhabitants of England and Wales lived in urban environments.⁵² While that would seem to indicate a still sizeable potential market of elite buyers for pornography in London (from which most of the above pornography figures originated), figures estimating the number of “really comfortable families” from which a guinea library subscription might be expected in 1872, were estimated by The Spectator to be no more than 60,000.⁵³ What all of this suggests is that pornography had to be penetrating more markets than the traditionally assumed one. Certainly it is obvious that pornographic photographs and prints were reaching a wide segment of the population, and it is not unreasonable to assume that pamphlets and books were broadcast as well. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, pornography was a mass-cultural product, cutting across class lines.

That works were available for all segments of the population is further supported by Ashbee's introduction where he notes, “I do not hesitate to notice the catchpennies hawked in the public streets, as well as the sumptuous volumes got up for the select few, and whose price is counted in guineas.”⁵⁴ Peter Gay, who argues that pornography was the domain of the elite, also acknowledges that “It is not possible to reconstruct a dependable map across space and time of nineteenth-century pornography: too much has been lost, especially of the cheaper titles, and the expensive collections of rich amateurs which are now behind locked doors in great libraries of the world are not necessarily representative.”⁵⁵ Lynn Hunt has provided research suggesting that pornography was democratized in France at the time of the French Revolution, as pornographic pamphlets of sixteen pages or less then began to gain mass audiences.⁵⁶ The influence of pornography's democratization must have spread to England. Francis Place's diary confirms that in England in the 1780s, quite respectable shops sold pornography and pornographic prints “to any boy or any maidservant.”⁵⁷

Ashbee's bibliographies, though containing a majority of works that would have interested a collector—finely bound, lavish presentations of rare erotica⁵⁸—do indeed house a number of “catchpennies,” or less expensive works that would have been within the reach of more than just gentleman-collectors. The Mysteries of Flagellation (1863) was priced at just twopence, and The Wedding Night (1841) cost three shillings.⁵⁹ Less than the two-guinea price that was a standard for volumes published by renowned pornographic publisher William Dugdale, Kate Handcock, privately printed in 1882, and The Confessions of a Young Lady, printed by Dugdale around 1860 “For the Society of Vice,” were each sold for a little more than £1.⁶⁰ Catalogues advertising pornographic works at the turn of the twentieth century show a range of prices, from ten shillings for “pocket editions” of Kate Handcock and The Voluptuous Night to £40 for a rare copy of My Secret Life. While these are the prices printed in the catalogue, it must be noted that the majority of catalogues preserved in the British Library advertise, in handwriting, discounts of 25 to 50 per cent off the listed price, and so were probably less expensive than we have previously understood them to be.⁶¹ Walter Kendrick has suggested that the average biweekly wage of a lower-middle-class family around 1880 was £110.⁶² Spending £1 out of £220 on a book in one month does not seem out of the question, much less twopence or a shilling on a French postcard or a cheaply bound volume.⁶³ Wages rose in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and what had been likely out of reach for a large percentage of the population before 1850 or so, became increasingly within reach.

Mass production continued to make many of these items cheaper. Through evidence in Ashbee's bibliographies, there appears to have been a sharp rise in the production of two- to ten-shilling “catchpenny” pamphlets around 1870, some with pornographic content, some merely promising it. Ashbee's bibliographic commentary regarding Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl (c. 1870) in Catena Librorum Tacendorum suggests that this pamphlet was one of many:

This is one of the worthless catch-pennies advertised in the low class newspapers, at a high price, to attract ignorant young people in search of something “racy.” There is absolutely nothing in the book; it is not obscene, nor does it fulfill in any way the promises put forth in its highly-spiced title. I notice it as a specimen of a class of publication largely produced some ten years ago, its only object being to obtain the transfer of money from the pockets of the simple to those of the sharping publishers.⁶⁴

Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl does not depict any explicit sex, being more a tale of low life and loose morality than a pornographic representation. It does suggest, however, one of the ironies of the middle-class construction of the lower classes as more susceptible to embodied subjectivity: in nineteenth-century pornography, the cheaper the pornography, the less body and acts were portrayed. Until later in the century, the lower classes had less access to the more genitally focused, grossly material forms of written pornography. Tracy C. Davis, in her article on the actress in Victorian pornography, has noted that erotica rich in theatrical imagery was an integral part of the penny illustrated weeklies, and that a postcard set depicting a nude gymnast on the swing and trapeze could be purchased in the 1890s at a cost of one shilling for thirty-six poses.⁶⁵ Pornographic stereographs (cards with three-dimensional images) are listed in a sales catalogue circa 1860 for prices ranging from 1s 6d to 3s each. Stereoscopes, popular three-dimensional viewing apparatuses which could and often did contain pornographic images, ranged from 2s 6d for simple tin models to 50s for deluxe ebony models.⁶⁶ Explicitly sexualized representations were clearly finding a market among the middle and lower classes.

The likelihood of a working-class audience for pornography is even more probable given the history of pornography's growth early in the nineteenth century. In his book Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840, Iaian McCalman makes the case that as the radical press lost its audience after the French Revolution, many of the journalists who had been radical pressmen began to sell obscene publications in the 1820s and 1830s.⁶⁷ Though some pornography was being produced for private consumption, obscene literature produced in this period often contained a political dimension, displaying a bawdy or obscene populism, that, “whatever its commercial objectives, intended to amuse, shock or disgust readers by exposing the crimes, vices and hypocrisies of the ruling classes. In style, tone and price it also borrowed heavily from traditional street literature.”⁶⁸ By street literature McCalman means the bawdy song-sheets, chap-books, squibs and prints that were commonly hawked on the streets by and for the proletariat.⁶⁹ In 1848, a journalist for The Times commented that by looking at Dugdale's shop windows, the literature of the working classes would seem to consist of “a melange of sedition, blasphemy and obscenity.”⁷⁰

Cannon and Dugdale, whose often lavish pornographic works figure prominently in Ashbee's bibliographies, are two widely known publishers to have come out of the tradition of the radical press, and whose ideas were influenced by the spread of libertine ideas from the Continent. McCalman has suggested that libertinism's central tenets, its hostility to political and religious authority and its advocacy of a hedonistic morality based on sexual instinct, were reinforced by the ideas current in post-Revolutionary romanticism.⁷¹ With its participation in libertine radicalism, nineteenth-century pornography flourished alongside other democratic-artistic movements of the first half of the century. Lynn Hunt has made a broader claim for pornography by suggesting that it can be associated with the entire democratizing movement of modern European culture. Hunt claims, “Pornography developed democratic implications because of its association with print culture, with the new materialist philosophies of science and nature and with political attacks on the powers of the established regimes. If all bodies were interchangeable—a dominant trope in pornographic writing—then social and gender (and perhaps even racial) differences would effectively lose their meaning.”⁷²

The radical presses generated a populist style of pornographic narrative that became a staple of Victorian popular culture and was eventually incorporated into newspapers and penny fiction: chroniques scandaleuses. Such works were usually cheap, paraphrased versions of the confessions, real or spurious, of famous courtesans, that were used as vehicles for exposing upper-class vice and corruption. Scandal in high places was a regular feature in Victorian “crim.con.” periodicals and, once developed, the taste for sexual scandal was further fed with the introduction of divorce announcements after the 1857 Divorce Act in popular newspapers as well as the specialized The Divorce News and Police Reporter.⁷³

Such periodicals, while not purely pornographic, introduced sexual narrative to a large portion of the population. As Thomas Boyle makes clear, “The police reports of mid-nineteenth-century newspapers consistently offer graphically detailed accounts of sexual misbehavior of all classes,” and include stories of “seduction, rape, adultery, transvestitism, illegal abortion, bigamy, sadism, and indecent exposure.”⁷⁴ While the taste for sexual scandal may have developed out of radical press practices, it spread democratically to such an extent that, while certain segments of the population may not have approved of such narratives, they were available to all who could purchase a paper or penny pamphlet and read its contents.

The limited radical audience for bawdy populism, melodrama, and libertine literature of the early nineteenth century became, through the broadening influence of the press, a mass audience in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Judith Walkowitz's work, City of Dreadful Delight, shows the numerous strategies Grub Street publishers used to build a mass reading public through exposing the “exotic culture of the metropolitan underworld.”⁷⁵ Because of a morally critical attitude toward his subject which fostered a gentleman-like detachment from the sexual material he presented, W. T. Stead, in his publishing blitz “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” and the journalists who quickly imitated him, were able to present material that until then had been the illicit domain of pornography's sexual narratives. The success of this venture, however, is more clear in our time than it was in Stead's. As Walkowitz explains, class became a focus of Stead's narrative and a public debate ensued as to whether his articles on child prostitution in London embodied the language of a penny dreadful or an expensive libertine volume: “Whereas Stead's opponents bracketed the Pall Mall Gazette with ‘gutter publications,’ written in the terms of the ‘ignorant and uneducated,’ Charles Braudlaugh's National Reformer, equally dubious of Stead's motives, criticized his ‘callous adhesion to the verbiage of the upper classes.’” Bradlaugh, who had suffered prosecution for distributing Knowlton's “dry physiological tract” on birth control, was particularly resentful of the apparent tolerance of Stead's “‘highly colored adaptations’ of expensive ‘works printed abroad,’” a clear reference to pornography.⁷⁶

As these assignations make clear, sexual narrative was associated with the lower classes or the libertine aristocracy, but rarely with the middle class. The body was always other. The aristocracy had a libertine tradition accompanying the rise of middle-class cultural domination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Through the chroniques scandaleuses, the lower classes had adapted and inverted that tradition to their political needs at the turn of and in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The middle-class Victorian imagination continued throughout the century to associate the lower and aristocratic classes with the unrestrained sexual body and its literature, pornography. It becomes especially interesting then that it is the middle class who eventually appropriated and transformed the explicit sexual narrative for the category of art early in the twentieth century.

SEXUAL NARRATIVE AND THE WORKING-CLASS BODY

The chronique scandaleuse originated out of more sexually explicit pornographic works related to political causes in France and England in the first half of the nineteenth century, but changed forms throughout the century in ways that confirm a shift toward a medically and morally self-policing Victorian culture. In its typical form early in the century, according to McCalman,

The courtesan “authors”—invariably from humble but respectable backgrounds—began by describing how they had been tricked by aristocratic or royal libertines into parting from their true loves. They had then been seduced and forced into prostitution. Thereafter they had become mistresses to a succession of corrupt, perverted and cruel aristocrats, against whom their only recourse was … to play one off against the other … to turn private sexual knowledge to blackmailing/publishing advantage.⁷⁷

A signal example of chronique scandaleuse narrative was published in the inaugural issue of the pornographic magazine The Exquisite in 1842. Priced at fourpence, The Exquisite is representative of a populist, mass-media form of pornography.⁷⁸ In a regular feature, the magazine celebrated the individual stories of London prostitutes: “Star of the Salons, Rosa Lygns, Hadlow St., New Road” is described as typical in her path to prostitution. Her story is intended both to titillate and to evoke populist glee at Rosa's revenge against power. After coming to London at age eighteen with her maiden aunt, Rosa is sought after by a barrister of the Old Bailey:

As the account of Rosa's seduction is nothing more than the everyday occurrence of those sorts of affairs, we shall content ourselves with saying, that after repeated visits, accompanied by presents of much value, made under the pretence of honest intentions, he one evening took advantage of Rosa's friends to advise her to close the shop and accompany him to Drury Lane Theatre, and upon leaving she accompanied him to a neighboring supper room, in order to partake of slight refreshment. She drunk freely, and beyond this she remembers nothing, a sickening stupor overcame her, and she fell insensible on the ground. Upon her recovery, she discovered when too late that the wine had been drugged, and the gentleman of the long robe had her conveyed a few doors higher up, viz. to Mrs. A's, Charles Street, Covent Garden, where he effected his purpose … [she is kept by her seducer until] The barrister, growing tired of her, left her.⁷⁹

The story ends with lower-class, feminist revenge: Rosa discovers that her seducer is a barrister, she blackmails him into a stipend, and she sets herself up in high-end prostitution.

This narrative is replayed with slight but telling differences throughout the century in newspaper reports of criminal proceedings, pornographic works, and moral tales written for respectable journals. In the end, the chronique scandaleuse is always about the working class (and importantly also the aristocratic) body and its sacrifice to, or struggle for, discursive control, the domain of the middle and upper classes. This type of narrative reveals how the working-class body was used as a focal point for nineteenth-century sexuality. It operates by staging cross-class desire, thus engaging the frisson of transgression so important to stratified British society, while simultaneously exposing the equally dangerous potential of a leveling of the classes. Later, modernist writers who incorporated explicit sexuality into their works maintained a trace of this narrative. To further understand this narrative, I will show the discursive construction of the working-class body throughout the nineteenth century in examples from a newspaper story, the pornographic work My Secret Life, and the respected journal New Review.

The newspaper case comes from a collection of “Various Trials Cut From Newspapers” by a Scottish lord, W. Bell MacDonald, in the mid-nineteenth century.⁸⁰ The name of the paper is not available. The news article details a case at Kingston in 1855 in which a fifteen-year-old “young gentleman” named Elton was accused of “feloniously assaulting” Mary Elizabeth Crawley, a seventeen-year-old servant at the rectory home of his clergyman uncle, with the assistance of two other servants, Elphick the groom, and Miss Fenn, the cook. The account is as follows:

While witness and Miss Fenn were undressing, Elton came in and passed to his own room, and witness locked the door. She and Fenn then went to bed and directly afterwards Elphick came into the room, and unlocked Elton's door, and said to him, “George, you come in and lie on Fenn's side.” Witness said that if they did so, she would tell Mr. Sudgeon [her master, husband of Elton's sister], and Elphick replied, “Oh no, you won't.” Elton then came to her bedside. He was undressed and he got into bed. Witness screamed as loud as she could, and the prisoner Fenn put her hand over her mouth, and Elphick held her while Elton committed the assault with which he was charged … Fenn [then] told her it was no use complaining, it was done now, and could not be undone. Elphick then told her that unless she consented to similar treatment a second time she would be sure to be in a family way and Fenn confirmed what he said; [and then] Elphick assaulted her in the same manner Elton had done. This all took place without her consent.

After the defense claimed that Mary Elizabeth Crawley was sexually experienced at the time of her rape, the jury found the gentleman “not guilty.”

To readers of pornography, the above account, though not genitally or sensuously explicit, would have been quite familiar. In nineteenth-century pornography, servants are frequently treated as easy sexual prey and, while they sometimes appear more willing, the power imbalance between master and servant is always the impetus from which the story originates and recapitulates its transgressive frisson. The territory that is conquered and discursively exposed (in an iteration of the colonial narrative) is the working-class body. While some versions of chroniques scandaleuses celebrate an eventual narrative triumph over the upper-class aggressor, the price paid is a mutual exposure into narrative itself, through which control is surrendered to the discursive techniques by which the body is rendered/tendered and to the consumptive practices through which it is consumed. At the level of plot, Crawley's working-class body is “consumed” and discarded by Elton and the jury because it is “used.” The penny newspaper that reports the court case is used in similar fashion, consumed and discarded when used. The working-class body is a disposable good, but in being so it is fashioned for consumer, i.e. middle-class, use. What is striking about this particular case is that it appeared in a public newspaper, available to all for around a penny. Sexual narratives were increasingly popularized throughout the nineteenth century provided they were relayed within a distancing context.

In the pornographic novel My Secret Life (c. 1880), the narrator, Walter, repeatedly takes advantage of the servants in his employ, seducing or forcing himself upon them in ways that look only marginally more kind than the above account.⁸¹ One of the distinguishing features of Walter's story, as compared with the “scandalous confession,” or the quasi-neutrality of the newspaper account above, is that it is given not by the sexual victim, but by the sexual perpetrator. The sympathetic voice is that of a gentleman of privilege, and it can be assumed that it was aimed at a similar reader.⁸² Walter's attitudes and assumptions, his position within what Steven Marcus calls the “nexus of sex, class, and money,” are made clear throughout his eleven-volume narrative.⁸³

In one particular episode, Walter is left to look after a neighbor's servant girl while they are away at the seaside. In common pornographic fashion, he wears down her resistance to his sexual overtures through lewd conversation and a copy of Fanny Hill (an instance of the self-reflexive nature of pornography; the subject is always a voyeur, even to his own voyeurism). Walter arrives one afternoon during a thunderstorm and insists that Jenny, the servant, soothe her nerves with several glasses of sherry. Just as in the stereotypical narrative relayed by McCalman above, Jenny has a sweetheart with whom she hopes to marry and open a grocer's shop. Insisting that the young man needs to know nothing of their sex play, Walter solicits a kiss from her on the promise that he won't be rude again. Walter's conscience, unlike most pornographic narratives, is touched by the girl's innocence, though not above his own desires. “She was one of the simplest and most open girls I have ever met with,” he says, “and once a half-feeling of remorse came over me about my intentions, whilst she was talking about her future; but my randy prick soon stopped that.”⁸⁴

After he chases her about the house, forcing a sovereign, which she refuses, into her pockets, and then ten sovereigns, Walter is clear in his conscience that he is entitled to do what he likes with her. The narrative becomes more decidedly sexual as he homes in on his prize, and begins, as is typical of pornography, a series of verbal repetitions. Walter relates of Jenny that “She forgot all propriety in her fuddled excitement, and whilst screeching from my tickling, repeated incoherently baudy words as I uttered them” (MSL 161). He elicits an incitatory echo from Jenny, but then must overcome her with the gushing stream of his own “entire baudy vocabulary, ‘prick,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘spunk,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘belly to belly,’ ‘my balls over your arse,’ ‘let my stiff prick stretch your cunt,’—everything that could excite a woman” (MSL 161-162).⁸⁵ Such a scene suggests the power of discursive sex as it grows in importance in the nineteenth century; the transformation, as Foucault has implied, of all desire into discourse.⁸⁶ The repetition of, and continual search for, sexual words in order to proliferate, detail, and stimulate the interplay of pleasure, sensation, and thought becomes the task of both Walter for Jenny and the sexual narrative for its readers. In this way the sensuous technology of pornography performs a separate function from other forms of sexual narrative, such as trial accounts in newspapers, as it lingers on repetitive details of anatomy in order to stimulate the sexual imagination of its readers and elicit a bodily response.

While Jenny seems to resist his forwardness, “She took to yelling and even hitting me” (MSL 162), Walter is not to be deterred. After much repetitive dialogue, he forces himself upon her and completes sexual intercourse. At this moment the narrative returns to the themes of the chroniques scandaleuses. After taking Jenny's virginity he questions, “Then I came to my senses, where was I? had she let me, or had I forced her violently?” (MSL 164). His conscience, however, is dwarfed by his desire to sexually dominate Jenny, as is revealed when he repeats a common pornographic trope of this period, that of the woman as a horse to be mastered:

She was a most extraordinary girl. After the first fuck she was like a well-broken horse; she obeyed me in everything, blushed, was modest, humbled, indifferent, conquered, submissive; but I could get no conversation out of her … She cried every ten minutes and looked at me.

(MSL 166)

This passage confirms Coral Lansbury's claim that a shift occurred in nineteenth-century pornography, from a narrative voice of a woman in the earlier years of the century, to a late-century narrator that “can best be described as a riding master,” who exercises a “lust to dominate, to assert his authority, to control and subdue.”⁸⁷ Lansbury observes that the “riding master” narrative is dependent upon the maintenance of a categorical social difference between oppressor and victim. Whereas novels and stories of the early nineteenth century frequently celebrate a female of the lower class getting the better of her upper-class employer, just as Rosa Lygns successfully blackmailed her seducer in the vignette from The Exquisite above, works in the late nineteenth century feature servants as the playthings of their master.⁸⁸

There is indeed a marked shift in pornographic narrative from an association with the working classes (as typically associated with a woman) to an association with the upper classes (as typically associated with a man) as the century progresses.⁸⁹ While class boundaries were gradually eroding in society, they were being more carefully observed in pornographic narrative to the extent that the working-class body could not be the subject of pleasure, only its object. This shift, however, did not occur until the last two decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, and one can infer that the effects of mass education and feminism were taking their toll on the male defenders of cultural hegemony.

A text that confirms this shift is a short piece entitled “From the Maid's Point of View” published in 1891 in New Review, a journal that at this time was also publishing short works by Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, and believed itself to be upholding high literary standards in its time. The narrative is remarkable for what, in contrast to the works above, does not happen and is not said. What is said is frequently cliché. Adopting the language of chroniques scandaleuses, religious conversion, and melodrama, the heroine-narrator, Maggie, begins the piece with a statement about her archetypal background, “I was born of poor but honest parents, in a small village near Carlisle.”⁹⁰ She titillates the reader by suggesting that “as I have some rather promiscuous things to tell—things ‘terrible but true’—I do not think it would beseem my pen to give the names of my masters and mistresses” (“MP” 170). Her parents' teaching is strengthened by that of her first employer and from this she declares “I was thus able to withstand the various temptations and ‘ills that flesh is heir to’ as I progressed in life, and to hold fast by the Cross which has been my staff and the prop of my failing steps” (“MP” 171). The abundance of interpolated quotes and the cliché language make clear that the narrative can find no language of its own, and must rely on a pastiche of various narrative modes in order to construct itself. Maggie's story is in fact a parody of the chronique scandaleuse, a parody of the lower-class mindset that consumes and regurgitates such narratives unreflectively. This suggests that not only has the narrative mode of the chroniques scandaleuses become quite tired by this point in the century, but that, in its pastiche, the narrator's working-class mind is perceived to be nothing more than an amalgamation of culturally constructed narratives. She is the unthinking victim of her reading, an opinion that most members of the elite-educated classes held with regard to the working classes and “their” mass-cultural media.

After her first mistress instructs Maggie “to be a good girl and never let a gentleman look at me as he shouldn't,” she takes up a new position where she encounters the first threat to her innocence. “The reader will pardon me if I hasten over this part of ‘my life and experiences,’” she says, but “‘the wound still bleeds’ [an ironic construction of Maggie's experience given that the relationship is never consummated] and I must crave indulgence for my tears. For I shall never forget him” (“MP” 172). The narrative continues as follows:

The “fierce light” of experience beats on my memory and strives to show my dear Mr. Algernon in colours “black as Erebus”, but my heart is faithful as “the needle to the pole,” and refuses to convict my earthly idol of sin. I loved him. Can I say more? Ought I to say less? He said he loved me and I believed him. He was a fine rash young man reading at Oxford; I was a tall slip of a girl as fair as a lily … He wanted to run off with me and marry me, but I remembered what Lady Eveline had said when she bid me good-bye, and I said, “No. If I was good enough to marry at all, I was good enough to marry in the face of day.” It did not quite suit my mind to run off like a thief. I loved Mr. Algernon as I never thought I could love any man, for I do not hold much with men and least with gentlemen; but that was no reason why I should do anything underhand, and forget father and mother and Lady Eveline and all and perhaps bring a curse instead of a blessing on my head. So I said Mr. Algernon No; and reasoned him out of hand, as it were; and kept free of guilt and shame; and always could say my prayers; and look at myself in the glass, not being ashamed of what I saw.

(“MP” 172)

Once Maggie has taken this type of narrative as far as it can go, she drops the autobiographical style and launches into her impressions about the way servants are treated by their masters and mistresses. Maggie's attack on the wealthy alters from the archetypal methods of the chronique scandaleuse; rather than exposing their sexual greed, she deplores how masters and mistresses continue to ignore the humanity of their servants and lead hypocritical lives. This more subtle attack suggests a shift toward the internalized policing of morality that becomes accessible to all classes by the end of the century.

“From the Maid's Point of View” is significant in several ways. To begin, the sexual narrative so typically associated with chronique scandaleuse is averted through a new strength of character attributed to the working-class girl. The piece is a morally prescriptive work that suggests not only a new subjective identity among the working classes, but also what was considered acceptable reading for the middle and upper-middle classes at this time. While it operates on one level as a middle-class parody of working-class moral pride, it operates on another level to endorse this pride. The story shows how the middle class had by this point in the century taken over the chronique scandaleuse in a gesture of moral self-policing. Interestingly, however, the cliché phrases and sayings suggest a gap between ideal narrative and actual experience. They expose the representedness of all experience, allowing the middle-class reader to believe and disbelieve the narrative. While the morally self-policing segment of the middle class might have supported Maggie's actions and therefore preferred to interpret the narrative at face value, a less earnest group of readers might have read the standardized language as ironic, preferring to see in a narrative such as My Secret Life a more realistic mode of representation.

The story gives voice to the maid and, by airing her opinions on her employers, grants her a certain power over them. However, her power in this instance is not simply derived from knowledge of their sexual misdeeds, as in the early chroniques scandaleuses, but rather from a moral superiority that allows her to say, “My word! if some mistresses were only half as respectable as their maids the world would go better than it does now!” (“MP” 178). The narrative of “From the Maid's Point of View” is indicative of the changing mores of the working class towards the end of the century. Jeffrey Weeks has claimed that, “In the last decades of the nineteenth century we can observe a greater decorum amongst the working class as a whole, and articulation of clear respectable standards amongst important strata of it.”⁹¹ The story raises the possibility of working-class control over their bodies and their representations even as it pokes fun at the complete lack of control so evidently displayed in the use of cliché language.

“From the Maid's Point of View” was published in a culturally prominent journal just three years after My Secret Life was published and distributed clandestinely. The publicly accepted story offers a striking contrast to the pornographic work in terms of class, gender, and literary identities. It is difficult to theorize which work might have represented the greater cultural fantasy. No doubt My Secret Life would have been banned or destroyed had it ever reached a circulating library. “From the Maid's Point of View,” however, represents a more complicated position on the part of its middle-class audience, who would have enjoyed having it both ways, viewing Maggie as laughable virgin or laughable whore. Regardless of the sophistication of the reading applied, at issue is the working-class body and its ability—or not—to restrain itself.

In each of the versions of chroniques scandaleuses above, it is quite clear that the working classes had little discursive control of their bodies. Their bodies, real or imagined, were offered up to the sacrifice of middle-class cultural control. In the nineteenth century, the working-class body offered up the secret of its sexuality in order to be exposed, decoded and recorded for middle-class consumption. The chronique scandaleuse is the paradoxical genesis of this middle-class recoding.

Ironically, at the same time that pornographic literature of the sexual body was being vilified by defenders of high culture, writers and artists identified with high culture were beginning to experiment with the sexual body in their works with the intent that they should be called art and included in the realm of legitimate culture (as opposed to pornography which has always been considered illegitimate). Such inclusion, however, could be said to enact a form of control. By taking the pornographic discourse and formally controlling it within the confines of one's aesthetically, and hence ideologically, stylized art, an artist could be said to be making sex and the sexualized body safe for the middle class and the realm of high art. It is with that in mind that I now turn to a discussion of Swinburne as a transitional figure in introducing sexual representation to a high-cultural, and eventually mainstream, middle-class audience for literature.

INTRODUCING THE SEXUAL AESTHETIC AS ART

Given my description in chapter one of pornography as a repetitive proliferation of words about the body and sexual acts, it would seem that some Victorian poets and writers would have to be classified as pornographers. Specifically, Swinburne, with poems that repetitively catalogue lips, limbs, and shuttering kisses, could be, and was, accused of creating a version of pornography. Swinburne's work directly challenged Arnold's dichotomy between interest and disinterest as representing low and high culture respectively. By introducing the sexually explicit, panting bodies typically associated with pornography (that which incites interest in its readers), while still maintaining the form and cultural capital typically associated with the aesthetic, or high culture (that which purportedly incites disinterest in its readers), the boundaries between high and low, disinterest and interest, were made less clear. In doing so, Swinburne ushered in a new era of sexual representation in British art while ironically drawing from what he claimed were older classical and aristocratic traditions of bodily representation. His poetry simultaneously represents what Raymond Williams calls residual and emergent culture, either of which stands outside of the dominant culture and must in some way be incorporated lest they continue to pose a threat.⁹²

The threat of Swinburne's verse was in its assimilation to pornography. Lines from “Faustine,” for example, resemble a line from The Lustful Turk in which a sexually domineering dey says of a sexual partner, “There alone she existed, all lost in those delicious transports, those ecstasies of the senses … In short she was a machine (like any other piece of machinery) obeying the impulses of the key that so potently set her in motion.”⁹³ Compare The Lustful Turk to the lines of “Faustine” which declare, “You seem a thing that hinges hold / A love-machine / With clockwork joints of supple gold” (lines 141-143). Each uses a typical pornographic trope of the woman as machine, a body emptied of any potential resistance to the incessant gratification of male desires. “Laus Veneris” suggests the necrophiliac in the speaker's pronouncements, “But though my lips shut sucking on the place, / There is no vein at work upon her face” (lines 5-6). Perhaps the most reputedly racy of Swinburne's poems is “Anactoria,” where a passionate, sadistic Sappho lustily exclaims:

Ah that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed
To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast!
Ah that my mouth for Muses' milk were fed
On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!
That with my tongue I felt them, and could taste
The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist!
That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet
Thy body were abolished and consumed,
And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!

(lines 105-114)

The poem vacillates between “abolishing and consuming” the sexualized body. It lists body parts and actions that can easily be found in pornographic description—lips, breasts, tongues, flesh; kissing, tasting, pressing—only to dangle them between descriptive words that work to erase their physical impact. Lips are “tuneless” and thus emptied of their sensuous impact. Nipples are not material presences, but metaphorical “bruised blossoms.” The poem participates in and suggests, but does not complete, the pornographic. It uses metaphor to evade pornography's insistent metonymy.

The list of sexually suggestive quotes in Poems and Ballads (1866) continues, from the masochistic poem “Dolores,” which resembles Swinburne's clandestinely published poems of flagellation, to the sexually enumerated body of “Fragoletta.” There is no doubt that the verse of Poems and Ballads proliferates the discourse of the body, and specifically sexual bodies in a repetitive manner that suggests some of the very techniques of pornography. By looking at the arguments surrounding Swinburne's poetry, I hope to clarify the aesthetics and social demarcations between pornography and art in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to show how those boundaries were changing.

Swinburne's poetry was released just as women and the working classes were forming a new reading public in the second half of the nineteenth century. How the “unrestrained” bodies of this new reading public would react to Swinburne's sexualized verse was at the heart of the public debate over his poems. The middle-class pressmen who reviewed Poems and Ballads made clear in their reviews their belief that literature had a responsibility to raise and uplift its new mass readership. The upper-middle-class and aristocratic members of the educated elite took their cues from the older tradition of libertine aristocracy (based on the right of the aristocracy to do with bodies—its own and others'—what it pleased) and argued that literature's sole responsibility was to a liberal, masculine spirit of privilege and tradition. Both sides of the debate took a pejorative view of the new reading class, but viewed its obligations to that class differently.

Writing for the Saturday Review, the moderate liberal John Morley took umbrage that Swinburne was “so firmly and avowedly fixed in an attitude of revolt against the current notions of decency and dignity and social duty that to beg him to become a little more decent, to fly a little less persistently and gleefully to the animal side of human nature, is simply to beg him to be something different from Mr. Swinburne.”⁹⁴ In saying so, Morley revealed his belief in literature as a model for the new reading classes whose path away from Darwinian animality needed to be illuminated by civilizing culture. He asked, “Whether there is really nothing in women worth singing about except ‘quivering flanks’ and ‘splendid supple thighs,’ ‘hot sweet throats’ and ‘hotter hands than fire,’ and their blood as ‘hot wan wine of love’? Is purity to be expunged from the catalogue of desirable qualities?”⁹⁵ Morley's list reveals the seemingly pornographic quality of Swinburne's writing. He made that association more overt when he asserted that the volume is “crammed with pieces which many a professional vendor of filthy prints [such as the Holywell Street vendors so frequently raided by the Society for the Suppression of Vice] might blush to sell if he only knew what they meant.”⁹⁶ In like fashion, the conservative and Pre-Raphaelite-despising Robert Buchanan wrote in the Athenaeum that Poems and Ballads “bears some evidence of having been inspired in Holywell Street.”⁹⁷ Morley made the aesthetic association between the poet's verse and pornography clear in his comment that “Mr. Swinburne's hunting of letters, his hunting of the same word, to death is ceaseless,” later implying that he used repetition and the sensuality of words to replace rational thought.⁹⁸

What both reviewers missed in Swinburne's poetry is a sense of the beautiful as it was understood by thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Ruskin, and Hegel to coexist with the good. Morley complained that “The lurid clouds of dust and fiery despair and defiance never lift to let us see the pure and peaceful and bounteous kindly aspects of the great landscape of human life. Of enlarged meditation, the note of the highest poetry, there is not a trace.”⁹⁹ In a similar vein Buchanan claimed that “the glory of our modern poetry is its transcendent purity … More or less unavailing have been all the efforts of insincere writers to stain the current of our literature with impure thought; and those who have made the attempt have invariably done so with a view to conceal their own literary inferiority.”¹⁰⁰ The two reviewers concur with the goal of ethical aesthetics to unite the social body through moral uplift and “purity.” Swinburne's poetry, in its provocative display of bodies with the potential to incite individual viewers' senses, threatens to disrupt this ideology.

Swinburne's poems were aesthetically condemned because they address the senses. Kathy Alexis Psomiades has explained that Swinburne's poems problematically “require from their readers embodied responses, and in doing so they implicate their viewers … in the celebration of aberrant sexuality. They stand for an art that takes you over, that gets under your skin, that comes to you on a level beyond the visually appealing.”¹⁰¹ As Morley said, “most of the poems, in his [Swinburne's] wearisomely iterated phrase, are meant ‘to sting the senses like wine.’”¹⁰² They are sensational and sensual, and as such, evade the requisite disinterest of the aesthetic in their provocation of the reader's body. The tendency of the aesthetic in the tradition of Shaftesbury and Kant is to limit art's sensuous appeal, shifting the measure of a work's value from its pleasurable effects on an audience, or affect, to the intrinsic considerations of the “perfection” and “harmony” of the work itself.¹⁰³ This aesthetic holds that true art does not set the body into motion by an appeal to the senses, but rather sets the mind into contemplation through a finality of form (Buchanan notes the poems' “utter worthlessness in form”). The aesthetic object becomes for its viewer or reader a substitute body. Through its objectification, the physical and the irrational are safely transubstantiated into the reflective reason of the aesthetic moment. Good art, according this hegemonic cultural ideal, should invoke a sense of rational harmony in the viewer by reifying the viewer's sense of its purpose.¹⁰⁴ In order to induce aesthetic contemplation and understanding, art must sublimate or transform its sensual appeals. Conversely, pornography's primary aim is to excite the sexual drives of its viewers, often by a specular representation of sexual desire. In high art, for instance, the female nude must act as a function of the pure, disinterested gaze, the body transubstantiated. In pornography, the naked female represents the realm of mass culture where sensual desires are stimulated and gratified in a scenario perceived as chaotic and regressive, beyond the control of civilized society (Freud's letter to Martha Bernays exemplifies this perspective).

Swinburne's poetic narratives fail to suspend or transform the sexual desire implicit in the speaker's gaze and naming of parts. Tannhauser, for instance, dwells sensuously on Venus's charms in “Laus Veneris” until “his blood and body so / Shake as the flame shakes” (lines 50-51). The speaker in “Fragoletta” observes “The maiden's mouth is cold, / Her breast blossoms are simply red,” and, after further naming of parts, pitches himself into such a frenzy that he begs, “Cleave to me, love me, kiss mine eyes, / Satiate thy lips with loving me” (lines 41-42, 56-57). His poetic speakers are sexual enumerators, fervently speaking the woman's body.¹⁰⁵ The speakers describe their own experiences of embodiment, inducing a specular desire in their readers. As is typical of pornography's self-reflexive narratives, Swinburne's poetic narrators are all voyeurs who recount their own sensations and reactions in order to reproduce the pleasure of the seen and felt. By preventing a reader's ability to remain disinterested, the poems turn readers away from the objectifying reason upon which the imaginary public sphere is based. As Psomiades has suggested, “Instead of marking the moment when beauty becomes public, it [Swinburne's poetry] marks the moment at which public man is privatized, drawn into the aesthetic-erotic realm, and at which he gives up his public power for private pleasure.”¹⁰⁶ Such an impulse is seen to destroy the possibility of a shared, rational public sphere.

William Michael Rossetti tried to set up a defense of Swinburne's poems by arguing a traditionally elitist point of view that the verses should not be broadcast to all, but rather to a select few “qualified readers”:

His writings exercise a great fascination over qualified readers, and excite very real enthusiasm in them: but these readers are not that wide, popular, indiscriminate class who come to a poet to be moved by the subject matter, the affectingly told story, the sympathetic interpreting words which, in giving voice to the poet's own emotion or perception, find utterance also for those of the universal and inarticulate heart. Mr. Swinburne's readers are of another and a more restricted order. They are persons who, taking delight in the art of poetry, rejoicing when they find a poet master of his materials and the employment of them, kindle to watch so signal a manifestation of poetic gifts and poetic workmanship, and tender him an admiration which, if less than that of an adept, is more than that of a dilettante.¹⁰⁷

Much of Rossetti's defense works with the idea that Swinburne truly preserves the “antique” spirit that subserves, to some extent, his “passionate sensuousness” while remaining in itself formally pure. He works within the domain of the educated-elite—classical language and culture—to preserve Swinburne's integrity as one of the privileged, for whom the pure space of Greek antiquity remains proprietary, with the mild chastisement that as “a mighty intoxication of poetic diction mounts to his head, and pours in an unruly torrent through his lips … he forgets the often still nobler office of self-mastery and reticence.”¹⁰⁸ Rossetti claimed a space for Swinburne in the aristocratic-libertine heritage, while perhaps wishing that via “self-mastery and reticence” he might take on a more characteristically middle-class stance. Importantly, however, his claims were based on the formal qualities of the poetry, Swinburne's materials, and his mastery of them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, form became the aesthetic defense under which sexual representations made their way into publicly accepted visibility.

While both the defense and attack of Swinburne's verse were based on classical notions of the aesthetic, the territory of that aesthetic and its function were up for debate. The newspaper critics wanted the poems purged of the sexual body and made safe for the middle classes. Swinburne and his defenders claimed the sexual body as the privileged domain of an artistic aristocracy, made pure by a formal treatment that only a masculine and publicly educated few could appreciate. Swinburne's own blistering attack upon his reviewers extended Rossetti's implied defense of elite privilege, and made his disdain for the new reading public clear. He began by differentiating the credentials of his reviewers from his own. First proclaiming “I have not studied in those schools whence the full-fledged phoenix, the ‘virtue of professional pressmen,’ rises chuckling and crowing from the dunghill,” he then proudly admitted, “I have never worked for praise or pay, but simply by impulse, and to please myself.”¹⁰⁹ Having established his own aristocratic superiority (and through his impulsive self-pleasuring aesthetic, suggested the pornographic), he attacked the standards for literature as prescribed by the new reading class:

I have overlooked the evidence which every day makes clearer, that our time has room only for such as are content to write for children and girls … It would seem indeed as though to publish a book were equivalent to thrusting it with violence into the hands of every mother and nurse in the kingdom as fit and necessary food for female infancy.¹¹⁰

Swinburne's response to the new reading public, here hyperbolically feminized and infantilized to make his point more clear, was to reject the self-policing urges so evident in the critical writing of Matthew Arnold and the middle-class reviewers in favor of a social policing that excluded entire segments of the population.

Aesthetically, Swinburne tried to make a case for the spiritualization of the body in art. In his individual readings of “Anactoria” and “Dolores” he used phrases like “that transient state of spirit,” and “the spirit of a poem” to empty the poetry of its guilty materiality. In defense of representing the body he said, “I knew that modern moralities and recent religions were, if possible, more averse and alien to this purely physical and pagan art [of sculpture] than to the others; but how far averse I did not know.”¹¹¹ He wanted it both ways: to validate bodily experience in and of itself, and yet also to imbue the body with the spirit. In his disdain for his middle-class critics, Swinburne claimed the sexual body for his aristocratic art. Yet his emphasis on spirit shows that even he bowed to middle-class pressure to idealize the body, to reduce its materiality (and hence its threat).

Swinburne was one of the last British artists to attempt an aristocratic, sensual art.¹¹² But as can be seen here, the pressure from the dominant middle class was so great as to cause him to succumb, at moments, to its pressure. In his final burst of castrating rhetoric, he argued for a new mode of art that makes room for the body and sexual representation in a masculine territory (fully engorged no less) he thought he had pioneered:

The office of adult art is neither puerile nor feminine, but virile … its purity is not that of the cloister or the harem … the press will be as impotent as the pulpit to dictate the laws and remove the landmarks of art; and those will be laughed at who demand from one thing the qualities of another—who seek for sermons in sonnets and morality in music. Then all accepted work will be noble and chaste in the wider masculine sense, not truncated and curtailed, but outspoken and full-grown.¹¹³

Like a lawyer arguing for a more pure form of the law, Swinburne can be seen here delineating the difference between a pure Kantian aesthetic and the Ruskinian-Hegelian one that intermixes the good and the beautiful. His “virile” art is pure in form; it does not stoop to moral prescription, an impotent form of beauty.

In his insistence on a purely formal art, Swinburne blazed the path for modernist critics and writers who relied on seeing aesthetic beauty as a purely formal quality in order to avoid the moral conundrums of ethically questionable and sensational subject matter. While remaining a peculiar transitional figure as a result of his insistence on the aristocratic tradition of writing and enjoying the body, Swinburne ushered in two important elements of modernist art: representation of the sexual body under the rubric of “disinterested” art and a concentration on formal rather than moral beauty. The two impulses together represent the only way of reconciling material representations to an ideally acculturated sensibility that insisted on concretizing the symbolic realm of the public sphere through the mutual understanding of rational individuals.

By stressing form as an idealizing, pure form of art, as Swinburne did, the body is purged of its unrestrained and threatening materiality (ironically in a gesture of reading that focuses on the materially manifest work of art). It is a subtle manipulation, but one that resolves the tension between the idealistic heritage of the elite-educated classes and the encroaching reading practices of the masses that allowed for material, sensual reactions to art. Form, by controlling the sexual representations and therefore the bodily reactions of its readers, fosters the objectification of the body which accompanies disinterestedness and allows the middle class to retain a sense of its cultural hegemony. As becomes more clear in the work of Aubrey Beardsley and James Joyce, the Kantian privileging of aesthetic form allows for an appropriation of pornographic tropes and images into art while simultaneously maintaining its claims to high-art, aesthetic status. Such a gesture colonizes both the pornographic genre and a portion of the market share upon which pornography has a hold.

Pornography, one of nineteenth-century England's most overlooked mass-cultural products, played a significant role in bringing lower-class bodies to the written page and exposing them to the discursive control of writers of all classes. It is with this in mind that we should look to its appropriation by modern artists as involving more than simply an effort pour épater le bourgeois, for in the hands of modern artists the body of pornography is transubstantiated into high art, where its potentially subversive bodies and bodily readers, the working classes, are made safe for middle-class consumption.

Notes

1. See Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1917) 134-140.

2. Ibid., 147.

3. Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) 24.

4. Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 150.

5. Donald Thomas, Swinburne: The Poet in his World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) 114.

6. Ibid., 114.

7. Hotten's books number frequently among the pornographic bibliographies of Henry Spencer, Lord Ashbee. There is clear evidence that he was actively publishing pornography when he took on Swinburne's poems. Cecil Y. Lang, in his introduction to The Swinburne Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), also suggests that before his death in 1873, Hotten blackmailed Swinburne for some pornographic work they did together: “It is obvious … that Swinburne cooperated (collaborated might be a more precise word) with Hotten in the issue of certain books from which both publisher and poet seemed to have derived both satisfaction and income; A Flagellation and Romance of the Rod are two named by Swinburne” (xlvii). Swinburne is known to have enjoyed the literature of flagellation. He wrote several long poems about school-boy floggings, both for the Whippingham Papers and The Pearl. He characteristically signed the poems “By an Etoniensis.”

8. While it is common to attribute these changes to the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which broadened school attendance within the working classes, it is clear that changes throughout the century led up to what in the last two decades of the century amounted to near universal literacy in England and Wales. Throughout the century, via religious bodies, charity schools, Sunday schools, and some National schools, the rudiments of elementary education were being administered in small doses to men and women of the working classes. Horace Mann's educational census of 1851 estimated that about one child in every three under the age of fifteen attended day school. Though few working-class children attended for more than one or two years, it is likely that a much larger portion received some instruction at one time or another. Eventually the state shouldered the primary burden of education, increasing its financial aid between 1851 and 1870 to such an extent that it bore a larger share of the costs than the voluntary bodies and the parents together. See Harold Perkin, The Structured Crowd (New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981) 49-50. R. K. Webb in The British Working Class Reader, 1790-1840 [London: Allen and Unwin, 1955] suggests that in the 1840s between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working class, and possibly more of the men, could read.

9. The Endowed Schools Act of 1869 took money that had originally been left to schools for other purposes and used it to create many new grammar schools with places for girls.

10. Joseph Ackland, “Elementary Education and the Decay of Literature,” The Nineteenth Century, 35:203 (March 1894) 413.

11. Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750-1985 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987) 360.

12. Ibid., 61-70.

13. E. G. Bulwer Lytton, England and the English, reprinted in The English Ruling Class, ed. W. L. Guttsman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) 27.

14. Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature, and Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (New York: Croom Helm, 1987) 60.

15. In creating his own taxonomy of the English social classes in Culture and Anarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Matthew Arnold admitted that such divisions were general, and that “in every one of us, whether we be properly Barbarians [aristocracy], Philistines [middle class], or Populace [working class], there exists, sometimes more or less developed, the same tendencies or passions which have made our fellow-citizens of other classes what they are … Thus, an English Barbarian who examines himself will, in general, find himself to be not so entirely a Barbarian but that he has in him, also, something of the Philistine, and even something of the Populace as well. And the same with Englishmen of the two other classes as well” (105-106).

16. Elite English education has still not lost its distaste for the materialist, practical interests of a business-dominated society. In 1996, Oxford University turned down a gift of ＄34 million to build a business school on its premises. “The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper, called the 259-to-214 vote against the offer, among university dons who came to a meeting about the issue on November 5, elitist bias against business. It is, it said, ‘an old British disease that lies behind much of our industrial decline into not-so-genteel poverty.’” Quoted in “We Can't Do Business, the Dons Tell a Big Donor,” The New York Times (November 26, 1996) A4.

17. Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) xii.

18. Ibid., xii.

19. Ibid., 24.

20. Judith Stoddart, “The Morality of Poems and Ballads,” The Whole Music of Passion, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1993) 102.

21. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays Literary and Critical by Matthew Arnold (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1928) 15.

22. The first quotation in the OED that uses culture in the sense of intellectual development is ironically from Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude, book xiii, line 197, “Where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown.” What's important to note about this use is that the Prelude was not published until 1850. Thus Arnold's use of the term in 1876 in Literature and Dogma, as quoted in the OED, can be said to participate in defining a specifically modern use of the word.

23. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 45, 47.

24. Reprinted in Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 122.

25. An article on “Penny Fiction” published in The Quarterly Review, 171:341 (1890) 150-171, noted that “It is hardly necessary to say that the gentlemen who accept engagements of this kind are not as a rule very distinguished members of the Republic of Letters, though in some few instances their antecedents are better than might be expected.” The author tells of a university educated clergyman who, having argued with his bishop, abandoned his career to write penny fiction. Of the working-class authors, the author relays “a still more amusing illustration of the social status of some of our popular instructors … related by a lady, the wife of a well-known physician. Her cook having repeatedly neglected to send up the dinner with the punctuality which is desirable in a well-ordered household, she remonstrated with some sharpness, and to her astonishment was informed that the young person in question was so much occupied with the novel she was writing that she had been unable to pay due attention to her duties in the kitchen.”

26. Ackland, “Elementary Education and the Decay of Literature,” 412-423.

27. Ibid., 421.

28. “Penny Fiction,” 156.

29. E. L. Godkin, “Newspapers Here and Abroad,” Review of Reviews, 1 (January-June 1890) 203.

30. In his Notes sur l'Angleterre (1872), H. Taine described Victorian-era English gentlemen as those with “cultivated minds, a liberal education, travel, information, good manners and ease in society.” Further he added that, “The real ‘gentleman’ is … a disinterested man of integrity” (my emphasis) (rpt. in The English Ruling Class, 36-38). Similarly, Edward Royle described the English gentleman as one whose “largeness of mind and generosity of spirit were based on a classical education. He was a man of leisure, an amateur capable of detachment and philosophical reflection” (my emphasis) (Royle, Modern Britain, 391). These descriptions confirm that, though more men in the nineteenth century were able to call themselves gentlemen, the qualifications for the designation were in keeping with those of the eighteenth century. One's ability to detach from one's own interests and show disinterest was foremost in classifying one's behavior as a gentleman. One of the ironies of disinterestedness is that it purportedly enlarges an individual beyond selfish personal interest and, in doing so, further contributes to a social-subjective, or ideological viewpoint that reinforces the subjectivity of that individual. Arguably, one is as invested in one's disinterest as in any other personal attribute.

31. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 17.

32. Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), cites art-historian A. Hauser with regard to this development. According to Hauser, after the bourgeoisie rose to dominance in the mid-nineteenth century, intellectuals found themselves alienated from a self-satisfied public: “the cultural elite, and especially its literary productive section, thereby lost the feeling of having a mission to fulfill in society. It saw itself cut off from the social class of which it had hitherto been a mouthpiece and it felt completely isolated between the uneducated classes and the bourgeoisie. It was this feeling that first gave rise to the replacement of the earlier cultural stratum with its roots in the middle class by the social group we call the ‘intelligentsia’” (174).

33. William Morris, lecture delivered to the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1880, reprinted in Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 1840-1910, ed. Eric Werner and Graham Hough (Cambridge University Press, 1983) 91.

34. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 105.

35. Quoted in Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964) 146-147n.

36. Edwin Chadwick, Report … from the Poor Law Commissioners on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: 1842) 369-372.

37. This article from an 1886 volume of the Contemporary Review was quoted in “Evening Continuation Schools,” New Review, 51 (August 1893) 135.

38. “Penny Fiction,” 154.

39. Regenia Gagnier outlines this shift in “On the Insatiability of Human Wants: Economic Man and Aesthetic Man,” Victorian Studies, 36:2 (winter 1993) 125-153. Lawrence Birken, in Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance 1871-1914 (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1988) makes the point that it was the sexologists who overturned the typical belief in individuals as producers and began to see them instead as consumers.

40. Gagnier, “On the Insatiability of Human Wants,” 143-144.

41. Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking Books, 1987) 167.

42. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) 557.

43. Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity Law (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993) 64-65.

44. Peter Fryer, ed., Forbidden Books of the Victorians (London: The Odyssey Press, 1970) 19.

45. Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, trans. M. Eden Paul (London: William Heinemann, 1920) 734.

46. See Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1964), Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking Books, 1987); and Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

47. H. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964) 180.

48. Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977) 49.

49. According to several sources, after the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, Lord Chief Justice John Campbell informed his diary that half of the Holywell Street shops had closed down and the other half were stocking only respectable wares. See David Loth, The Erotic in Literature (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961) 120, and Ian Hunter et al., On Pornography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993) 57-91.

50. Gay, The Education of the Senses, 358.

51. Cited by Ashbee in his introduction to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, reprinted in Fryer, n.17.

52. Royle, Modern Britain, 21, 87.

53. Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970) 79.

54. Fryer, Forbidden Books of the Victorians, 26.

55. Gay, Education of the Senses, 372.

56. Lynn Hunt, “Pornography and the French Revolution,” The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993) 301-339. Hunt also notes that the variety of engravings that can be seen in pornography of the 1790s, from high brow to low brow, “signals the beginning of the democratization of pornography as a genre during the Revolution. The libertine literature of the ancien régime, destined exclusively for upper-class men, now becomes partly, perhaps even predominantly, a popular genre” (317-318).

57. Quoted in Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life, 24-25.

58. For instance, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs, a volume issued in 1869 by J. C. Hotten, the publisher who took on Swinburne's Poems and Ballads after Moxon withdrew it, is catalogued by Ashbee as “beautifully printed on toned paper” with a fleuron on the title page and a Roxburghe binding (Fryer, Forbidden Books of the Victorians, 59). A Roxburghe binding, according to John Carter, ABC for Book Collectors (New York: Granada, 1985) 181, was a style “originally designed for publications of the Roxburghe Club, founded by a group of patrician bibliophiles after the Duke of Roxburghe's sale in 1812, this special style of binding has a gilt-lettered smooth leather spine, usually brown or green, and dark-red paper-board sides, with no leather corners.” Only one-hundred copies (according to Hotten's advertisement) were sold for private distribution.

59. Fryer, Forbidden Books of the Victorians, 124, 223.

60. Ibid., 76-124.

61. The prices quoted are taken from two catalogues, dated 1901 and 1903, found in the British Library's “Album 7.”

62. Kendrick, The Secret Museum, 48.

63. Bristow suggests in Vice and Vigilance that by 1908, 800 million obscene picture postcards had been handled by the Post Office (208).

64. Pisanus Fraxi, Catena Librorum Tacendorum (London: privately printed, 1885) 181.

65. Tracy C. Davis, “The Actress in Victorian Pornography,” Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class, ed. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1992) 99-134.

66. My thanks to Britt Salvesen of the University of Chicago for supplying me with this information from his incomplete dissertation on stereoscopes.

67. Iaian McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) 204.

68. Ibid., 205.

69. The British Library houses many examples of the bawdy street literature produced in the 1830s and 1840s. Tiny 2 inch × 3 inch duodecimo chap-books such as The Cockchafer: “A Choice selection of Flash, Frisky, and Funny Songs Never before printed and adapted for Gentlemen only” (c. 1840), house numerous bawdy music-hall songs apparently in common circulation among the literate working classes. Ashbee lists about fifty such chap-books in Index Librorum Prohibitorum (London: privately printed, 1878) and notes that “These are songs which, some 30 years ago, were sung publicly by J. H. Munyard, H. Hall, Ross, Sharp, and others, in the various music halls of the metropolis … the death blow to these jovial smutty ditties was struck when the doors of the Canterbury and Weston's Music Halls were opened to women; the entertainment had then to be modified, and suited to female ears; vice was not checked, but its aspects changed; and instead of being places of resort where men could indulge in coarse and bawdy songs, the music halls became meeting-places for prostitutes” (135-136).

70. McCalman, Radical Underworld, 219.

71. Ibid., 209.

72. Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” The Invention of Pornography, 43-44.

73. McCalman, Radical Underworld, 225; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society (New York: Longman, 1981) 21; Thomas F. Boyle, “Morbid Depression Alternating with Excitement: Sex in Victorian Newspapers,” Sexuality and Victorian Fiction, ed. Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984) 213.

74. Boyle, “Morbid Depression Alternating with Excitement,” 212-213.

75. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narrative of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (University of Chicago Press, 1992) 97. In the British Library's “Album 7” there is an undated penny pamphlet titled “Astounding Revelations Concerning Supposed Massage Houses, or Pandemoniums of Vice Frequented by Both Sexes.” The pamphlet compares its own discoveries to those of Stead's “Maiden Tribute” and notes that “it is not for us to moralise upon the present social scandal, but to publish facts—unsavory though they be—and thus cause official notice to be taken of Modern Babylon's latest development of immorality.” The pamphlet is clearly intended to sexually stimulate its readers.

76. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 124.

77. McCalman, Radical Underworld, 223.

78. Over its three-year publication (1842-1844), The Exquisite moved from a magazine concerned with health and radical, populist causes to a more graphically oriented sex magazine. In the middle of its second year it began to introduce illustrations, and eventually printed English translations of French pornographic tales. By its eighty-fifth issue it raised its price to six pence. Without any research into its publishing decisions, one must speculate as to the reasons for its changes. Was it answering the demands of the market?

79. The Exquisite, vol. i (London: H. Smith, 37 Holywell Street, 1842) 6.

80. This entire account has been taken from Boyle, “Morbid Depression Alternating with Excitement,” 224-225.

81. Though the chroniques scandaleuses are almost invariably about the seduction of a woman, upper-class women do seduce their servants, male and female, in various pornographic texts. One such example is The Modern Eveline (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1904) in which the eponymous heroine seduces her footman, John. John, as it turns out, is a willing victim. Of equal interest, Eveline enjoys a fascination for “the other half.” She engages with many servants, enjoys forced copulation with strangers below her class, and goes slumming by affecting a cockney accent and offering herself as a street girl to be photographed naked in Pimlico.

82. My Secret Life is thought to have been published in the late 1880s in Belgium. The small number of copies (accounts vary from six to thirty) were paid for by its anonymous author at a cost of over £1,000. As such, it ranks among the elite forms of pornography that would have been available only to gentleman-collectors.

83. Marcus, The Other Victorians, 128.

84. My Secret Life (New York: Blue Moon Books, 1988) 158. All references cited in the text will hereafter be referred to as MSL.

85. Such verbal repetition is central to the work of pornography and can be found in most texts. An example from the same period can be found in The Adventures of Lady Harpur (Glascow [sic]: William Murray, 1894), where Lady Harpur's mulatto mother, Miss Queenie, is exhorted by a lover “Now, Queenie, now—hold me in your arms put both hands on my bottom—squeeze the cheeks of my Arse! Oh my love, say with me; Prick; Cunt; Arse; Pissing; Fucking; Prick; Cunt; Arse; Fuck; Fuck!” (vol. ii, 8).

86. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. i (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 20-23.

87. Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Victorian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 115.

88. Ibid., 120. A more clearly pornographic example of the female-style narrative to which Lansbury refers can be found in Ashbee's bibliography: “The Confessions of a Lady's Maid, Or Boudoir Intrigue: disclosing many startling scenes and voluptuous incidents as witnessed by her in the various Families of Distinction with whom she lived: forming a wonderful picture of fashionable Frailty, Passion, and Seduction. Beautifully illustrated with Coloured Plates, by an eminent French artist. W. Johns, 35 Holywell Street, Strand, London” (Fryer, Forbidden Books of the Victorians, 213).

89. Andreas Huyssen, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) makes the convincing claim that mass culture is frequently figured as female at the turn of the twentieth century; see especially pp. 44-65.

90. “From the Maid's Point of View,” New Review, 5:27 (1891) 170. Hereafter all citations in the text will be referred to as “MP”.

91. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 73-74.

92. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 121-128. Of residual culture Williams says “The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation. It is crucial to distinguish this aspect of the residual, which may have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture, from that active manifestation of the residual (this being its distinction from the archaic) which has been wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture” (122). The necessity of incorporating Swinburne's residual culture into the dominant culture is not fully realized until early in the twentieth century.

93. Quoted in Marcus, The Other Victorians, 214.

94. Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) 22.

95. Ibid., 24.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., 31.

98. Ibid., 27.

99. Ibid., 29.

100. Ibid., 30.

101. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford University Press, 1997) 76.

102. Hyder, Swinburne, 27.

103. A fascinating side effect of this demarcation is the association of women and the lower classes as those more easily prone to affect, and hence very much outside the separate economy of the masculinized, pure aesthetic.

104. Such a definition suggests that pornography could equally create a sense of harmony in a reader, who, employing a specific practice of reading, is reified by pornography in sexual stimulation—the purpose sought there.

105. It is interesting to note that while his publicly published poems dwell on female charms, his poems of flagellation deal specifically with the bodies of adolescent boys. “Charlie Collingwood's Flogging,” a poem published under the pen-name “Etoniensis” in the September 1879 edition of The Pearl (New York: Grove Press, 1968) 86-92, lingers over the fleshy details of Charlie Collingwood's bottom, as seen in the following excerpt:

     And again we can see his great naked red bottom, round, fleshy and plump,
     And the bystanders look from the Master's red rod, to the schoolboy's red rump:
     There are weals over weals, there are stripes upon stripes, there are cuts after cuts,
     All across Charlie Collingwood's bottom, and isn't the sight of it nuts?
     There, that cut on the fleshiest part of the buttocks, high up on the right,
     He got that before supper last evening, oh! isn't his bottom a sight?
     And that scar that's just healed, don't you see where the birch cut the flesh?
     That's a token of Charlie's last flogging, the rod will soon stamp it afresh.

     (lines 19-26)

106. Psomiades, Beauty's Body, 87.

107. W. M. Rossetti, Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (London: John Camden Hotten, 1866) 71.

108. Ibid., 20.

109. Charles Algernon Swinburne, “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” Swinburne Replies, ed. Clyde Kenneth Hyder (Syracuse University Press, 1966) 19, 31.

110. Ibid., 30.

111. Ibid., 27.

112. Here I make a distinction between the socially transgressive work of Swinburne and that of other artists like Thomas Hardy and George Moore, whose works were also accused of obscenity. While Hardy's and Moore's works addressed sexuality in terms of content, their representations of sexuality remained implied and metaphorical. Swinburne, by contrast, used the very language and techniques of pornography, albeit in a disjunctive and prolix manner, and this was the source of his literary scandal.

113. Hyder, Swinburne Replies, 32.