SOURCE: Hyde, H. Montgomery. “The Pornography of Perversion.” In A History of Pornography, pp. 122-52. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.

[In the following excerpt, Hyde discusses nineteenth-century pornography devoted to sado-masochistic practices, homosexuality, and incest.]

[1]

Apart from purely erotic pornography, there are various manifestations of sexual abnormality in pornographic literature, such as sado-masochistic practices, homosexuality, incest, transvestism and sundry forms of fetichism. The principal sado-masochistic perversion is, of course, flagellation. We have already seen how it was practised in the period of ancient Rome and in the Middle Ages. Later on it was to become so popular in England, particularly in the nineteenth century, that it became known on the European Continent as ‘the English vice’ (le vice anglais).

Some consideration must be given to the lives and personalities of the individuals who have given their names to the two best known perversions: sadism, or sexual emotion associated with the desire to inflict pain and humiliate, and masochism, or sexual emotion associated with the desire to have pain inflicted upon one and to submit to the domination of another. The two individuals who have commemorated these perversions in their writings are the French Marquis de Sade and the Austrian von Sacher-Masoch.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 in Paris and died in 1814 in Charenton Lunatic Asylum, where he had been an inmate for many years. He also spent many years in prison. He belonged to a noble and distinguished old family from the Avignon region in Provence and as a young man became a cavalry officer in the French army, where he seems to have first developed a taste for the perversion commonly associated with his name. He got married when he was twenty-three, but although his wife was devoted to him he much preferred the company of her sister, with whom he lived and whom he idealized in his novel Juliette. After her death he gave himself up completely to a life of dissipation, although his actual exploits were by no means as terrible as those he liked to imagine and which he was to describe in his books. His most serious crime was probably the forcible and indecent flagellation of a thirty-six-year-old woman named Rosa Keller, who had solicited him for alms and whom he induced by false pretences to accompany him home. Here he tied her to a bed, whipped her with a birch, made various incisions in her flesh with a small knife and poured wax into the wounds. Some years later in Marseilles he took part in an orgy of prostitution and flagellation with several whores to whom he administered a powerful aphrodisiac, which made them so ill that they complained to the local magistrate. For these and similar offences de Sade was confined in the Bastille and other prisons.

During his imprisonment de Sade turned to writing, and it is probably true to say that no author has been more talked about and less read than the profligate Marquis. His principal works, which Havelock Ellis regards as a sort of eighteenth-century encyclopaedia of sexual perversions, are Justine (1781), The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Aline and Valcour (1788), The Philosopher in the Boudoir (1795), Juliette (1796), and The Crimes of Love (1800).

De Sade was no mere debased lecher. Not only was he extremely well read in every branch of literature, but he was perhaps the first to realize the importance of sex in its pathological aspects. ‘If there are beings in the world whose acts shock accepted prejudice,’ he wrote, ‘we must not preach at them or punish them … because their bizarre tastes no more depend upon themselves than it depends on you whether you are witty or stupid, well-made or hump-backed.’ With de Sade coition and cruelty synchronized, even if only in the imagination. To quote his own words, ‘every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.’

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in Lvov, a town then belonging to Austria and known as Lemberg, where his father was chief of police; on his father's side he was descended from the noble Spanish family of Sacher which had settled in Prague in the sixteenth century. His mother, whose maiden name was von Masoch, was of mixed German and Russian descent, and also a member of the nobility. As a child, Leopold was greatly attracted by spectacles of cruelty and liked to gaze at pictures of executions, while he dreamed that he was in the power of a cruel woman who kept him in chains and tortured him. At the age of ten, he was the involuntary witness of a scene which left an indelible impression upon his imagination. The incident occurred in the house of a certain Countess, fair but wanton, to whom he was related on his father's side. He was playing hide-and-seek with his sisters and had hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail in the Countess's bedroom, when the Countess suddenly entered the room, followed by her lover, to whom she began to make love on a sofa. Shortly afterwards the Count, accompanied by two friends, dashed into the room. The Countess got up and struck her husband such a blow in the face with her fist that it sent him reeling. She then seized a whip and drove the three intruders out of the room, while her lover escaped in the confusion. At this moment the clothes-rail fell over and revealed the terrified young Sacher-Masoch, whom the Countess now seized, threw on the ground and proceeded to thrash unmercifully with her whip. The pain was great, and yet the boy experienced a strange pleasure. Meanwhile the Count returned and knelt down to beg his wife's forgiveness. As he ran from the room, young Sacher-Masoch saw her kick him. He could not resist the temptation to come back to the room. The door was closed so that he could see nothing, but he heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath his wife's blows.

After taking his degree, he became a university lecturer in history but soon abandoned teaching for writing. He produced a number of novels, mostly with a masochistic theme, of which the best known is Venus in Furs. The whip and furs were his favourite emotional symbols, and at one time his writing paper bore the design of a woman in Russian Boyar costume, her cloak lined with ermine and brandishing a whip. He was twice married and had children by each wife. The first wife, who was a glove-maker in Graz, where he lectured at the university, at first refused to whip him at his request and was obliged to witness the infliction of the castigation by her maid. However, he persuaded her to change her mind after the maid had been discharged, and he is said to have found the whipping, which she administered nearly every day with whips of his own devising, having nails attached to them, to be a great stimulant to his literary work. Not content with this, he constantly urged her to be unfaithful to him and went the length of putting an advertisement in the local newspaper to the effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the acquaintance of an energetic man. Although she wished to please her husband, she was not prepared to do so to this extent, and his persistence eventually led to their separation. He later married his secretary with whom he seems to have lived quite happily. Apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was a kindly man, who neither smoked nor drank alcohol, and was fond of his children. Nor was he a physical weakling. Indeed he fought in the Austrian army in the Italian War of Independence and was decorated for bravery on the field of battle. He died in 1895, by which date the Austrian sexual psychologist Krafft-Ebing had already coined the term ‘masochism’ to describe his behaviour both in fact and fiction.

Although it is written in the form of a novel, Venus in Furs is in reality autobiographical. It is the story of a well-to-do young landowner named Severin, who allows himself to become the abject slave of a heartless mistress named Wanda (the name adopted by his first wife) whom he encourages to tie him up and flog him with a heavy dog-whip—‘something like those they use in Russia for flogging slaves’, says Wanda as she chooses it in the shop—while at the same time wearing her furs.

Severin agrees to accompany his mistress on a tour of Europe as her servant under the name of Gregory. When they reach Florence, he signs a document in which he agrees to put himself completely in her power as her slave, to be punished at will, while on her part she ‘undertakes to wear her furs as often as possible in the presence of her slave, even when she may be most cruel to him.’ Eventually Wanda departs with a handsome Greek lover, but not before Severin has received a final terrific thrashing, this time at the Greek's hands. Some time afterwards Wanda sent her former lover a picture of herself in her ermine jacket, whip in hand, to remind him of past days. ‘I hope my whip has cured you,’ she wrote to him at the same time. ‘The treatment was cruel but thorough.’ Severin agreed. He had indeed been cured.

In the closing passage of the book, Sacher-Masoch points the moral of his tale.

The moral is that, such as Nature has created her and as man actually treats her, woman is the enemy of the latter, and she can only be either a slave or a despot—never a companion. It is only when a woman becomes the equal of man by education or work, when like him she can uphold her rights, that she will be able to be a companion. As things are, we have to choose between being the anvil or the hammer; for my part I was an ass to become the slave of a woman. Do you see what I mean? This is the moral: he who lets himself be whipped, deserves to be! So you see I know what it is to be flogged. I have learnt my lesson. …

[2]

Sacher-Masoch's pornographic masterpiece is perhaps the most revealing work of its kind, although it is by no means the best known. Nor, of course, was he the first masochist to describe his experiences. In the previous century, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had astonished the reading public by the account in his Confessions of his experience when a young boy at the hands of his governess. He was eight years of age and the governess, Mademoiselle Lambercier, was thirty at the time he received his first whipping from her, in 1720, for an act of childish disobedience.

‘After it had been carried out, I found the experience less terrible than the expectation of it had been,’ he was to write; ‘and, strangely enough, this punishment increased my affection for her who had inflicted it … for I had found in the pain and even in the shame of it an element of sensuality which left more desire than fear of receiving the experience again from the same hand. It is true that, as in all this a precocious sexual element was doubtless mixed, the same chastisement if inflicted by her brother would not have seemed so pleasant.’

The whipping was repeated a second time, but it was the last, as the governess noted the effects it produced and immediately discontinued this form of punishment. Nevertheless the effects of the two whippings he had received from Mlle Lambercier made a lasting impression on his mind. ‘Who would have believed that this childish punishment,’ he later confessed, ‘would have determined my tastes, my desires, my passions for the rest of my life?’ It is said that he sought the company of young girls, and in their youthful games the favourite one was where they figured as schoolmistresses and asserted their authority by beating him. Soon he imagined that every young woman was a schoolmistress or a stepmother; and, when he was afraid to communicate his wish to be chastised to the young women of his fancy, he used to revel in thought under the lash of his mistress. But he always felt too ashamed to ask for it.

It was in England, as has already been noted, that flagellation became the greatest rage. In the home, at school, in the brothel, and for breaches of the criminal law as well as of military and naval discipline, the rod or lash was the favourite implement of chastisement, besides being productive of an immense literature devoted to the subject of flagellation. Continental observers attribute this in part at least to the inordinate love of corporal punishment displayed by English schoolmasters. As early as the latter part of the seventeenth century we find the dramatist and poet Thomas Shadwell in his play The Virtuoso (1676) introducing a scene in which the old libertine Snarl comes to a young prostitute to be flogged by her. ‘I wonder that should please you so much, that pleases me so little?’ she asks him. He replies: ‘I was so us'd to't at Westminster School I cou'd never leave it off since.’

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in the Regency period, there were numerous flogging establishments in London, to which the highest in the land would resort. One of them was run by Mrs Collett, whom Ashbee describes as ‘a noted whipper’, and King George IV is known to have visited her on at least one occasion. But the queen of her profession was undoubtedly Mrs Theresa Berkley, of No 28 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. She was a perfect mistress of her art, according to Ashbee, understanding how to satisfy her clients; and she was, moreover, a thorough woman of business, for she amassed during her career a considerable sum of money. She is particularly remembered for the ‘Berkley Horse’, a machine specially invented for her ‘to flog gentlemen upon’. A print of this ingenious contrivance appears in Venus School-Mistress; or Birchen Sports, published about 1810, and we are told that ‘it is capable of being opened to a considerable extent so as to bring the body to any angle that might be desirable’. Her collection of instruments of flagellation was probably unrivalled, and she was careful to keep her birches soaking in water so that they were always green and pliant.

Further details of Mistress Berkley's ‘birchen sports’ are given in Venus School-Mistress:

It is very true that there are innumerable old generals, admirals, colonels, and captains, as well as bishops, judges, barristers, lords, commoners, and physicians, who periodically go to be whipped, merely because it warms their blood, and keeps up a little agreeable excitement in their systems long after the power of enjoying the opposite sex has failed them; but it is equally true that hundreds of young men, through having been educated at institutions where the masters were fond of administering birch discipline, and recollecting certain sensations produced by it, have imbibed a passion for it, and have longed to receive the same chastisement from the hands of a fine woman. …

Those women who give satisfaction to the amateurs of discipline are called governesses, because they have by experience acquired a tact and a modus operandi, which the generality do not possess. It is not the merely keeping a rod, and being willing to flog, that would cause a woman to be visited by the worshippers of the birch: she must have served her time to some other woman who understood her business and be thoroughly accomplished in the art. They must have a quick and intuitive method of observing the various aberrations of the human mind, and be ready and quick to humour and relieve them. …¹

The delicacy and savoir faire requisite in the administration of the whip by a woman were depicted in a later work, The Merry Order of St Bridget: Personal Recollections of the Use of the Rod, by ‘Margaret Anson York’, which purports to be an account of the whipping society for aristocratic ladies in France at the time of the Second Empire. ‘There is a great difference in the style of whipping,’ writes the author. ‘There is no enjoyment in the use or endurance of the rod when it is vulgarly used, like a woman would strike in a passion; but when an elegant, high-bred woman wields it with dignity of mien and grace of attitude, then both the practice and suffering become a real pleasure.’

Cleland included a flagellation scene in Fanny Hill, and this seems to have been the first detailed description of the practice to appear in print in England. The scene occurs in Mrs Cole's establishment with a young man, who has himself tied with his own garters, face downwards on a bench, and flagellated by Fanny. Afterwards he flagellated Fanny, but not so severely, and apparently it was only by these means that he came to satisfy his desires fully. After all this, so we learn, a supper was brought in by the discreet Mrs Cole herself, ‘which might have piqued the sensuality of a cardinal, accompanied by a choice of the richest wines!’

That the rod was in use in English brothels even before Cleland's time we have seen from Shadwell's The Virtuoso. It is significant, too, that Hogarth in his series of pictures of ‘The Harlot's Progress’ is careful to show a birch hanging up on the wall of the room where the harlot lives and receives her customers. But it was in the schools, both for boys and (surprisingly enough) for girls as well, that the rod was most popular and whence its vogue and interest spread to all ranks of English society.

One of the most widely read examples of this type of flagellation literature in the mid-Victorian period was The Romance of Chastisement, first published with eight coloured lithographs by Dugdale in 1866. It revealed the experiences of a pupil at Belvedere House, an academy for young ladies where the birch was much used. Although purporting to be the work of a woman, it was written by a male hand—in fact that of Mr St George H. Stock, formerly a lieutenant in the Queen's Royal Regiment, who appears to have thoroughly enjoyed the subject, since he expresses the belief that a woman operating upon one of her own sex also experiences pleasure and excitement in the act. ‘As a rule women do not readily resort to rods,’ he writes. ‘Some are too tender-hearted, others too chaste or too timid, but—their scruples overcome and vengeance safe—they know no measure in the cruel sport that, under the name of duty, gives the rein to passion and gratifies two lusts at every lunge.’

A companion volume, which Dugdale brought out in the same year, with lithographs from designs by Edward Sellon, The New Ladies' Tickler; or The Adventures of Lady Lovesport and The Audacious Harry, is largely devoted to the uses of the birch in the home. ‘Lady Lovesport’ is an ardent flagellant, and the scenes are described by her niece Emily who has been brought up by her and, as may be guessed, is herself no stranger to the rod.

The domestic use of the rod was enthusiastically discussed in newspapers and magazines of the period, and such respectable journals as The Queen and The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine opened their correspondence columns on the subject. In fact, so many letters reached the editor of the latter journal that he was obliged to issue a supplement containing a selection of these letters ‘On the whipping of Girls, and the General Corporal Punish-ment of Children’, which were written between April and December 1870. Some of the letters may have been a hoax, but others were apparently written in all seriousness.

The supplement to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, which contained this instructive correspondence, price two shillings, had a wide sale. But, just as the publication of Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs is said to have caused an immediate rise in the sale of dog-whips to purchasers who did not own dogs, so the publication of these letters was not confined to those with a genuine interest in juvenile education.

[3]

‘The schoolmaster's joy is to flog,’ so runs an old ballad attributed to the poet Thomas Gray, best known for his Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Many such masters of boys' schools have left a notorious reputation for their use of the birch, notably Gill and Colet of St Paul's, Bowyer of Christ's Hospital, Busby and Keate of Eton, and Drury and Vaughan of Harrow. Private tutors or governors were also permitted by custom to flog their pupils at will. Even young monarchs were not exempt from this form of punishment. George Buchanan, tutor to King James I, used to whip His Majesty freely: when asked by a believer in the Divine Right of Kings whether he did not fear to strike the Lord's Anointed, he replied, ‘Nae, I never touch his anointed end.’

Besides Gray, other English poets and writers who suffered under the schoolmaster's birch, and subsequently recorded the experience, include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Coleridge, for example, went to school at Christ's Hospital, where Bowyer often beat him with merciless severity. When he subsequently heard of his old master's death, Coleridge remarked that ‘it was lucky that the cherubim who took him to Heaven were nothing but faces and wings, or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way!’

Perhaps the poet who suffered most in this way, in mind as well as in body, was Swinburne, who in consequence had a positive obsession with flagellation throughout his life and produced an extensive literature on the subject. While his interest in it was unquestionably morbid, it was not sadistic; on the contrary, Swinburne was decidedly masochistic. His sympathies were always with the boy being flogged, usually himself, whom he regarded as a hero in the struggle with his tormentor.

Although most of Swinburne's writings on this subject were either not published until long after his death or else have remained unpublished, during his lifetime the poet was an anonymous contributor to The Whippingham Papers, a collection of flagellation pieces by St George Stock, author of The Romance of Chastisement. It probably made its first appearance in the late 1880's, since it is not mentioned by Ashbee.

In his unfinished autobiographical novel Lesbia Brandon, which Swinburne began in 1864 and which seems to have been privately circulated among his friends in the seventies although it was not published until many years after his death, there is a vivid prose description of the flogging of a boy by his tutor in an aristocratic household for having bathed in the sea without permission. The episode has an added piquancy by reason of the fact that the tutor is strongly attracted by the physical charms of the boy's elder sister. Incidentally, the character of the boy, Herbert, is based on the author himself.

The sado-masochistic literature of the Victorian period and later is so extensive and also so repetitious in theme and incident, that only a few further specific examples may be given here. One which must be briefly mentioned is Gynecocracy. A Narrative of the Adventures and Psychological Experiences of Julian Robinson (afterwards Viscount Ladywood) under Petticoat Rule. Written by himself. This work appeared in three volumes in 1893, with an imprint at Paris and Rotterdam, although it was actually produced in Liverpool. It is one of the most complete and detailed expositions of the power of masochism, and the anonymous author has been identified with a distinguished contemporary writer of scientific books. It has a strong psychological as well as erotic interest, and it certainly shows considerable literary ability.

A similar work, stated to be by the author of Gynecocracy, which also appeared in the nineties, was The Petticoat Dominant, or Woman's Revenge. Another work on the same theme, originally written in French, and first published in 1903, was The Mistress and the Slave, which enjoyed a considerable vogue. Later, the theme reappears in Miss High Heels. The Story of a rich but girlish young gentleman under the control of his pretty step sister, and her aunt, written by him at his step sister's order, with an account of his punishments, the dresses he was made to wear, his final subjection, and his curious fate. This was first published in a privately printed edition in Paris in 1931. So far as is known, it is still selling.

Also deserving of mention, on the more specific theme of flagellation, is The Memoirs of Dolly Morton, the Story of a Woman's Part in the Struggle to free the Slaves. An Account of the Whippings, Rapes and Violences that preceded the Civil War in America, with curious Anthropological Observations on the radical diversities in the conformation of the Female Bottom and the way different Women endure Chastisement. First published by Carrington in Paris at the turn of the century, and frequently reprinted both in Europe and America, Dolly Morton is regarded by Dawes as ‘by far the best of all the books whose main theme is Flagellation’. Its author is said to have been the young Breton writer Hughes Rebell, otherwise George Grassal, who was a friend of Carrington and is known to have been interested in flagellation. He wrote another book on this theme entitled Femmes Châtiées, and incidentally made a French translation of Oscar Wilde's Intentions, which Carrington also published. Dolly Morton is an interesting and moving book, which certainly recaptures the plantation atmosphere, even more graphically and convincingly than Uncle Tom's Cabin, also a favourite with devotees of the whip in spite of its high moral tone. ‘There is an intensity about it that is arresting,’ writes Dawes, ‘and places it as being among the very few good erotic books of the period.’² Its original publisher described it, with perhaps some justice, as ‘the most wonderful Romance of Flagellation in existence’.

The plot of The Memoirs of Dolly Morton may be shortly recounted. At the age of eighteen, Dolly, who is an orphan, goes to ‘a place in Virginia right in the middle of the slave states’, first as companion to a woman who wishes to redeem the slaves, and later, after having been indecently whipped by some slaveowners for helping the slaves to escape, as mistress of the owner of a large plantation and many slaves, a man named Randolph. Here she not only witnesses many whippings and birchings, but has to submit to them herself, as well as to the erotic performances of Mr Randolph and even of his friends. ‘You are a Northern girl,’ Randolph tells her, ‘so you don't understand how we Southerners look upon our slave women. When they take our fancy we amuse ourselves with them, but we feel no compunction in whipping them whenever they misbehave. Their bodies belong to us, so we can use them in any way we please. Personally I have no more regard for my slaves than for my dogs and horses.’ He added that whipping a girl always excited him, and after such a flagellation he frequently had intercourse with Dolly. At the end of her story, she has separated from Randolph, having saved a little money, which she ekes out by adopting the oldest profession in the world. She then marries a man in a good way of business, a few years older than herself and settles down to a life of routine domesticity.

That flagellation retains its interest as ‘the English vice’ on both sides of the Atlantic is evident today, when such recent works as The Wisdom of the Lash by Pauline Réage find a ready market;³ and the pornographic appeal, however deplorably it may appear to the normally sexed, is as strong as in the days of King George IV:

Delightful sport! whose never failing charm
Makes young blood tingle, and keeps old blood warm.

[4]

It may safely be said that, in the realm of sexual perversion, homosexuality has been and continues to be considerably more prevalent than flagellation; however, homosexual literature is by no means so extensive as that devoted to the joys of the rod, doubtless because it is not erotically stimulating to the average reader of pornography (who is a male heterosexual) although male inversion, in particular, has flourished in the Anglo-Saxon countries from earliest times. In England, as with the case of flagellation, homosexual conduct has often owed its origin to the public school, where its practice has long been tacitly tolerated. Writing at the time of the Wilde trial in 1895, W. T. Stead, the outspoken editor of The Review of Reviews, remarked that, ‘if all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde's offences were to be clapped into gaol, there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester to Pentonville and Holloway.’ The existence of numerous homosexual societies, or sodomitical clubs, particularly in London, has been a matter of fairly common knowledge, but they have only occasionally received publicity, through the appearance of their proprietors in the courts, as in the case of ‘the Vere Street coterie’ in 1810 and ‘the Cleveland Street scandal’ in 1889.

The activities of the Vere Street coterie have been described in The Phoenix of Sodom … Being an Exhibition of the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Lechers of Sodom and Gomorrah, embellished and improved with the Modern Refinements in Sodomitical Practices, by the members of the Vere Street Coterie, of detestable memory. This book was published in 1813 for the benefit of James Cook, the landlord of the White Swan public house in Vere Street, where the homosexuals were in the habit of forgathering. Cook had been fleeced by a fraudulent attorney whilst in Newgate prison awaiting trial on the charge of keeping a disorderly house, and some sympathy had been felt for him, since he had a number of noble and wealthy patrons who got off scot free while the unfortunate landlord was sentenced to stand in the pillory where he was pelted with mud and rotten eggs.

The fatal house in question was furnished in a style most appropriate for the purposes it was intended so we learn from The Phoenix of Sodom. Four beds were provided in one room—another was fitted up for the ladies' dressing-room, with a toilette, and every appendage of rouge, etc., etc.,—a third room was called the Chapel, where marriages took place, sometimes between a female grenadier, six feet high, and a petit maître not more than half the attitude of his beloved wife! These marriages were solemnized with all the mockery of bridesmaids and bridesmen; and the nuptials were frequently consummated by two, three or four couples in the same room, and in the sight of each other!

The Cleveland Street scandal, which created a great sensation at the time, is noticed by Frank Harris in My Life and Loves, although it is unlikely that Harris ever visited the notorious establishment. But others much higher in the English social hierarchy than Frank Harris unquestionably did so, including, so it is said, a member of the Royal Family. The scandal came to public light through the action of a newspaper editor, who published a list of the house's aristocratic patrons, among them, the Earl of Euston, who was the eldest son of the Duke of Grafton. Now Lord Euston was a man of perfectly normal propensities and, although he had indeed been to Cleveland Street, his visit had taken place under a misapprehension. One evening, after dining at his club, he happened to be strolling through Leicester Square, when a man thrust a card into his hand; the card bore an address in Cleveland Street and the words ‘Poses plastiques’ in one corner. Being at a loose end, Lord Euston went off to Cleveland Street, where he imagined he might see some female nudes. On finding it was an establishment of quite a different kind, he immediately left. When the newspaper article appeared, he took legal proceedings, as he naturally resented having his name linked with a homosexual circle.

Among the journals which commented upon the affair was a certain weekly which had a hitherto blameless reputation. A literary clergyman, the Rev. John Verschoyle, expressed the opinion, when lunching with Frank Harris at the time, that any weekly which even mentioned the affair ‘had killed itself’. Francis Burnand, the witty editor of Punch, was also a luncheon guest, and he disagreed, taking the view that the business of any journal was to print news and comment, and in this case everyone was talking about the scandal.

‘How could you explain such an incident to your wife and daughter,’ the puritanical clergyman insisted, ‘if she asked you what it was all about?’

‘Very easily,’ replied Burnand smiling. ‘I'd say: “My dear, Lord Euston feels himself above the ordinary law and, having nothing better to do, went to this notorious gambling house to play. He thought the game was going to be poker; but when he found it was baccarat he came away!”’

Various English writers, admittedly homosexual, such as Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon, have given some evidence of their inclinations in their writings. In the seventeenth century, homosexuality was rife at court, both James I and William III being inverts, and in the reign of Charles II the king's libertine companion, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote a play in praise of the practice, Sodom: or The Quintessence of Debauchery, which is said to have been actually performed before the king and his male courtiers. Some idea of this piece, written in heroic couplets and described in the article on Rochester in the Dictionary of National Biography as being ‘of intolerable foulness’, may be gained from the caste of characters, of whom the first is Bolloxinion, King of Sodom.

Sodom was published in 1684 with an Antwerp imprint, probably fictitious; but no copy of this original edition is known. However, two manuscript copies are extant, one of which is in the British Museum. Rochester in fact disclaimed responsibility for it, and it has been attributed to a barrister named John Fishbourne, but modern authorities are generally agreed that Rochester had the main hand in its composition which indeed is fairly clear from internal evidence.

It is noteworthy that Gilbert and Sullivan also treated the subject with characteristic humour in an obscene opera they composed, The Sod's Opera, about the same time as The Dictionary of National Biography was fulminating against Rochester's works. The characters in The Sod's Opera included Count Tostoff; the brothers Bollox, ‘a pair of hangers on’; and Scrotum, ‘a wrinkled old retainer’. Unlike Sodom, this work was not performed at court; but, according to Mr St John-Stevas, for many years a copy was kept in the guard room at St James's Palace in London.⁴

It was not until the following century that anything approaching deliberately produced homosexual literature in prose began to appear. The first example occurs in Fanny Hill, but the scene in question is omitted from most editions of this most celebrated of all English erotica, although the author liked to include every possible erotic experience. Fanny makes it quite clear that she disapproved of sodomy, and her view was no doubt shared by the author.⁵

About a century later an unblushing defence of sodomy appeared in the celebrated homosexual poem, Don Leon, attributed to Lord Byron. This work, 1,465 lines long, was first published by Dugdale in 1886, along with another poem, Leon to Annabella, which retails in rhyming couplets the reasons for the amorous poet's separation from his wife. Dugdale had bought the Mss of the two poems some years before in the genuine belief that they were the work of Byron and apparently with the idea of going to Lady Byron and extracting a large sum of money from her in return for their suppression. A friend dissuaded him from the latter course, pointing out that it might well result in his being prosecuted for blackmail, besides which he greatly doubted whether they were by Byron at all. Although the style is decidedly ‘Byronic’, there are allusions to events of which Byron could not possibly have known, since they occurred after his death. However, the two poems duly appeared, with their stated attribution, and they have been frequently reprinted by publishers of pornography, including the redoubtable Carrington, who in an advertisement described Don Leon as a work ‘which far outdistances Don Juan both in audacity of conception and licence of language’. Don Leon is stated to have formed part of Byron's famous Journal or Memoirs, which was destroyed by the poet's biographer Thomas Moore shortly after his death. As for Leon to Isabella. An Epistle from Lord Byron to Lady Byron, this was said to have been found in a cottage by the roadside in the neighbourhood of Pisa, which Byron used to visit. However, there can be little if any doubt that the poems are spurious, notwithstanding their clever imitation of Byron's style. In England, orders have frequently been made for their destruction under the Obscene Publications Act.⁶

The earlier part of Don Leon is allegedly autobiographical and describes the poet's youthful passions.

I love a youth; but Horace did the same;
If he's absolv'd, say, why am I to blame?
When young Alexis claimed a Virgil's sigh,
He told the world his choice; and may not I?
Shall every schoolman's pen his verse extol,
And, sin in me, in him a weakness call?
Then why was Socrates surnamed the sage,
Not only in his own, but every age,
If lips, whose accents strewed the path of truth,
Could print their kisses on some favoured youth?
Or why should Plato, in his Commonwealth,
Score tenets up which I must note by stealth?
Say, why, when great Epaminondas died,
Was Cephidorus buried by his side?
Or why should Plutarch with eulogiums cite
That chieftain's love for his young Catamite,
And we be forced his doctrine to decry,
Or drink the bitter cup of infamy?

Dr Lushington, the lawyer whom Lady Byron consulted on the question of divorce, publicly stated his opinion that ‘her noble husband … has given cause for a separation which can never be revealed; but the honour due to the female sex forbids all further intercourse for ever’. Forty years later, in 1856, Lady Byron told the American novelist Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe that the cause of their estrangement was an incestuous intrigue which her husband had carried on with his sister, Mrs Leigh. Although Byron was known to be warmly attached to his sister nevertheless it is difficult to accept this story, which Mrs Stowe published after both Mrs Leigh and Lady Byron were dead. On the other hand, the explanation suggested in the latter part of Don Leon, namely that Byron had sodomized his wife when she was pregnant, must appear equally incredible to many.

[5]

Fifteen years after the original publication of Don Leon, there appeared the confessions of a homosexual, which was widely read by those interested in the subject, among others, Oscar Wilde. This was The Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or The Recollections of a Mary-Anne, published in 1881, price four guineas, which was expensive considering that it amounts to less than a hundred pages.

The writer of these notes was walking through Leicester Square one sunny afternoon, last November, when his attention was particularly taken by an effeminate, but very good looking young fellow, who was walking in front of him, looking in shop windows from time to time, and now and then looking round as if to attract attention. Dressed in tight fitting clothes, which set off his Adonis-like figure to the best advantage … he had small elegant feet, set off by pretty patent leather boots, a fresh looking beardless face, with almost feminine features, auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes, which spoke as plain as possible to my sense …

Thus the volume begins. The youth is accosted and willingly accompanies the writer back to his rooms in ‘Cornwall Mansions, close to Baker Street Station’, where they share a meal which includes ‘a good rumpsteak and oyster sauce, tipped up with a couple of bottles of champagne of an extra sec brand’, after which an amorous encounter takes place.

It appears that the youth, whose name is Jack Saul, is making his living as a ‘Mary Anne’. In addition to satisfying the other man, he is induced to write a short account of his adventures and experiences for which he is also paid. These are almost entirely of a homosexual character and are related with considerable skill and force, although the language employed is somewhat crude in places. Similar details are given by other characters in the narrative. For instance, Fred Jones, who ‘had been a soldier in the Foot Guards and bought out’, relates his experiences while in the army. ‘There are lots of houses in London,’ he says, ‘where only soldiers are received, and where gentlemen can sleep with them. The best known is now closed. It was the tobacconist's shop next to Albany Street Barracks in Regent's Park, and was kept by a Mrs Truman. The old lady would receive gentlemen and let us know. That is all over now, but there are still six houses in London that I know of.’

Jack relates how he is introduced to such a house, a so-called ‘club’, which was in a street leading off Portland Place. ‘If you had looked in the London Directory,’ says Jack, ‘you would have simply found it as the residence of Mr Inslip—a rather suggestive name, you may think, considering the practices of the members of his club. I afterwards found that no gentleman was admitted to the freedom of this establishment unless he first paid an admission fee of one hundred guineas, besides a handsome annual subscription and liberal payments for refreshments and the procuration of boys or youths like myself.’ The ‘special’ evenings of the club lasted from shortly after 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., and there were usually about a dozen members present and a similar number of younger guests. Most of the latter were dressed as girls and assumed female names. Jack was known as ‘Eveline’.

‘You remember the Boulton and Park case?’ Jack continued. ‘Well, I was present at the ball given at Haxell's Hotel in the Strand. No doubt the proprietor was quite innocent of any idea of what our fun really was; but there were two or three dressing rooms into which the company could retire at pleasure. Boulton was superbly got up as a beautiful lady, and I observed Lord Arthur was very spooney about “her”. … Park was there as a lady, dancing with a gentleman from the City, a very handsome Greek merchant.’⁷

Jack goes on to describe how Lord Arthur, to whom he had just been introduced by Mr Inslip, sat down with Boulton, who was known as ‘Laura’, and, turning to Jack, said: ‘Allow me to introduce you two dears to one another. Miss Laura—Miss Eveline.’ After excusing himself for a few minutes, Lord Arthur went off, leaving the other two together. ‘Boulton seemed to take to me at once,’ Jack subsequently admitted.

The upshot of this meeting was that, when the ball was over, Jack returned with Boulton and Park to their rooms in Eaton Square, where he stayed the remainder of the night. ‘As soon as we got to Boulton's place, he gave me a drop of his invigorating cordial, which seemed to warm my blood to the tips of my fingers; then we went to bed and slept till about twelve o'clock, had breakfast all dressed as ladies. (I believe the people of the house thought we were gay ladies.) Boulton assured me they hadn't a rag of male clothing in the place, all their manly attire being in some other place.’ Afterwards Boulton and Jack became close friends.

Although some of the details of the incidents described in The Sins of the Cities of the Plain may be exaggerated for effect, the work is based upon fact and no doubt gives a faithful enough picture of a seamy side of contemporary London life. As the author remarks, ‘the extent to which pederasty is carried on in London between gentlemen and young fellows is little dreamed of by the outside public.’ The book remains one of the few erotic works in English whose main theme is homosexuality. Another, entirely in the form of fiction, in which Oscar Wilde is supposed to have had a hand, is Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal, originally published in two volumes clandestinely by Leonard Smithers in 1893. The history of Teleny, and of Wilde's association with this curious composition, are not generally known.

About 1889, a Frenchman named Charles Hirsch, who is the authority for the following account, came over to London and opened a bookshop, the Librairie Parisienne, in Coventry Street, for the sale of French publications, which he successfully managed for many years. Among his early customers was Oscar Wilde, who used to buy the works of the leading French writers of the day such as Zola and Maupassant. Later on, when Wilde got to know him better and had taken him into his confidence, he would order ‘certain licentious works of a special genre which he euphemistically described as “socratic”’ and which the bookseller was able to obtain not without difficulty. Most of these works were in French, but at least one, as Hirsch recalled, was in English. This was The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. The bookseller also supplied Wilde with several recent titles, obscene little books bearing an Amsterdam imprint, but their crudity evidently displeased Wilde, as he returned them to the shop.

One day, towards the end of 1890, Wilde came in to the bookshop, carrying a small package, which was carefully wrapped up and sealed. ‘A friend of mine will call for this manuscript and will show you my card,’ he told the Frenchman, to whom he also gave the name of the prospective caller. Some few days later, a young man whom Hirsch had previously seen in Wilde's company came in and took the package away. After a while, he returned it, saying in his turn: ‘Please give this to one of our friends who will call for it on behalf of the same person.’

This procedure was repeated three times. The last borrower, who was not so careful as the others, returned the manuscript unwrapped and simply tied round with a piece of ribbon. The temptation to open and read it was too great for Monsieur Hirsch to resist. The work turned out to be a homosexual novel, entitled Teleny, and what struck the bookseller about it was the extraordinary mixture of different handwriting, erasures, interlineations, corrections and additions obviously made by various hands. ‘It was evident to me,’ the bookseller noted at the time, ‘that several writers of unequal literary merit had collaborated in this anonymous but profoundly interesting work.’

Shortly afterwards, the bookseller returned the manuscript to its owner and thought nothing more about it until his attention was drawn to its publication three years later by Smithers under the fictitious imprint, ‘Cosmopoli’, at the price of five guineas. On examining this publication, the Frenchman found that it conformed generally with the story as he had read it in manuscript, except that the setting had been transferred from London to Paris, and this gave some of the descriptions of characters and places a false ring, since they had appeared to the bookseller to be so essentially English in the original version.

For example, take this description of the Latin Quarter, which the hero visits on his way to a brothel:

We had an endless drive through the narrow straggling streets, alleys and by-ways where painted women appeared in gorgeous dresses at the filthy windows of some wretched houses.

As it was getting late, all the shops were now shut, except the fruiterers, who sold fried fish, mussels and potatoes. These disgorged an offensive smell of dirt, grease and hot oil, which mixed itself up with the stench of the gutters and that of the cesspools in the middle of the streets.

In the darkness of the ill-lighted thoroughfares more than one café chantant and beer house flared with red gas-lights and as we passed them we felt the puffs of warm close air reeking with alcohol, tobacco and sour beer. All these streets were thronged with a motley crowd. There were tipsy men with scowling ugly faces, slipshod vixens, and pale precociously withered children, all tattered and torn, singing obscene songs.

This picture appeared very real to the bookseller, provided it were meant not for the Boulevard St Michel but for the neighbourhood of Soho Square and some parts of the East End of London.

Some years later, the Frenchman pointed out this and other inconsistencies to the English publisher whom he met at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. On this occasion Smithers admitted that he had altered the text and transposed the scene of the story across the Channel ‘so as not to shock the national amour propre of his English subscribers’! He added that he hoped to publish the original text when the 1893 edition was exhausted, but he died before he could carry out this intention. However, the original manuscript eventually came into the possession of M. Hirsch, and from this a French translation was prepared; this was published together with an Introduction by Hirsch, in a privately printed edition in two small octavo volumes in Paris in 1934. Meanwhile, the Smithers edition has been republished in Paris by The Olympia Press, with a Foreword which attributes the whole work to Wilde.

The plot of the story may be briefly summarized. Camille Des Grieux, a young man of good family, conceives a violent passion for a famous pianist named René Teleny. Much is made of the effect of the latter's playing upon the romantic highly strung youth, who attends every one of Teleny's concerts that he possibly can. In due course he is introduced to his idol. The first part of the novel is mainly occupied with descriptions of Des Grieux's feelings, dreams and hallucinations; also his actual experiences, such as his first and only visit to a brothel which nauseates him, and his rape of his mother's housemaid, who subsequently commits suicide by throwing herself out of a window.

Des Grieux meets Teleny several times, but they are prevented by circumstances from becoming more intimate. The younger man is consumed with jealousy, and one night, after a concert, he follows Teleny unobserved, as he imagines. Seeing him with several other youths with whom he is obviously on the most friendly terms, Des Grieux gives way to despair and stops on one of the bridges over the Seine with the intention of jumping into the waters below. He is on the verge of doing so, when Teleny, who has seen him all along, softly approaches and seizes hold of him in the nick of time.

Teleny takes the young man home with him, and at last the latter's dreams are realized. For a time they live together in homosexual rapture. But after a while Des Grieux is convinced that his lover is also having an affair with a woman, and his old jealousies and fears return. To his horror and dismay, he discovers that his suspicions are only too true and that the woman in question is none other than his own mother! Again he rushes to the river, and this time he succeeds in throwing himself in. He recovers consciousness to find himself in the Morgue, where he has been taken for dead. Meanwhile, Teleny, who is deeply in debt and has engaged in his liaison with Madame Des Grieux solely for financial reasons, stabs himself. The wound is fatal and he dies, but not before Des Grieux reaches his bedside and in a touching death-bed scene utters his forgiveness.

Hirsch subsequently told Dawes, the historian of English erotica, that, in his opinion, Teleny was undoubtedly written by various friends of Wilde, who himself supervised and corrected the manuscript, adding touches of his own here and there. ‘I admit that Teleny is better written than the vast majority of English erotic books,’ Dawes has noted, ‘but if Wilde really had a controlling influence over it, as apparently he must have done, it should certainly be better than it is. Perhaps it may be regarded as an outlet for the worst and most sensational side of Wilde's artistic nature.’⁸

Of course, numbers of modern writers, who have been homosexuals or inclined to homosexuality, have indicated their feelings in their writings. Walt Whitman in America (Leaves of Grass), Wilde in England (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud in France. But it cannot be said that they wrote any pornography. In the field of fiction, most recent homosexual literature has been concerned with female homosexuality or Lesbianism; but, with the exception of occasional ‘under the counter’ productions such as The Strange Cult by George Clement, here again they hardly rank as pornography, although that has not prevented the police from taking action in respect of some of them. The case of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall has been mentioned in an earlier chapter. Although condemned in 1928, no proceedings were taken when it reappeared in English bookshops after the last war, and it can now be bought freely. Likewise The Man in Control by Charles McGraw, the story of a girl of seventeen who is seduced by a Lesbian, which was unsuccessfully prosecuted in London in 1954. If the subject is treated seriously or scientifically, or in overtones of disapproval, in spite of lurid and sensational presentation, books in which this is done are likely to survive on the bookstalls on both sides of the Atlantic. The most commercially successful example of the latter type is probably Women's Barracks, the diary of a Frenchwoman named Tereska Torres, of which two million or more copies of the paperback edition of the English translation by Meyer Levin have been sold, in spite of its having attracted the unfavourable attention of the Gathings Committee in the United States.

A certain amount of literature, including magazines, is written by homosexuals for homosexuals, among whom it circulates exclusively. It is not readily available to the general reader, even to the ordinary ‘run-of-the-mill’ commercial dealer in pornography, so that it need not be further examined here. The frankest autobiography of an English male homosexual, at the same time written with great restraint, is Against the Law by Peter Wildeblood, first published in 1955. This is a sincere and moving account of a congenital homosexual's experiences, which led to his sensational trial and imprisonment along with Lord Montagu and Mr Michael Pitt-Rivers in what was known in England as the Montagu case. Against the Law is in no sense pornographic or obscene.

The same cannot be said for The Black Diaries, the homosexual diaries of the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement, who was hanged for high treason in 1916. These controversial documents, which the British Government for many years refused to make available for public inspection, were eventually released in 1959. The Government's hand was partly forced by Mr Peter Singleton-Gates, into whose hands copies of two of the three diaries had found their way many years before, and who published them about the same time with the assistance of Mr Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press in Paris. An edition appeared shortly afterwards in England. No official action was taken against Mr Singleton-Gates, either under the Official Secrets Act or the Obscene Publications Act, although the text had been taken from the diaries when they were in the possession of the British authorities and the descriptions of homosexual acts which they contain are undoubtedly the frankest which have ever appeared in an open English publication.⁹

[6]

Other kinds of sexual deviation, besides sado-masochistic and homosexual practices, have been the subjects of pornography, but as a rule only incidentally. The list is considerable and includes incest, defloration, exhibitionism, nymphomania, masturbation, necrophily, transvestism and various forms of fetichism such as women's high-heeled boots and shoes, corsets and other articles of female attire or use, like riding-whips and spurs. They are less commonly met with in literature than in the fields of sexual psychology and psychopathology and in criminology, so that only a few detailed examples can be given here.

Incest appears relatively seldom in narrative literature. John Ford, the early seventeenth-century dramatist, treated it with considerable skill and subtlety in his tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, first published in 1633, and later in the same century Rochester made it the subject of a light-hearted scene in Sodom. In the nineteenth century, as has also been noted, according to Mrs Beecher Stowe's account, Byron's incestuous love for his sister was the real cause of the break-up of his marriage.

One of the very few examples of pornography which deals almost exclusively with this particular sex deviation is Letters from a Friend in Paris, which came out in London in 1874. The writer of the Letters is a photographer, who has been introduced by a homosexual friend to a family in Paris, consisting of father, mother, two daughters and a son, who live together in a state of the most complete and indiscriminate incest. Having had intercourse with the whole family, the photographer marries and has a daughter, whom he weds, after taking her maidenhead, to his own natural son, thus effecting an incestuous marriage. ‘The copulations which occur at every page are of the most tedious sameness,’ remarks Ashbee; ‘the details are frequently crapulous and disgusting, seldom voluptuous. The work is without a spark of wit or poetical feeling from beginning to end, but is gross, material, dull and monotonous.’¹⁰

At one time, in Victorian England, there was almost as great a mania for the defloration of young girls as there was for flagellation. The trade in virgins for this purpose was a flourishing feature of prostitution, and after they had lost their maidenheads they were sometimes ‘patched up’ by procuresses and quacks through surgical treatment and drugs to simulate the virginity which they had lost. The horrifying details of this trade in child prostitutes were exposed by W. T. Stead in a series of articles entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, then edited by Stead, during the first fortnight of July 1885. Unfortunately for himself, Stead allowed his zeal for purity to outrun his discretion when he disclosed that he had, through the medium of a procuress, in an attempt to show how easy the operation was, obtained a little girl named Eliza Armstrong, for the apparent purpose of prostitution at a price of three pounds, although in fact he had immediately handed her over to the Salvation Army to be cared for and had not ‘interfered’ with her in any way. The upshot was that Stead was prosecuted for abduction, convicted and sent to prison for two months. ‘I regret to say,’ said the judge in passing sentence, ‘that you deluged for some months our streets and the whole country with an amount of filth which I fear tainted the minds of the children you were so anxious to protect, and which, I do not hesitate to say, has been and ever will be a disgrace to journalism.’¹¹

More recently, the subject has been treated from a comparatively sophisticated angle by Vladimir Nabokov in his now celebrated novel Lolita, which was originally published by Girodias's Olympia Press in 1955; perhaps for that reason attempts were made to suppress it in England. Although the English novelist and critic Graham Greene drew attention to its merits, copies were seized by the British Customs and John Gordon of the London Sunday Express denounced it in language reminiscent of that used by James Douglas about The Well of Loneliness in the same journal thirty years before. (‘Without doubt it is the filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography.’) After the passing of the Obscene Publications Act, 1959, it was published without difficulty in Britain. Likewise in the United States, where for a time copies imported from the Olympia Press were seized by the Customs, the work was cleared. There it is noteworthy that the American sexologist Albert Ellis regards Lolita as indicative of what is ‘probably the most detailed and persuasive defence of extreme heterosexual fetichism—the compulsive attachment of a male for a young adolescent female—that has ever been penned in any language. Not only does the narrator of the story wildly love his nymphet, Lolita, but also remains obsessed with watching and thinking about other nymphets of her age.’¹²

Fetichism of various kinds has always been a popular vehicle of covert as well as overt pornography, and many writers have had particular fetiches among women's possessions. Restif de la Bretonne, for example, made a fetich of women's shoes. The subject sometimes appeared in quite respectable journals in Victorian England, such as The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. In addition to the corporal chastisement of children and girls in the home, this journal printed scores of letters on the tight lacing of corsets, said to produce a ‘delightful sensation’. and the use of spurs by lady riders on horseback, alleged to give their wearers similar pleasurable feelings. The correspondence on corsets and stays was so voluminous, like that of the domestic whipping of girls, that it was republished separately, and for that reason achieved a subsequent notoriety. That on the alleged habits of fair equestriennes has remained embedded in the files of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and for that reason is perhaps less known than the correspondence on the other two topics.

The eighteen-sixties in London were known, among other features, for ‘pretty horsebreakers’, as the equestriennes and drivers of smart phaetons were known who appeared in Hyde Park's Rotten Row and, to use an euphemism, lived ‘under the protection of gentlemen’. The success of these high-class ‘tarts’ of the demi-monde was celebrated in a musical hall song of the day:

The pretty little horsebreakers
          Are breaking hearts like fun,
For in Rotten Row they all must go,
          The whole hog or none.

The contemporary journalist George Augustus Sala described the ‘pretty horsebreakers’ in characteristic prose:

The Amazons! The lady cavaliers! The horsewomen! Can any scene in the world equal Rotten Row at four in the afternoon and in the full tide of the season? Watch the sylphides as they fly or float past in their ravishing riding habits and intoxicatingly delightful hats; some with the orthodox cylindrical beaver, with the flowing veil; others with roguish little wideawakes, or pertly cocked cavaliers' hats and green plumes. And as the joyous cavalcade streams past … from time to time the naughty wind will flutter the skirt of a habit, and display a tiny, coquettish, brilliant little boot, with a military heel, and tightly strapped over it the Amazonian riding trouser.

Sala was popularly credited with the authorship of a current piece of pornography, The Mysteries of Verbena House, a salacious tale of a girls' school, in which the details of feminine underwear engage a good deal of attention. Curiously enough, in this work, the author condemned women's ‘riding trousers’, which had been described as of ‘chamois leather with black feet’, and which he considered indelicate because they were measured for and fitted by men and also because they fitted tightly.

The ‘military heel’, which Sala particularly noticed, had a spur attachment, and it was the use of this aid to female equitation which gave rise to the extraordinary correspondence, which ran for more than a year in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. This correspondence was initiated by three contributors, who were obvious decoys; their letters were designed to elicit genuine communications written in good faith and so promote a covert pornographic interest in the subject. The three decoys were ‘Martingale’, who appeared to be a man living in Australia, ‘Eperon’, who stated that he was an ex-cavalry rough-rider now male instructor in a riding school for ladies, and ‘Second Eperon’, who was apparently a woman but gave no clue to her identity beyond admitting that she had a passion for spurring every horse she rode.

The correspondence was opened by ‘Martingale’ in language which suggests that Sala must have been at it again. (After all he was a most versatile special correspondent.)

I certainly think that a neat little spur greatly improves a pretty boot, and I dare say that now that the habits are so short as to render it very difficult to keep the left foot covered by the skirt they are sometimes worn for appearance only; but having lately been reading all I can find about female equitation and ladies' horses I cannot help thinking that even with the high couraged, well trained horses in Rotten Row the secret stimulus of the hidden steel is more frequently resorted to than some of the fair ladies would like to admit, and I do not see how this could be avoided if the horses are trained with spurs, as I have always found that a horse accustomed to them will never go nicely without them.

… I cannot find any means of supplying this [animation] so simple and effectual as tickling a horse gently with a sharp-pointed spur—a blunt one will not do—and no amount of whipping produces the same effect as a few gentle touches of the spur. Having been requested by several ladies to obtain spurs for them, before doing so I tried several rowels of different patterns, and found those with five very thin long points the best. This is only half the usual number, but they are double the usual length, and were made from a description I met with of a lady's spur that was highly recommended. I obtained for the ladies spurs fitted with similar rowels, and they have been very pleased with them, as they find them very effectual. …

It was not surprising that this correspondence should have called forth indignant protests from genuine women riders, since of course if the spurs were of the character and were used in the manner described the horses' flanks would soon be gored and streaming with blood. Such inhuman behaviour in the saddle today, when women almost invariably ride astride like men, would soon be noticed and would certainly excite adverse comment; but in the days of the ‘pretty horsebreakers’ there is no doubt that fairly severe methods were sometimes employed by female horse trainers to make the animals adopt the showy action eventually produced by what ‘Martingale’ called ‘a slight hint from the fair rider's spur’. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the correspondence which appealed to prurient-minded readers was that the precise manner in which women riders used their spurs could not as a rule be seen by the casual onlooker, owing to the boot being covered by the habit.

These letters have been mentioned in order to illustrate a typical but little known example of covert pornography in Victorian England, which has all the basic ingredients familiar to the sexual psychologist—the erotic symbolism of the horse and the dominant woman rider and its sado-masochistic overtones, and the phallic significance and fetichism of the whip and spur and women's riding boot.

It may be noted that this subject continues to figure inadvertently from time to time in respectable journals, having presumably escaped the vigilance of those responsible for its insertion. Quite recently a photograph appeared in one of the best known English Sunday newspapers, showing a woman dressed in riding-clothes and reclining on the grass in a provocative attitude, while she handled a riding-whip suggestively. The photograph was an advertisement for a woman's deodorant. It has not reappeared in any subsequent issue.

Notes

1. Cf. evidence of Vickie Barrett, a prostitute who gave evidence at the trial of Dr Stephen Ward in London in July, 1963, for living on immoral earnings, that dressed in high-heeled shoes and underwear she would whip middle-aged men at £1 a stroke: Clive Irving, Ron Hall and Jeremy Wallington, Scandal '63 (1963), pp. 198, 204.

2. Dawes, 287.

3. Originally published by the Olympia Press in 1954 under its French title Histoire d'O. ‘Pauline Réage’ is a pseudonym, and it almost certainly cloaks the identity of a man rather than a woman.

4. Norman St John-Stevas. Obscenity and the Law (1956), p. 189 note.

5. Further on this and Fanny Hill generally, see the interesting article by David Foxon (‘John Cleland and the Publication of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’) in The Book Collector, Vol. 12, No 4 (Winter 1963); also Appendix below, p. 208.

6. An edition published by the Fortune Press in London in 1934 was seized by the police and later destroyed.

7. Ernest Boulton, the son of a London stockbroker, and Frederick William Park, the son of a Master of the High Court, were transvestist homosexuals, who liked to play female parts in amateur theatricals and frequently appeared in public places dressed as women, rouged and painted, with low cut dresses. They lodged in the same house as Lord Arthur Clinton, M.P., third son of the fifth Duke of Newcastle, and a servant in the house subsequently deposed that she thought Boulton was Lord Arthur's wife. All three were indicted for conspiracy to commit a felony. Lord Arthur died before the trial came on—before Chief Justice Cockburn, in 1871—but the other two were acquitted. For a detailed account of this extraordinary case, see William Roughead, Bad Companions (1930), pp. 149-83.

8. Dawes, 252-60. Cp. The Olympia Press edition Foreword: ‘Teleny cannot in any way compare with Wilde's major works; but it is, nevertheless, a book of value, giving an insight into its author's tortured pathology. Its fantastic, crude and feverish portrayal of a Sodomite civilization is not devoid of some strange appeal. …’

9. Further details of the diaries and their background will be found in my edition of The Trial of Sir Roger Casement (1960).

10. Pisanus Fraxi. III, 190.

11. For a detailed account of the Stead case, see my Cases That Changed the Law (1951), pp. 17-37.

12. Ellis. The Folklore of Sex, 189.

Bibliography

The fullest bibliography in English of erotic and pornographic literature is the Register Librorum Eroticorum, compiled by Rolf S. Reade (Alfred Rose) and privately printed in two volumes in London in 1936. There are copies in the British Museum and the London Library.

Of the other bibliographies the three-volume Notes on Curious and Uncommon Books by Pisanus Fraxi (Henry S. Ashbee) is of great value down to the year 1885. The respective titles are Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879) and Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885), all privately printed in London. They were reprinted in 1960.

C. R. Dawes completed his History of English Erotic Literature in 1943. It has never been published, but the author's typescript is now in the British Museum Private Case (cap. 364 d. 15).

Banned Books by Anne L. Haight (3rd ed. New York, 1958) may also be usefully consulted, as well as the article ‘Erotic Literature’ by Dr E. J. Dingwall in Cassell's Encyclopaedia of Literature, ed. S. H. Steinberg. Vol. I (London, 1953).

The following works, which do not claim to be exhaustive, deal with general or particular aspects of the subject.

bloch, ivan. The Sexual Life of our Times. London, 1922.

———Sex Life in England. London and New York, 1934.

chandos, john (Ed.). ‘To Deprave and Corrupt’. London, 1962.

craig, alec. The Banned Books of England. London and New York, 1917.

———Above All Liberties. London and New York, 1942.

———The Banned Books of England and Other Countries. London, 1962; New York, 1963.

ellis, albert. The Folklore of Sex. New York, 1951.

ellis, havelock. More Essays in Love and Virtue. London, 1931.

———Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 4 vols. New York, 1936.

ernst, morris l. and seagle, william. To the Pure. New York, 1928; London, 1929.

foxon, d. f. Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745. (Three articles in The Book Collector.) London, 1963.

ginsburg, ralph. An Unhurried View of Erotica. New York, 1958; London, 1959.

haney, robert w. Comstockery in America. Boston, 1960.

jackson, holbrook. The Fear of Books. London and New York, 1932.

kilpatrick, james jackson. The Smut Peddlers. New York, 1960; London, 1961.

kinsey, alfred c., and Others. Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Philadelphia and London, 1948.

———Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Philadelphia and London, 1953.

kronhausen, eberhard and phyllis. Pornography and the Law. New York, 1959.

kyle-keith, richard. The High Price of Pornography. Washington, D.C., 1961.

loth, david. The Erotic in Literature. New York, 1961; London, 1962.

paul, james c. n. and schwartz, murray l. Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail. New York, 1961.

rolph, c. h. (Ed.). Does Pornography Matter? London, 1961.

———The Trial of Lady Chatterley. London, 1961.

scott, george ryley. Into Whose Hands. London, 1945.

st john-stevas, norman. Obscenity and the Law. London and New York, 1956.