SEX & SEXUALITY, 1640-1940

Literary, Medical and Sociological Perspectives

Parts 3 and 4: Erotica, 1650-1900, from the Private Case Collection at the British Library, London

Editorial Introduction by Professor Brad Mudge, Department of English, University of Colorado at Denver

The Private Case collection at the British Library is justifiably famous. One of the largest and most representative collections of erotic and pornographic literature in the world, the Private Case has been open to scholars only in recent years. Thanks to the vigorous petitioning of Peter Fryer, in the mid 1960s the Trustees of the British Museum allowed Private Case books to be included in the General Catalogue, thus for the first time permitting access to the Museum’s restricted holdings. Appreciative scholars quickly realised that the Private Case Collection outshone similar collections at the Bibliotheque Nationale and at the University of Indiana. Containing almost two thousand titles and spanning almost four hundred years, the books of the Private Case are anchored by two major bequests: the first by H Spencer Ashbee in 1900 and the second by C R Dawes in 1964. In addition to works in English, there are numerous books in French, German, Italian and Latin. The better known titles are often represented by multiple editions, and there are many books that exist nowhere else in the world.

Scholars debate exactly when “pornography” emerged in Europe as a recognizable discourse. Walter Kendrick insists that its emergence is relatively late in the cultural scheme of things: the word “pornography”, he argues, dates only from the 1820s. Robert Darnton, on the other hand, points to French works of the 1740s and emphasizes the crucial influence of materialist philosophy. Traditional bibliographers, capably represented by David Foxon, go back even further and point to Aretino’s postures and the Italian “whore dialogues” of the mid-sixteenth century. As inclusive as it is, the Private Case Collection encourages such inquiries. Scholars can consult Aretoni’s Ragionamenti (1660), Chorier’s Satryra sotadica (1655), and Millet’s L’escole des filles (1668), as well as French works from the 1740s, like the Histoire de Dom B (1742), and later British contributions from publishers Edmund Curll, William Dugdale and J C Hotten.

The Private Case Collection is as generally diverse as it is culturally inclusive. In addition to seventeenth-century “whore dialogues”, which have an older, experienced woman explaining the history of human sexuality to a younger counterpart, the collection includes “pseudo-medical manuals” like Gonosologium Novuum (1709) or Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718), “pseudo-travelogues”, like A New Description of Merryland (1741) or The Natural History of the Tree of Life (1741), and “criminal cases”, like Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1746) or A New Collection of Trials for Adultery (1799). This collection also includes two remarkable autobiographies-My Secret Life (1890) and The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (1894) - and a number of erotic magazines-The Bon Ton (1791-95), The Exquisite (1842-44), and The Pearl (1890), among them. Although prose fiction predominates, there are several collections of bawdy songs and many works of verse. A considerable number of the volumes are illustrated-many splendidly so-making the Private Case Collection of considerable interest even to those scholars concerned only with the history of prints.

In recent years, scholars of literature, history, art, medicine and sexuality have all become increasingly interested in the erotic and pornographic records from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These materials, however, are as rare and difficult to access as they are fascinating. A microfilm collection of some of the material from the Private Case Collection should be an extremely valuable addition for research libraries across the globe.

Brad Mudge
Department of English
University of Colorado at Denver
June 2002

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