Hi! Could you please read, summarize, and take detailed notes on three research articles for me? Also, please suggest ideas for a thesis. I will be writing a 2,500-word research paper on Fanny Hill: M

—The History of the Human Heart, 1749 b ut what shall I do to get to speak to her? If cold inanimate writing could banish her indifference, surely the eloquence of words, lips, eyes, warm embraces, and short-breathed sighs, must melt her into compliance. Oh, the nameless ecstacy—thus to press her to my heart; t\�o see her blushing, panting, sighing, dying!

b y heaven, the very thought transports me beyond imagination.

—Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, 1844 b ut what shall I do to get to speak to her? If cold inanimate writing could banish her indifference, surely the eloquence of words, lips, eyes, warm embraces, and short-breathed sighs, must melt her into compliance.

—Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, 1968 My three epigraphs provide a micro-example of the transformation of pornographic narrative across more than two centuries. Originally narrating an amalgam of physical desire, imaginative fantasy, and affective transport, this single passage is pruned to focus on the hoped-for sex act with increasing efficiency. All three versions agree on the essentials of titillation: sighs, lips, a woman’s surrender. b ut the material surrounding the imagined physical union changes, and attention to the mind’s role in sexual desire is whittled out. In 1749, 898 the ejaculative, hyperbolic, syntactically fluid passage shows the her\�o’s fantasy to heighten his longing. The erotic wish is trimmed and gram- matically tidied in 1844, when an editor finds it more suitable for the male protagonist to “press . . . to [his] heart” his beloved than \�to “fold her to [his] warm b osom”—presumably too emasculating a term for the male body—and eliminates the “Prayers, Vows” that would pronounce the spiritual degree of his supplication.

b y 1968, the passage is halved.

It ends with the beloved’s compliance, doing away with the source text’s attention to the power of imagination, to the “transport” that succeeds from purely mental action.

b y the later twentieth century, pornographic narrative economically focuses on eroticized bodies, masculine prowess, and consummated sex acts, a rather far cry from the eighteenth-century text’s equal reliance on the mind to complete the erotic scene. This essay documents the formal and thematic contraction of pornographic narrative over the two centuries that saw its coher - ence as a genre. Drawing on archival work with four editions of the virtually unknown, anonymously authored novel The History of the Human Heart, I demonstrate that a narrative focus on sex acts was purposefully imposed by later editors on an eighteenth-century source text that refused to treat sex as a singular or privileged subjec\�t matter. History’s rich, complicated, and long textual history makes it an ideal—perhaps the only—case study in which we can ascertain the reading and editing practices that transformed pornographic texts from hybrid to specialized, reflecting the wider coalescence of \� the genre into its modern forms. Containing a complex introduction, numerous lengthy footnotes, and a sexual picaresque narrative, the 1749 History is textually and thematically heterogeneous, and self- consciously so. Narrative descriptions of sex acts constitute a central \� but not exclusive focal point of the text, and they do not always aim to arouse erotic feeling. In the hands of nineteenth- and twentieth- century editors, History’s heterogeneity was systematically pared back to more consistently deliver genital action.

l isa Sigel has documented a related narrowing of pornographic style across this period, showing that the “fluidity” and “versatility” of eighteenth-century sexual diction, which connected the body to religion, beauty, and humor, ossified into a language of dirt and pollution by the late Victorian period. 1 I find this linguistic contraction to parallel an increasing sexual focus imposed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century producers of pornography on narrative itself. They focus the text more and more narrowly on sex acts\� as such, and they modernize History’s eighteenth-century references Making Pornography, 1749–1968 899 and stylistics in order to situate narrative descriptions of sex acts wi\�thin a world perceived as proximate and concrete by later readers. This contemporariness was achieved by suppressing eighteenth-century sexuality’s convergences with science, religion, sentiment, and gender.

Introduction and footnotes were curtailed or deleted, Italianate names Anglicized, sentimental dialogue reduced, and title changed to Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure—the better, no doubt, to capitalize on John Cleland’s pornographic brand. History’s plot, which remains unchanged through 1968, traces the history of Camillo, a Shropshire boy born to a wealthy family, from conception to marriage, wending its way through the sexual discoveries of adolescence and the bawdy mischief of his grand tour through l o ndon and Holland, during which he seduces women, attends masquerades, patronizes brothels, feigns betrothals, and performs the part of agonized lover until he is tricked into a surprise marriage to the b elgian Angelina, who, having already succumbed to Camillo’s “repeated searches” of her body, boldly pursues him from Amsterdam to l ondon. 2 Framing the main narrative are an introduction and footnotes that elaborate its scientific, cultural, and philosophical assumptions\�.

Their effect is both probing and comic, layering the main narrative’s sometimes explicit, sometimes allusive descriptions of genital acts with sober reflection and expansive significance. Alternately lusty prose\�, scientific treatise, and personal history, the text features and describes sex acts, but it also does much more. It leads the reader away from local sexual episodes into the discursive nether regions of the footnote\�s, displaying a confidence that the reader will be attentive and amused as the text meanders. History acquaints us with a miscellaneous model of reading less familiar than the purposeful, libidinal consumption we typically asso- ciate with pornography. History figures its readers as highly tolerant of, indeed pleased by multiple registers of meaning unfolding at once.

It demands a variety of attitudes in readers, inviting both “absorpti\�ve or intensive reading” and “more desultory modes of consumption”\� that, as Simon Dickie argues, coexisted in eighteenth-century reading practices.

3 While the text invites a sustained interest in Camillo as adventurer and lover, it repeatedly disrupts readers’ singular focus on him, deflecting their attentions variously to the predicaments of seduced women, the speculations of the footnotes, and the hero’s own sentimental reflections. History seems most comfortably at home in the mid-century subgenre Dickie calls the “male-centered ramble novel” in which the “obligatory romance plot” stands as an orga\�nizing Kathleen lubey 900 principle to various hijinks—fraud, whoring, gambling, drinking, and \� fighting. 4 Its readers would not have expected a Clelandesque concen- tration of narrated sex acts, nor would physical pleasure have been their premeditated aim in reading about a hero’s sexual adventures. l ike the pre-revolutionary French context studied by Robert Darnton, where philosophical and political concerns suffused sexually explicit narrative, eighteenth-century English readers would not have thought about sexual arousal as an exclusive outcome of reading. The notion of a “‘pure’ pornography” would not have been thinkable in a\� climate of pronounced textual hybridity. 5 In the English context, as we see in History, this hybridity comprised the disparate practices of comic prose fiction, where readers’ attentions were invited to meander in\� unpredictable directions, making associations—at times absurdly—with scientific, religious, and philosophical discourses. These paths would\� not have taxed their patience or compromised the occasional erotic response. In fact, History shows how extra-sexual material was inflated to comic proportions, exemplifying a point of origin for pornography in which authors and readers refuse to attribute earnest or singular meaning to sex acts—a perhaps less coherent project than the socio- political meaning l ynn Hunt finds in early pornography , and predating the utilitarian economy of later pornography, where sexual action is concentrated into the genre’s primary focus. 6 b y calling History pornography, I’m suggesting a definition of the genre as temperamentally inconsistent, discursively hybrid, and intermittently erotic. Pornography is not as prescriptive as we have imagined it to be, at least in its early forms; nor do we always find \�it contained within individual, transgressive texts, an argument I’ve ma\�de at length in a recent book. 7 Defining pornography prior to the genre’s establishment is complicated, of course; but Darnton reminds us that even though pornography as such “did not exist in the eighteenth century . . . one should not relativize the concept out of existence.” 8 It remains a useful analytic for observing the historically contingent ways in which representations of sex acts create meaning in art and literature. The uncommon spin I am putting on the concept is the possibility that pornography isn’t consistently erotic—that it does not contain an unwavering imperative to arousal. Pornography is, more inclusively, a mode of inquiry that takes for granted the relevance of sex acts to other fields of experience and knowledge; and within pornography, narrative descriptions of sex acts constitute a method for engaging or lampooning those other fields. These dialogic exchanges do\� not necessitate readers’ arousal.

l ike sexuality as we have understood Making Pornography, 1749–1968 901 it since Foucault, sex acts in History constitute a fluid and highly adaptable field of experience that shapes the hero’s and reader’s perceptions of their world. Early pornography, in my view, does not privilege “sexual stimulation” over other perceptive possibilities\� within this field; it insists, in fact, on the coexistence of multiple respon\�ses at once, drawing on humor, intellectual debate, and cultural critique to emphasize the associative function of sex acts in narrative. 9 In this multitasking model of reading—embraced too by writers like Haywood, Fielding, and Sterne—we can see pornography as an integration, rather\� than a separation, of sex acts with a wide array of cultural concerns. History provides reason to question the critical practice of identi- fying early pornography as a set of distinct and insulated techniques fo\�r describing sex acts. Julie Peakman’s rich account of the field of erotic writing in the period yet narrowly identifies “pornographic strands\�” in which writers develop particular techniques aimed at sexually gratifying\� readers, suggesting these are separable from a text’s references to other modes of experience. 10 Karen Harvey even more radically differenti- ates pornography, finding its directness and transparency of descrip- tion to dampen readers’ imaginative faculties. She defines “erot\�ica” against pornography, arguing the former’s techniques of metaphor and distancing engage creativity and criticism in readers in a way referenti\�al genital descriptions cannot. 11 History suggests Harvey’s distinction is a false one. Readers are expected to shuttle between different registers of literary representation and sexual understanding, and to exercise flexibility of humor and intellect as they do so. History advances a historical view of pornography as a disorganized and unplanned field of overlap between narrated sexual experience and countless other discourses sexuality engages. The text blithely leaves these threads open and unresolved, inviting readers to explore them without a particular endpoint being privileged over any other. Restoring a wider view of early pornography allows us to see the transformation of the genre from a hybrid to a specialized narrative practice, a perspective that remains invisible when we overvalue sexual content as its defining feature. Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has, albeit richly and productively, contributed to this blind spot. It offers a narrative that confirms our distinctly modern \� understanding of pornography as a concentration of sexual description designed to arouse the reader and has therefore seemed the “notable exception,” appearing to stand alone as a fully pornographic English \� work until the later eighteenth century. 12 When we look from Cleland, to the well-conceived doctrines of pleasure contrived by Sade, to the Kathleen lubey 902 unceasing sexual efficiency of My Secret Life, pornography can seem to have originated in texts with a unified and unwavering focus on sex acts. b ut as the publication history of History shows, pornographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw what literary critics have not: that there is more than one way to look for early pornography, and that it does not always, or even usually, present itself as an organized, efficient succession of narrative descriptions of sex acts. 13 Editors found in History a repository of material that could be re-crafted as they incrementally invented the modern pornographic function of arousing readers with sexual description. From this perspective, we can see pornography as the purposeful construction of a condensed sexual narrative from a markedly less focused source. Sex became History’s overvalued content for later pornographers, concentrated and elevated in a way the eighteenth-century original does not anticipate.

Our work as critics should avoid replicating this overvaluation; we should not seek to curate a collection of sexually explicit works in our\� attempt to know pornography’s history, but instead look for the ways in which texts tell us what sex acts meant, what kinds of ideas they introduced, and what other subjects and discourses were necessary to justify their recurrence. These myriad associations were subdued as modern pornographic narrative was made. I. PORNOGRAPHY IN 1749: THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN HEART The History of the Human Heart was published in 1749 in london by J. Freeman, publisher of many anonymous texts promising intrigue and topicality to the mid-century reader (Figure 1). 14 It is exactly contemporary with Cleland’s Memoirs but is less relentless in its genital focus. b ecause it so richly explores sexuality’s social and philosophical aspects, it is truly surprising that History has garnered so little critical attention in the decades since pornography, vis-á-vis Cleland’s novel, was established as part of the eighteenth-century canon. History has appeared on the radar of the field, reprinted in 1974 in the Garland series The Flowering of the Novel as well as in The Eighteenth Century microfilm collection, but it is noted only briefly in a few studies of eighteenth-century sexual culture. 15 As we shall see below, during the eighteenth century History was categorized with texts we wouldn’t now consider pornographic, and by the next century, it occupied a definitive position in the lineage of texts being assembled by publishers, sellers,\� and collectors of pornography.

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 903 Figure 1. Title page, The History of the Human Heart, 1749. Singer-Mendenhall Col- lection, Rare book and Manuscript library, University of Pennsylvania.

Kathleen lubey 904 History’s introduction immediately discredits the text’s integrity and establishes its comic spirit. The author’s lineage, we learn, is a kind of pastiche: he is born in Wales to a father of Scottish Highland descent and a “Lancashire Witch” mother whose maternal line extended to Ireland (H, 2). Using his sometimes reliable “Second Sight” (H, 3), the author practices fortune telling, comes under the mentorship of a “Rosicrucian Philosopher” (H, 6), and inherits his talisman, which delivers Camillo’s story to the author. It is Camillo’s history that constitutes the main text.

b efore publication, the author edits the manuscript with the input of his landlady and appends voluminous footnotes “moral, historical, and critical” contributed by a “w\�orthy” gentleman-friend of the landlady (H, 11). The result is the printed text we encounter. The introduction labors to establish that the main text is not to be taken terribly seriously. 16 The story arrives through a dubious medium, the notes are arbitrarily appended, and the author edits the manu- script based on his landlady’s level of boredom, cutting until she can “hear it out without once yawning” (H, 11).

b efore the narrative even begins, History resists the familiar pornographic paradigm. Sexually excitable reading is not posited as a focused or singular enterprise.

It is, rather, highly mediated: readers are not positioned to read sex earnestly or transparently, but rather to be part of an extended joke, a comic experiment that episodically offers sexual description. Nor is reading about sex envisioned as a private activity tantamount to mastur - bation, an association Thomas l aqueur and Michael McKeon see to be intensifying during the eighteenth century; it is instead figured a\�s synchronic exchange among author, landlady, and editor, more closely resembling Harvey’s account of sociable erotic reading. 17 b ecause of their collective impact on the narrative, the text is positioned as liter - ally disintegrated, shaped by a motley crew of amateurs and arousing various curiosities among them. In the main narrative, Camillo’s sexual development is not portrayed as a linear, uninterrupted process. Rather, his sexual discoveries constitute an adaptable medium through which his world can be experienced—genitally, yes, but just as often sensibly, affectively, and cognitively. Sexual encounters lead to thinking and speculating, for hero and reader alike. At times, his sexual actions are altogether unwitting, as in his childhood. Readers observe the development of his appetites as he suckles his mother’s breast; in the nursery, where he parses the bawdy jokes of nurses; in the family orchard, where he traumatically discovers his sister’s “great Wound” as she climbs up a Making Pornography, 1749–1968 905 cherry tree; in his first, circuitous sexual experiments with his cous\�in Maria, for which both are punished by his parents (H, 31). In all of these early experiences, sex and its bodily effects arrive unannounced to Camillo as points of unsettling confusion. Narrative descriptions of \� sex acts are something of a constant in the plot, but their return is no\�t confidently or evenly signaled to the reader, even as Camillo’s desires become more conscious and plotted during his grand tour. Camillo’s own thoughts reveal uncertainty: until later in the narrative, he is rarely sure how to succeed at courtship and at times appears as flummoxed by the trappings of seduction as are his women partners. He often seeks guidance from his tutor Vilario, whose instructions aim at gratifying Camillo’s desires above all else. While the plot is largely structured by Camillo’s sexual pursuits, the narrator attends commodiously to the thinking, planning, and frustration of those pursuits, unlike Cleland’\�s Fanny Hill, who “slip[s] over matters of no importance” between se\�xual encounters. 18 In these spaces between sexual events, the text explores other topics: domestic life, education, and psychological development. The footnotes move even further afield of a direct discussion of sexuality. Of the fifteen that are dispersed across the narrative, six describe biological and anatomical concerns, such as fertilization, pregnancy, lust, and the hymen; five weigh in on cultural questions, such as friendship between the sexes and women’s education; and four use empiricist epistemology to explain how the mind responds to instances of heightened stimulation. The footnotes impinge on the main narrative. On the page, they reduce Camillo’s history to one or two lines of printed type, and they sometimes run for pages.

Thematically, they challenge the easy path to sexual meaning we find in the main narrative. Rhetorically, they are pedantic, and purpose- fully so, for we are to hear the farcically learned voice as humorously \� discordant with the main text. They boast specialized language, as we see in the first footnote, which explains fertilization: “This Doct\�rine [of insemination by the male] was more controverted, and less understood, till the ingenious Mr. Leewenhoeck, by his microscopal observations, discovered the Animalculae in the Semen Humanum, which has put the Question beyond all Controversy” (H, 15)—and this is just a way of introducing the larger question of when the soul animates the fetus, \� which the editor concludes must be when it is yet “in the l oins of the Parent” (H, 16). He also occasionally calls on the English historical tradition to provide evidence for his claims. He warns women of the impressionability of the fetus, for example, by recalling courtier David\� Rizzio’s murder, a spectacle witnessed by James I’s mother during Kathleen lubey 906 her pregnancy that, he insists, affected the temperament of the king.

Scientifically, historically, and rhetorically, the footnotes move away from the personal history being narrated above them.The comic effect is therefore no quick, slapstick punctuation of the main text’s sexual focus; it is comedy hard-won, where readers meander into detailed, lengthy elaborations that tediously debate quick assumptions of the narrator. Further, the authoritative voice lends itself to a skeptical reaction in the reader. The editor espouses modern reproductive knowledge that emphasizes sexual difference between men and women, but he at times sounds antiquated in his beliefs, such as his concern over the fetus’s impressionability. The reader is thus called upon periodically to assess the editor’s competence—no easy task in an era that, according to Tim Hitchcock, saw the uneven development of an elite medical discourse on reproduction that stood quite apart from an ongoing popular belief in the old humoral model of the body. 19 History might be seen, in fact, to stage the concurrence of these different registers of sexual understanding. Rather than impart authoritative knowledge, this discussion exercises the flexible attent\�ions of a reader willing to follow narrative paths away from an erotic plot, and to gauge their relevance and accuracy. The text’s reprinters in the next century, as we’ll see, will find them increasingly bothersome and will delete them without ceremony. In this cumulative model of pornography, myriad speculations of natural philosophy combine with and branch outward from sexual description, but do not remain tethered to arousal as an inevitable endpoint to reading. History indeed offers scenes that conform to pornography more traditionally defined, but even these lend them- selves, in 1749, to philosophical elaboration. One such scene involves a performance by posture girls attended by Camillo and his friends during a “Town Ramble” in l ondon (H, 122). Camillo is “greatly surprised” (H, 124) at the postures they strike and marvels that they yet blush even though “so many Men fix their Eyes on that Part which all other Women chuse to hide” (H, 125–26). The performance indeed centers on the spectacular display of their genitals: [T]he parts of the celebrated Posture Girl, had something about them which attracted his attention more than any thing he had either felt or seen. The Throne of l ove was thickly covered with jet-black Hair, at least a Quarter of a Yard long, which she artfully spread asunder, to display the Entrance into the Magic Grotto. The uncommon Figure of this bushy Spot, afforded a very odd sort of Amusement to Camillo, which was more heightened by the rest of the Ceremony which these Making Pornography, 1749–1968 907 Wantons went through. They each filled a Glass of Wine, and laying themselves in an extended Posture placed their Glasses on the Mount of Venus, every Man in Company drinking off the b umper, as it stood on that tempting Protuberance, while the Wenches were not wanting in their lascivious Motions, to heighten the Diversion. Then they went thro’ the several Postures and Tricks made use of to raise debilitated l ust. (H, 127–28) being the initiate to this bawdy ritual, Camillo “shoot[s] the bridge, and pass[es] under the warm Cataracts”—presumably, positions himself in some way under or between the women’s legs—to the amusement of the company (H, 128). 20 The posture girls then masturbate in unison:

“Having resumed a proper Posture, with wanton Fingers they entered the mysterious Cave, and heaved, and thrust, and riggled, till they opened the teeming Springs, which shot their volatile l iquids into a Wine Glass, each held in the other Hand—— b ut here the Reader will hardly believe me, though I assure him on the Credit of my Talisman, that what the Glasses received, was mingled with their Wine, and drank off without the least Shock to the Nature of any one present, except Camillo” (H, 128–29). Despite repeated requests, the girls refuse “the Embraces of the Men, for fear of spoiling their Trade” (H, 129), and so prostitutes are called. Camillo manages to entertain two of them simultaneously, and thus concludes the novel’s most paradigmatically pornographic episode: it focuses on erotic bodies, masculine pleasure, performative, non-reproductive, and non-domestic sexuality. The scene does not serve a singularly titillating purpose in 1749. It in\� fact leads to speculations we might call feminist. The editor interrupts\� the main narrative with a footnote that raises abstract and speculative \� concerns emerging from a detail in the main narrative (Figure 2). It questions a passing remark made by the author that the posture girls possess a natural modesty that causes them to blush. The editor rejects modesty as a natural feminine attribute, defining the concept instead \� as a long-standing cultural invention. The author assumes, mistakenly in the editor’s view, that modesty is a natural Property of the Soul, and [that] the uneasy Emotions which Women sometimes feel . . . on hearing any Conversation on their Secret parts, or the Act of Generation, is the effect of some innate Principle \� natural to the Sex. I have all the Value in the World for Modesty, but I cannot agree to this Notion of its Original. It is certainly the greatest Ornament of the Sex, but for all that, it is no more than a meer Habit, \� founded on Convenience, and nourished by Custom. (H, 124) Kathleen lubey 908 Figure 2. Footnote in The History of the Human Heart, 1749. Singer-Mendenhall Collection, Rare book and Manuscript library , University of Pennsylvania.

The editor provides evidence that modesty is not instinctual—genital \� display is practiced by both infants and Indians, he points out—and infers that there are artificial motivations behind the strict codes t\�hat are imposed on English women. but these motivations are laudable for the editor , who goes on to imagine a culture without modesty in which the sexes encounter each other naked. If women’s genitals were exposed, men’s “Organs of Sense” (H, 126) would respond accordingly, “prevent[ing] the Growth of Dissimulation in Female Discourse” (H, 126)—preventing, that is, women’s ability to pretend they are not desired by men. Were everyone nude, women would have to acknowledge men’s erections, rituals of politeness would be desublimated, and a level playing field would be established in which everyone would be aware of everyone else’s genital situation. The editor recognizes such a world as impossibly disordered. “The first\� Moralists, foreseeing these Inconveniences, feigned a supposititious Making Pornography, 1749–1968 909 Virtue, which they called Modesty, and recommended it to the Fair Sex; this answers all the Purposes of a real Passion, and keeps that Sex\� within l imits they would be naturally prone enough to leap over, if not guarded by this imaginary Fence” (H, 126). 21 Modesty is instrumental, he concludes; it is a system that maintains the social order. The editor praises this scheme as one that empowers women to determine their social identity and urges parents and educators to impart it as early as possible to female children. Parsed closely, this passage also offers the fleeting insight that women are “naturally prone enough to leap ove\�r” impediments to gender equality: modesty is not natural, but liberty is. The footnote departs from the main narrative in many ways. It distracts from the descriptions of sex acts unfolding above it on the pa\�ge; it strikes a speculative tone that contrasts with the sequential account\� of Camillo’s experience; and it isolates what would seem a minor point—“natural” is a passing adjective—and bloats it into a \�concept available for deep questioning. Within this questioning, elements of the pornographic topos—genitals and women—are reconfigured and defamiliarized, becoming objects not of erotic but of social interest.

The suggestiveness of the editor’s insights into sexual inequality may or may not be perceived by the eighteenth-century reader, and there is no way to tell how this discussion would affect the reader’s response to the narrative description of sexual performance taking place in the main text. Are readers disgusted by the spectacle? Aroused? Curious?

Did readers bother reading the footnote? If they did, did they read carefully, skeptically, dimly, impatiently? Did they detect the feminist implications of the editor’s observations? The text is unconcerned with stabilizing these questions, but one fundamental premise is clear: in History, reading about sex is a process of awareness and reflection that exceeds erotic response and that is conducive to associations beyond specifically erotic contexts, leading even, as in this case, to\� ethical discoveries that might complicate the pleasure of beholding nude women. As this episode and its footnote make clear, the author of History expects readers to balance multiple demands simultaneously as they move through and around this text. Readers and writers seem to have no anxiety about the frequency of erotic episodes, and the pleasures of \� reading appear to reside precisely in the multitasking that is required for a full understanding of sexual meaning and the intellectual possibilities that proliferate from it. At this rich moment in pornography’s history, when texts addressing sexual matters were not entirely differentiated from other forms of literature or thought to be at odds with sociable Kathleen lubey 910 behavior, and long before a distinct market for pornography existed, narrative descriptions of sex acts served as vehicles for discussions of\� perception, science, morality, and culture that unfold instead of—or in competition with, or in service of, or parallel to—erotic satisfac\�tion.

There were multiple pleasurable outcomes to reading pornography, and these outcomes did not uniformly serve the body. II. THE HISTOR Y OF THE HUMAN HEAR T IN THE ARCHIVE The british library’ s copy tells us that in its own time, History was not considered particularly objectionable reading material. It was part \� of a textual category loosely organized around matters of love and seduction, and its daring level of detail reflects a literary marketpl\�ace “relatively unfettered,” in Harvey’s words, by legal prohibitions on obscenity. 22 This copy also shows us that contingencies of acquisition and shelfmarking directly affect what is visible to historians and bibli- ographers researching sexual literature. Our methods of identifying pornographic texts rely too heavily on library cataloguing practices that tend to neaten texts into categories rather than reflect the wide\�r, messier history of pornography, especially in periods prior to its coherence as a genre in the nineteenth century. A single duodecimo binding, shelfmark Cup.702.t.14, holds The History of the Human Heart together with another sexually charged narrative, The Progress of Nature, or the Adventures of Roger Lovejoy, published in 1744 by T. Wiltshire. History, the longer text, appears first, followed by the 95-page Progress, rendering the latter all but invisible in the archive. It is beyond the scope of this essay to give a detailed account of Progress, but like History, it centers on the erotic discoveries of young characters, male and female, and connects those discoveries to the development of taste and temperament. 23 The physical details of the book show that in their own time, these narratives were classified with texts we’d now consider courtship t\�rea- tises and amatory fiction. An early owner had History and Progress bound together with such works and titled the volume “Pamphlets and Poems Gallant,” as the spine now reads. The other works were at some point removed from the current binding or perhaps were held in a second volume that eventually was separated from its companion volume. Cup.702.t.14 contains a manuscript table of contents that no longer reflects what it holds:

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 911 1. The History of the human heart 1749 2. The Progress of Nature 3. The Misteries of l ove reveal’d 4.

The Mercenary l over The Padlock. Novels. This list appears on paper that matches in age and wear the printed eighteenth-century pages, suggesting that relatively early in their lives, these texts were collected together based on their amatory themes. It is likely that the four texts, published between 1728 and 1749, were bound by the owner named in the bookplate affixed to the inner cover—Charles Hope-Weir of Craigiehall (1710–91), Scottish aristocrat, Parliamentarian, and urbane man of fashion. Hope-Weir came into his estate through his first marriage to Catherine Weir in 1733, but it is likely during his second, spanning 1745 to 1757, that this collection wa\�s bound together. This marriage to Anne Vane, great-granddaughter of Charles II, botanist, and possible translator of l inneaus, ended after she birthed a child, which Parliament decreed was not Charles’s, during his extended travels on the continent. 24 Either Charles or Anne—both were well read—saw continuity across these “gallant” works, works we would variously classify today as pornography, amatory fiction, picaresque narratives, seduction manuals, and marriage treatises. 25 l iterature detailing sex acts had a home among other, more allusive discussions of sexual and domestic life. Mysteries of Love Reveal’d, published about a decade before History, instructs men and women readers on matters of courtship and gallantry, following the premise that personal happiness can be achieved if romantic love is prioritized. Sex is gestured toward only implicitly. Toward the close of the treatise, the unnamed author urges women readers to understand he means for love to be consummated: “I would not be here thought to recommend Platonick l ove; for the most virtuous Woman may, and indeed ought, to partake of the reciprocal Sweets of the mutual Enjoyment which Nature has allotted, and God himself commanded. Increase and multiply is the End of Creation; and in order to induce People to marry, Providence has decreed the most inexpressible Pleasures to be enjoy’d in the Act of Generation.” 26 Sex, while not detailed, is celebrated as the inevitable endpoint to courtship and the sustenance of a happy marriage. The Mercenary Lover and The Padlock thematically bear out this logic, dramatizing the elaborate machinations of male suitors to win the affections of their beloved.

Honorius Severius, the hero of The Padlock, goes so far as to rescue Violante from a tyrannical marriage, receiving dispensation from the Kathleen lubey 912 Pope to obtain her divorce and marry her himself. 27 For the eighteenth- century collector, the focus on love, passion, and courtship was the most significant commonality among these texts, and the discussion of sex acts themselves in the first two entries did not disqualify the\�m from a grouping with narratives that defer sex acts so that questions of desire and conduct can be explored. At some point, a later distinction between pornography and “soft- core” sexual narrative came to bear on this particular collection. Th\�e current binding no longer contains The Mercenary Lover and The Padlock or Mysteries of Love Reveal’d. These other two texts now appear in the b ritish l ibrary’s general catalogue with shelfmarks that make no reference to their sexual content.

28 At some point after Hope-Weir’s ownership, History and Progress were designated as qualitatively different from the other titles. The rebinding, though, preserves important aspects of their eighteenth-century character. The later owner kept the handwritten table of contents, for example, and preserved the provenance of the more sexually focused texts, pasting Hope-Weir’s bookplate onto the endpages of the second binding. The rebinding also reuses the original cover from the eighteenth century; the spine still announces the “gallant” nature of the book’s insides, and the cover is of plain brown calf, a style that predated the more ornate \� bindings of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 29 These details confirm what the wider history of History’s reprinting will tell us: in 1749 and thereabouts, a pattern of graphic sexual description in a work of prose fiction did not categorically distinguish that work\� from a wider body of literature concerning intimate life, nor was such a work expected to deliver primarily genital detail.

l ike amatory fiction and courtship treatises, such a work developed multiple discursive strands that were seen as non-competing in the eighteenth-century context. We can also deduce that later collectors had two purposes in collecting eighteenth-century pornography: on the one hand, to emphasize its antiquarian character, and on the other, to separate the works into a new category—pornography as such—based on their narrative descriptions of sex acts. If later collectors recognized History’s pronounced sexual content, how has that content come to be overlooked by modern scholars?

Several contingencies have obscured the text. First, it occupies an inconspicuous position in the pornography archive. History has never been held in the b ritish l ibrary’s Private Case, the archive around which historians tend to orient their research. Established in 1857 for \� accessions that were thought to warrant restricted reader access, the Making Pornography, 1749–1968 913 Private Case still holds much of the library’s sexually explicit mate- rials, and bibliographers and scholars regularly look to this collection\� to delimit the field of early pornography . 30 Its holdings have been considered comprehensive at least since Victorian book collector Henry Spencer Ashbee worked from the Private Case to compile his three- volume bibliography of erotic literature (1877–1885), a resource th\�at remains important for historians today. 31 Patrick Kearney’s The Private Case (1981) was the first annotated bibliography specifically detailin\�g the collection, providing a new kind of access to this archive. This important work drew its own set of boundaries, since it only covers those works held in the Private Case at the time of its publication; it does not catalogue those titles that were declassified at some prio\�r point, nor does it cover newer acquisitions that concern sex but were not thought scandalous enough to warrant P.C. shelfmarks. 32 In other words, bibliography cannot account for the contingent ways in which the pornographic archive is continuously reconstituted. 33 The 1749 History of the Human Heart has been overlooked for the simple reason that it was never restricted to the Private Case, instead receiving the less restrictive “Cup.” shelfmark. This desi\�gna- tion, ranging from the smutty to the sociological, has not been as widely recognized by scholars as a classification for texts relevant t\�o a history of pornography as such, an oversight that has prevented us from detecting the possibility of a pornography dispersed across texts that serve functions other than frequent explicit sexual description. 34 The reason History was not assigned a P.C. shelfmark seems to result from a second contingency: its acquisition date. The b ritish l ibrary’s catalogue notes associate the holding with a large bequest made by Ashbee in 1900, but a gold stamp on the rear endpage suggests a more likely acquisition date—“ bl 1982”—when the restrictive P.C.

shelfmark was being less commonly assigned. Changing definitions of obscenity, it seems, continually shape the archive itself—how it grows and contracts, how it does or does not receive additions. Had History been acquired earlier, a P.C. shelfmark would likely have earmarked it as an important text in pornography’s history. 35 A third contingency involves the oversights and biases of bibliog- raphy. The most thorough bibliographic account of History appears in the third volume of Ashbee’s bibliography, but it does not provide a description of the first edition. It contains mistakes and omissions\� that indicate Ashbee never saw the 1749 text. First, he misdates it at 1769, an error he probably inherited from fellow bibliographer James Campbell Reddie, from whose manuscript notes he copied the Kathleen lubey 914 entry on the first edition of History. 36 Neither ever saw the current b ritish l ibrary binding, since Progress does not appear in Ashbee’s bibliography.

b oth bibliographers were meticulous—Reddie would compare multiple copies of the same work line by line, and Ashbee records detailed variations across copies and editions—and had either\� examined this binding, they would have found Progress lurking behind History, and so would have recorded it as part of the erotic archive ultimately documented by Ashbee. 37 Progress thus disappeared from pornography’s history as well as literary history altogether. b ut so did the distinctive heteroglot character of History. Ashbee worked only with nineteenth-century editions of the novel, retitled Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure; or, the Amours, Intrigues, and Adventures of Sir Charles Manly, and containing significant textual changes. Ashbee mistakenly assumed these editions were the original “[r]eprinted with merely the\� name changed,” an oversight that has made its way into later biblio- graphic studies that take Ashbee’s account as authoritative. 38 Ashbee’s lack of curiosity to track down the original was perhaps fueled by his annoyance with the novel, even in its updated nineteenth-century form.

“The style is poor,” he concludes, “and it cannot be looked upon as a composition of anything but an inferior order.” He found its discur - sive aspects to be cloying and outdated, its introduction “long and irrelevant,” and its footnotes too insignificant to be mentioned at all. 39 Unenchanted by this text, Ashbee gives an incomplete account, erasing from view those attributes that may have motivated other readers and researchers to study the eighteenth-century edition. Together, the shifting practices of shelfmarking, censorship, and bibliography have screened History from scrutiny, rendering a remark- ably messy, complex, and irreverent text into a shadowy holding in the archive, a sexually unfocused text that, at least to Ashbee, does not warrant the close attention of a reader interested in pornography.

Ashbee was unaware that William Dugdale, its nineteenth-century publisher, edited with a heavy hand. Much that makes History of the Human Heart a distinctively eighteenth-century text was deliberately altered, streamlining the novel to suit the more singularly sexual tastes of the nineteenth-century market. III. MEMOIRS OF A MAN OF PLEASURE , 1827–1844: THE DUGDA l E EDITIONS In the nineteenth century, English pornographic publication resiliently, if evasively, thrived in l ondon, and by century’s close was Making Pornography, 1749–1968 915 flourishing in the continental print market, where the English trade was driven by tightening obscenity restrictions. Available to English readers were texts of varying cost, length, and genre that were decidedl\�y focused on arousing the sexual curiosity of readers, and a great deal of\� enterprising went into creating a supply. 40 William Dugdale, a central figure in this industry, tirelessly published and sold pornography from the 1820s through his death in 1868, operating in Holywell Street, the commercial center for the obscene book trade l ynda Nead calls “the single, mythic entity of obscenity” in nineteenth-century l ondon. 41 He commissioned original work from inexpensive sources, including Reddie who provided original and translated copy, and shamelessly pirated existing erotic works. His customers included the wealthy and the laboring, and he correspondingly produced texts at a range of prices. His illustrated 1832 edition of Fanny Hill, for example, sold\� for three guineas, while individual issues of his weekly The Exquisite, a miscellany of mildly bawdy prose, verse, and illustration, could be had for sixpence in 1844. 42 He was unembarrassed and intrepid in his reliance on existing sources. In a most brazen act of bootlegging, Dugdale reprinted the erotic cantos of l ord b yron’s Don Juan without permission, and he managed to avoid legal consequences by pointing out that, due to their sexual content, the cantos in question were ineligible for protection under copyright. 43 Characteristically, he treated a little-known text like History with editorial abandon. In his hands, History was a malleable source-text that could be repackaged for a range of audiences. Many of the details Ashbee includes in his bibliographical description indicate the differen\�t kind of text History had become in the obscene book trade of the early nineteenth century. Dugdale printed two freestanding illustrated editions, the earliest dated 1827, with the new title Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure—no doubt coined for its echoing of the Fanny Hill brand. One of Ashbee’s copies was priced at a half-guinea, indicating a moneyed readership. Across these editions, the phrase “wanton waiting maid” gets added to title pages and dustjackets, referring presumably to one episode in the book and, in any case, promising a desiring woman. None of these editions are extant in library collec- tions. It is likely that the copies Ashbee worked with were his own, that they were part of his bequest to the b ritish l ibrary, and that they were thereafter destroyed. 44 We can glean from Ashbee’s bibliography that questions of historical contingency and textual alterations either did not occur or did not matter to readers, collectors, and publishers in the nineteenth century, Kathleen lubey 916 who instead valued illustration and packaging that highlighted sexual content. Whereas the title page reading The History of the Human Heart; or the Adventures of a Young Gentleman had alluded more diffusely to personal history, masculinity, and intrigue, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure specifies the tradition of sexual writing associated with Fanny Hill, the particular characters (“Sir Charles Manly,” a “wanton waiting maid”) who will be sexualized, and the illustrations within \�the book. Through these decorative means, Dugdale crafted History into the kind of book that appealed to a contemporary English readership. In 1844, he repurposed History again, publishing it serially in The Exquisite (Figure 3). Available cheaply to a new set of readers, and serving as cost-free material for a weekly Dugdale was keen to continue publishing, Memoirs appeared across numbers 120 to 135 in the third and final volume of the magazine, without illustrations. \� I take the changes in this edition to reflect many of the changes that\� Dugdale had already made in 1827, when, as we know from Ashbee, he had already modernized character names (from Camillo to Charles, Saphira to Emilia, Philotis to Mr. Seymour, and so on). The only edition of the nineteenth-century Memoirs extant to researchers, the serialization reveals the extent of Dugdale’s editing, which updates the prose, reduces the text’s discursive aspects, and accelerates the narrative so that sexual description occurs more frequently. These changes streamline the narrative’s sexual focus and radically decrease its level of irony. More mundane changes include paragraph breaks, standardized capitalization, and modernized quotation marks. Dugdale advertises Memoirs’ sexual content at the outset by attrib- uting it to Sir Charles Sedley, the celebrated libertine and favorite of Charles II—a preposterous attribution, given the narrative’s mid- eighteenth-century style, but one that promises sexual intrigue for the reader prepared to suspend disbelief. This appropriation is one instance of what Sigel identifies in The Exquisite as a “truncation” that simplifies libertinism from a philosophy of pleasure into an emphasis \� on the “expectation and availability” of women. 45 Dugdale’s editing of Memoirs bears out the increasing focus on men’s heterosexual plea- sure. Apparently eager to immerse readers in sexual action, Dugdale deletes the introduction (though Ashbee notes it remained in one of the earlier freestanding editions), with all its comic architecture, and eliminates half of the footnotes and shortens four others, retaining tho\�se that directly elaborate on sex acts—those describing fertilization, t\�he hymen, and the role of the imagination in sexual pleasure. Omitted are those footnotes that unapologetically diverge from the erotic context Making Pornography, 1749–1968 917 Figure 3. Serialization of Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure in The Exquisite, 1844. Mi- crofilm reproduction of b ritish l ibrary’s copy.

Kathleen lubey 918 of the main narrative toward more abstract considerations. The note on modesty glossing the posture girl episode is deleted, for example, as is one describing the ideal tutor. In addition to pruning the narrative of material seemingly non-erotic, Dugdale strips it of diction, concepts, and historical references that might be unfamiliar to the reader. Other than implausibly positing Sedley as author, Dugdale wants to rid the narrative of historical and even political specificity. References to monarchical history—women’s modesty in the Elizabethan age, King William’s political ministers at the Hague—are removed (compare H, 150; D, 233). 46 Outdated professions are replaced with their modern equivalents—“Wigmakers” ( H , 70) become “hair-cutters” (D , 144) in 1844—and titles invoking old systems of rank are replaced by more inclusive categories—Camillo’\�s tutor is a “worthy Gentleman” (H, 28) in 1749, later an “excellent man” (D, 128). Dugdale also updates scientific language to reflect emerging knowledge of species and adaptation. Discussing animal versus human sexual desire, a footnote is altered to refine its scient\�ific diction. Explaining that animals will mate with one another irrespec- tive of beauty, the eighteenth-century author wrote that a male animal “takes Relief from the next kind She that is disposed for his Use”\� ( H , 197). Animals are anthropomorphized here, possessing gender and benevolence. Dugdale makes the language more scientific, and decid- edly less sociable: the male “takes relief from the first female of\� its own species that is disposed for its use” (D, 198). In the same passage, History’s author described women as possessing “Organs fitly disposed to allay the prevailing appetite” of men (H, 197); Dugdale states they have “organs fitly adapted” to this purpose (D, 198), stabilizing what once sounded arbitrarily happenstance into an evolutionary premise. Some of the editorial changes achieve contemporariness by subduing concepts specific to eighteenth-century culture and aesthetics that might confuse later readers. Such revision is evident in a scene involving Camillo, the Quaker virgin Saphira, and her maid Rebecca (for consistency, I’ll refer to their 1749 names). With Rebecca’s help, Camillo sneaks into Saphira’s darkened bedchamber to finish the seduc - tion he attempted the previous day. Unbeknownst to Camillo, though, Rebecca puts herself in Saphira’s bed and “receive[s] his Fire without flinching” (H , 195). Afterward, he is disgusted to find the less beautiful Rebecca in Saphira’s place. The empiricist terms originally used to explain Camillo’s desire are replaced with less specialized language by Dugdale. In 1749, Camillo, when he discovers Rebecca’s trick, is “stung to the quick, that he had been so lavish of himself on such a Creature, \� Making Pornography, 1749–1968 919 whose very Idea chilled his Vigour; (for she had something very forbid- ding in her Countenance, and nothing but Youth to recommend her)” (H, 195). “Idea” denotes a specialized meaning, referring to the vi\�sual representation of an object—in this case, Camillo’s perception or memory of Rebecca’s face. In 1844, the sentence is less intellectually taxing: Camillo is “stung to the quick with disappointment, and the thought that he had been so lavish of himself on a creature who had nothing but her youth to recommend her” (D, 197). The hero’s mind is not the mediating force it was in 1749; gone is the language that reminds us of the mental faculties involved in perception and desire. The footnote to this episode, retained but altered in 1844, marvels at the influence exerted by sight and the imagination on a man’s desire:

even though Rebecca and Saphira are both genitally equipped to satisfy Camillo, his appreciation for Saphira’s beauty makes him unwilling to knowingly accept the body of a less appealing woman. In 1749, the editor hyperbolically celebrates this human capacity. It is entirely omitted in 1844: “Strange Incantation! that the meer Sound of an Indifferent, should have such Influence upon the human Mechanism, in spite of Experience, and the Demonstration of all his Senses; at least of that Sense, which, as it comprehends all the rest, so is the least liable to be deceived, viz., his Feeling” (H, 196). Referring to a human as a “mechanism,” distinguishing among the various senses, a\�nd styling the sentence as an irrepressible philosophical exclamation—al\�l of these conventions are characteristic of eighteenth-century sexual and philosophical writing, but seem increasingly dissonant with the more direct path toward sexual description Dugdale is crafting from his source text. Dugdale further pares this footnote of its philosophica\�l particularity. The 1749 author attributes Camillo’s disappointment in discovering Rebecca to “the Sense of b eauty or Order hinted at by the Famous Mr. Hutchinson” (H, 197); Dugdale leaves only “sense of beauty” in this clause and deletes the rest—the particular phil\�oso- pher, the now-peculiar usage of “order” to explain aesthetic harmony (D, 198). Dugdale systematically eliminates the conceptual nature of sexual desire, particularly by removing the reference to Francis Hutcheson’s association of beauty with moral sense as well as terms that specify desire as a consequence of mental operations. The 1749 author insisted that two simultaneous sensations constitute Camillo’s desire for Saphira: he repeats exactly that it’s due to the “Sense of b eauty or Order” she provokes, which is coincident with “the other \� Idea of Desire” associated with her body (H, 197). The concepts of “order” and “idea”—that desire is not a direct expression\� of the interior Kathleen lubey 920 mind, but one mediated by a concept—are removed in 1844, where “the sense of beauty . . . constantly recurred as often as the other desire appeared” (D, 198). In this formulation, beauty directly causes desire, and the cognitive processes—that perceive order within beauty, that associate an idea with desire itself—are submerged, presenting, in th\�e nineteenth century, sexual attraction as a seamless bodily response to an alluring object. The final major change to this footnote suppresses the 1749 editor’s self-consciousness that he is a fallible thinker, a sentiment expressed in the first-person tone that is common in philosophical texts of the \� Enlightenment when writers admit to limited knowledge. Heightening both the pedantic tone and the comic effect of this lengthy elabora- tion—it spans three pages in the original—the editor admits that the moral sense of beauty Hutcheson postulates could be disputed: “I dare\� not pretend that the Application answers the Difficulties in the Case,\� but its the best Solution I can find for the strange Caprice which Camillo shews on the Discovery of the Deceit” (H, 197). Dugdale deletes this entire sentence, allowing the note to conclude more authoritatively, and much less humorously. In 1749, readers work through these dense and challenging ideas only to arrive at the philosopher’s admission of incomplete knowledge; in 1844, they receive a conceptually simpler explanation of desire in the voice of an omniscient scientist. In sum, Dudgale’s changes do not radically alter the plot of History, but they deliberately suppress the textual and stylistic conventions that mark it as a fiction from an earlier era, rendering a relatively \� ahistorical text out of the original. The miscellaneous character of the\� earlier fiction is subdued into a narrative more consistently focused \�on sex acts, and therefore more closely approaching what we call pornog- raphy in its modern guise. The inflated voice of the philosopher in the footnotes is reduced, as is the comedy produced there; the hero’s cognitive reflection on his own sexual experience is pared back; and the empiricist terminology that wielded explanatory power and irony for the eighteenth-century reader is modernized into a vernacular treatment of the hero’s sexuality. IV. THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN HEART IN 1885: THE ROCHESTER REPRINT SERIES Around 1885—contemporary with Ashbee’s bibliographical entry on History—two l ondon booksellers, Edward Avery and Arthur Reader, collaborated to publish another edition. It appears with its original Making Pornography, 1749–1968 921 title as part of the Rochester Reprint Series, advertised to potential subscribers as “A series of works illustrative of Manners and Customs\�, Public and Private life of the 17th and 18th Centuries” (Figure 4).\� 47 In four installments, the series placed anonymous works like History alongside editions of Rochester’s poetry and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb. Three copies of this History are held at the b ritish l ibrary; one of these was probably Ashbee’s, held in the Private Case until at least the late 1960s before being assigned its current shelfmark, Cup.805.d.3. 48 True to its mission, this printing restores, a bit disingenuously as we’ll see, the antique flair of the original History. The source-text for this edition is the original 1749: here appear the Italianate names, (most of) the introduction, early modern typography such as Germanic capitalization and continuous quotation marks. A facsimile title page names the original publisher and restores the correct date. Reader, an antiquarian bookseller, most likely supplied the 1749 copy-text to Avery, who oversaw printing and publication. Avery, named as book- seller in the endpages, was a successful purveyor of erotic books in late Victorian l ondon and had a loyal and wealthy customer base that included Ashbee, whose bibliography he also sold and who was likely a subscriber to the series. They printed 116 copies of each installment \� in the series, which were available in two bindings—both expensive at\� £1 16s or £2 2s per volume. 49 The customer for this edition of History was likely a dedicated collector of erotic books, but also one who valued the trappings of antiquity, who would have read the outmoded narrative style as a quaint aberration from the more focused pornog- raphy being written by the late nineteenth century and who would be knowledgeable enough about English literary history to be able to place History among its comic contemporaries—Fanny Hill, Tom Jones, and Tristram Shandy. Avery and Reader, though, determined that their readers’ enthu- siasm for eighteenth-century style would only go so far. b y late in the century, a “formulaic focus on sex acts” characterized print pornography, a development Deana Heath associates with new photographic forms that froze sexual images into static and interchangeable objects. 50 Even Avery and Reader’s seeming antiquarianism succumbs to this new streamlining of narrative. Their History contains no footnotes. The editor figure is carefully removed from the 1885 introduction, and with him any trace that there were footnotes in the copy-text to begin with. The novel reads, in this form, as a mischievous tale of gallant masculinity, focused on the hero’s escapades and unconcerned with Kathleen lubey 922 Figure 4. Title page, History of the Human Heart, c. 1885. Shelfmark PHI e. 130, b odleian l ibraries, University of Oxford.

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 923 the philosophical explanations that had accompanied the narrative previously. As Ashbee had very recently complained in his bibliog- raphy, the footnotes—even the abbreviated ones he encountered in the Dugdale editions—too radically distracted a reader seeking sexual\� action. Those paratextual outgrowths that had constituted the book’s eighteenth-century humor are seen by 1885 as a nuisance even to readers who fashioned themselves genteel antiquarians. The 1885 edition tells us two things about the making of pornography in Victorian England. First, even when a degree of interest is shown in an erotic text’s historical character, publishers craft as much as possible a more modern, more exclusively sexual focus out of earlier fictions that included sex as part of a comic miscellany. Second, despite this restructuring, booksellers and collectors assembled an erotic canon that included historical texts whose approach to narrating sexuality was\� different, less condensed than that of Victorian pornographic novels.

As the genre of pornography cohered, so did its historical character.

Even as some of their antiquated form was stripped, the eighteenth- century fictions that were preserved by Avery and Reader as part of the long history of pornography still do not entirely conform to the habits of the genre in 1885. Producers and collectors were aware, to a greater degree than modern critics, that the pornographic tradition included these miscellaneous fictions that narrated sex with less focu\�s and less certainty than their contemporaries. V.MEMOIRS OF A MAN OF PLEASURE IN 1968: PU lP FICTION In the twentieth century, History made its final appearance in an edition that, further still, removes impediments to the reader’s sexual focus. Packaged as pulp fiction, it differs from earlier editions in i\�ts rigid gendering within sexual encounters: the hero is self-possessed, his seductive efforts uninterrupted by the bouts of uncertainty we saw in earlier editions, and his women partners are quieter, flatter, less condemning of his scheming and duplicity. The 1968 Tandem Press paperback published in london and New Y ork is entitled Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, and its cover boasts it is a reprint of a great archival find, “an 18th-century erotic classic, wider in scope than My Secret Life . . . [d]iscovered in the archives of the british Museum—available in the U.S. for the first time!” (Figures 5 and 6). 51 The editor James Graham (a pseudonym probably based on the eighteenth-century quack sexologist, whose lectures are reprinted in the first volume of \� The Exquisite) cites an 1844 Dugdale edition as his copy-text: The Exquisite serialization.

Kathleen lubey 924 Figure 5. Front cover, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, 1968. Author’s copy.

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 925 Figure 6. back cover, Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, 1968. Author’s copy.

Kathleen lubey 926 Graham extends Dugdale’s editing tradition, silently modernizing and abridging the 1844 copy-text to ahistoricize it and, for the first time, to rid it of sentiment. In 1968, the narrative pruning seems even \� more intently focused on upholding a powerful masculinity in the sexual context. Feeling, women’s suffering, and men’s abject proclamations of love were deemed irrelevant or even threatening to the reader’s enjoyment, which here begins to look much more exclusively sexual and more aggressively masculinist than it had two hundred years earlier. Graham inherits all of Dugdale’s changes, never working with an earlier copy-text, and creates more paragraph and section breaks to provide a seemingly more rapid reading experience. The abridgements made by Graham have a few patterns. He removes some pseudo-medical discussions that would be viewed as radically outdated by the late twentieth century: a life-threatening episode of hysteria in Camillo’s mother (compare D, 126; G, 12) and a description of his infant appetites that grants him an implausible level of cognition—implausible too in 1749, and funny (compare D, 127; G, 13). A description of the hero’s private education—which favored English history over the classics, morality over the “specula\�- tive sciences”—likewise is deemed irrelevant by Graham (compare D, 128; G, 16), as is Saphira’s accusation of heresy when Camillo claims that his life depends on her returning his affections (compare D, 184; G, 113). Graham eliminates historically contingent associations of sex with other topics, such as religion and education, that would be unfamiliar and outdated to the reader of pulp fiction. Most consistently, Graham removes material from seduction scenes that might read as sentimental, feminist, or emasculating. Topics that might distract from a potent masculine heterosexuality are often suppressed, suggesting that the pleasure of pornographic reading by 1968 is not only narrow compared to the miscellaneous pleasures enjoyed by the eighteenth-century reader, but also that it requires a proud and unfailing hero. This hero, so unlike his eighteenth-century forebear, falls short of ever admitting subjection to his beloved. Graham, for example, eliminates the enthusiasms and hyperbole of Camillo’s seduction speech to Charlotta, his first successful conquest; in 1749 and 1844 we read, “Those languid Eyes, that heaving panting b osom, that glowing b lush, all proclaim the God of l ove triumphant: Yield my Dearest to his Dictates and make me happy” (compare H, 105; D, 159). Graham has Camillo’s conquest succeed from the penulti- mate line, an imperative that never admits to the triumph of love: “[ l ]et no childish coyness chill the warm desires that now mutually fire Making Pornography, 1749–1968 927 our breasts” (G, 69). Camillo’s poetic, carpe diem speech to Saphira also disappears (compare D, 184; G, 112), as does his abject pledge to banish himself from Saphira’s sight forever—a sacrifice that would threaten his own life—if she so wishes (compare D, 192; G, 128). It seems the pleasure of the reader in 1968 would be compromised by a pleading and subjected masculinity. In a series of related abridgements, Graham removes speeches by women that boldly lament their vulnerability at the hands of preda- tory men. When Saphira discovers, post-seduction, that Camillo has no plans to marry her, she delivers a searing condemnation of his dishonesty. Graham removes a section in which Saphira comes close to accusing him of rape, calling him a “lustful ravisher” whose “s\�oul stands naked before [her], in all its natural baseness and deformity” (D 199; G, 138). The seriousness of this piece of the plot is left undisturbed by Graham—Camillo still faces imprisonment, he fears for Saphira’s well-being, she regrets her indiscretion—but passages that persuasive\�ly condemn the hero’s actions on moral or religious grounds, and that underscore the plight of the seduced woman, are removed, relieving the narrative of some of its unflattering commentary on masculine power. The most drastic and stylistically clumsy changes of this nature are made to the final pages of the novel, where Angelina, having been seduced and abandoned by Camillo in Amsterdam, surprises him in the bedchamber of his l ondon mistress who has offered to help reunite them. In the comic register of the original, Angelina is a suit- able partner for the wayward Camillo, matching him in irreverence and spiritedness—after all, she considers herself marriageable even though he has already seduced her. She has traveled alone, cross-dressed en cavalier, and pursued him with loyalty and diligence. Echoing Helena’s pursuit of Willmore in The Rover, their coupling, a familiar means of comic closure to the eighteenth-century reader, promises to be lively, even turbulent. The 1968 edition is profoundly uninterested in this resolution. Most of Angelina’s confrontation of Camillo is deleted by Graham, so in 1968 we do not hear her admonish him, when he renews his pledge of love, to “swear no more! heaven has already witnessed too many of your false oaths; tempt it no more” (D, 248); or that “nothing is left for [her] but endless misery!” (D, 248). In 1968, the exclamation is shorter:: “[Y]ou cannot give me back my happiness, my peace, my lost innocence” (G, 222). More abbreviated still is the hero’s response, which Graham truncates to a vow passionless even in its punctuation:

“Oh, my [Angelina]. Take me back and let my tears heal you” (G, Kathleen lubey 928 222–23). In earlier editions, Camillo’s eagerness to reconcile and marry was evident in his emotional response: “[T]he tears started to his ey\�es, and running to assist her, he exclaimed— Oh! my [Angelina]! thou dear, lovely injured maid! take me to thy lovely bosom, there let me grow, and with my tears heal the wounds my cruelty has given to thee” ( D , 248). In 1749 and 1844, this proclamation had been a suitably comic conclusion to the hero’s picaresque sexual adventures, and the lovers’ hyperbolic vows at their reunion animated the immediate nuptials that followed. In 1968, the pulp editor seems to view the conclusion as a structural rather than a thematic necessity. The sexual adventures are concluded, and masculine desire is conforming to monogamy; the reader no longer needs passionate dialogue, or even exclamation points. VI. CONC lUSION : PORNOGRAPHY SO-CA llED by 1968, the pornographic text has been made efficient. Discursive elements remain, but they are trimmed and condensed to be deemed relevant to the sexual concerns of the main narrative. Objections to the supremacy of the hero’ s desires are muted; women’s articulations of their social disadvantages are removed; abstract speculations no longer move us afield of the local sexual encounter. The book’s cover may sensationalize the text’s historical character, but Graham worked subtly, as had Dugdale, to tame and normalize his copy-text’s unruly hybridity. While I’ve tried to convey the amalgam that constituted the original text, I have been less concerned to detail the contents of editors’ deletions than to demonstrate the range of topics, reference\�s, and usages that were quieted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors, who considered them impediments to the erotic pleasure of the reader. A sexually focused narrative must be artificially curated, this history tells us, imposed through a process of selection and suppression at various levels—sentence, language, text, and title. In\� the long life of History, we see pornography narrow into a vision of heterosexual male pleasure imposing itself serially on evacuated women; but importantly, we see that this plot was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as a dubious one, impinged upon by contingencies, internally self-questioning, and speculative about its own hypocrisies. \� I have emphasized here the way in which gender transforms across this history from a site of confusion and debate into a stricter, stabler heteronormativity.

b ut my central point is that so many dynamic, probing, and uncertain associations with sexuality—associations with \� religion, science, philosophy, cognition, early feminism—are scrutinized Making Pornography, 1749–1968 929 and subdued as pornography becomes more strictly defined as a purposeful address to readers’ erotic interests.The case study of History shows this change to be underway at some point between the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aligning it with a broader streamlining of human sexual practice. Henry Abelove has associated these decades with a rise in prominence and practice of “sexual intercourse so-called,” the “particular kin\�d of sexual expression” that involved the seminal emission of a penis inside a va\�gina and that increasingly often, demographers show, resulted in reproduc- tion. 52 The perceived productivity of this model of sexual activity marks its affinity with capitalism, Abelove suggests, under which labor and leisure become strictly differentiated and “industrial work-discipline” becomes internalized and exhibited in human behaviors increasingly tailored to efficiency. 53 As part of this large-scale transformation of public and private life, cross-sex, genital, penetrative, seminal sex acts ascend in frequency and in cultural value to become understood exclusively as sexual intercourse. Non-reproductive sexual practices were widespread and fluid prior to this historical shift, Abelove spec\�u- lates, and only with the rise of industrial capitalism do they become consigned to the status of “foreplay,” of non-essential, “preliminary” precursors to a more central act deemed to be intercourse itself. 54 The transformations of pornography, a textual aspect of the prac- tices of sexuality, reflect the influence of this regimen of productivity.

Narrative descriptions of sex acts propel readers toward cross-sex genital union more rapidly after 1749; discursive, speculative strands are deemed superfluous, expendable, even irrelevant by publishers who shorten or delete them. Pornography, we’ve seen, was rendered into an imperative that the reader frequently attend to genital action as a text\�’s central purpose.

l ike foreplay, non-narrative, non-sequential pieces that originally constituted pornography were redefined as ornaments or even barriers to some more primary spectacle—to those repeated penetra- tive acts we have naturalized as pornography, but that we might now name, following Abelove, pornography so-called. As modern culture became increasingly intolerant of perceived inefficiency, sexual narra- tives concentrated descriptions of sex acts, marginalizing the myriad ways that sexuality previously had entailed critical reflection on diverse aspects of human experience. It is only to our modern perspective that such treatments of sex are digressive, not-quite-pornographic, or soft- core. Taking a longer view of pornography, these speculations reappear as constituent of sex acts, in narrative and in practice.

St. John’s University Kathleen lubey 930 NOTES I wish to thank Joseph Drury , Wendy Anne l ee, and l isa Sigel for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 1 lisa Sigel, “Name Your Pleasure: The Transformation of Sexual language in Nineteenth-Century b ritish Pornography,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 399.

2 The History of the Human Heart; or the Adventures of a Young Gentleman ( london, 1749), 280. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbrevia\�ted H.

3 Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), 271. See also Thomas Keymer on readers’ peaceable synthesis of a wide spectrum\� of literary conventions, specifically in Tristram Shandy, in Sterne, The Moderns, and The Novel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 30–45.

4 Dickie, 253, 255.5 Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York:

Norton, 1995), 87.

6 lynn Hunt’s landmark collection emphasizes the resistant politics of early pornog- raphy; see The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone b ooks, 1993). For two very different accounts of the narrative economy of pornography after Sade, see Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory:

What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), who emphasizes the “social evaluation” (13) of individual action fac\�ilitated by pornography, and Stephen Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Norton, 1985), who sees the genre tending toward a “pornotopia” (268) in which the totality \�of human experience is reducible to sex acts.

7 Kathleen lubey, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760 ( l ewisburg: b ucknell Univ. Press, 2012).

8 Darnton, 88.9 “Sexual stimulation” is Peter Wagner’s phrase in Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America ( l ondon: Secker and Warburg, 1988), 225.

Julie Peakman echoes Wagner in her definition of pornography as “material that contains graphic description of sexual organs and/or action . . . writte\�n with the prime intention of sexually exciting the reader” (Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England [ l ondon: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003], 6).

10 Peakman, 3.11 Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 20. See also 25–27 for close readings of texts that, Harvey argues, demonstrate the difference between metaphor and referentiality. I find the distinction labored and untenable from a literary-critical standpoint and not releva\�nt for eighteenth- century readers who would have encountered these different modes within single texts.

12 Peakman, 6; Wagner shares this view (see 246). Recent work on Memoirs demon- strates why sex has absorbed so much critical attention on the novel: because it so richly functions as a vehicle for addressing other contemporary concerns\�. Outstanding recent accounts emphasize its contributions to realism (see Danielle b obker, “Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79 [2010]: 1035–45); domestic ideology (see Andrea Haslanger, “What Happens When Pornography Ends in Marriage,” ELH 78 [2011]: 163–88); and theories of language (see Scott Juengel, “Doing Things with Fann\�y Hill,” ELH 76 [2009]: 419–46).

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 931 13 bradford Mudge’s reading of John Cleland, Matthew lewis, and Jane Austen identifies a kind of dispersed pornography prior to the genre’ s coalescence. I disagree, though, that after the Romantic period the genre loses self-consciousnes\�s; the textual history I provide shows that pornographic production remains highly awar\�e of its own methods. See “How to Do the History of Pornography: Romantic Sexualit\�y and its Field of Vision,” in Historicizing Romantic Sexuality, ed. Richard C. Sha, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (January 2006), http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/mudge/ mudge.html.

14 Freeman’s mid-century publications include exposés of Henry VIII, the Roman Catholic church, an “unfortunate young nobleman return’d from thir\�teen years slavery in America,” as well as pamphlets on the hoaxes of street performers and the resignation of l ord Chesterfield. The imprint may be false, according to Henry Plomer’s Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers in England, 1726–1775 (Oxford: b ibliographical Society at the Oxford Univ. Press, 1932). l ater in the century, History of the Human Heart becomes the subtitle to Henry b rooke’s sentimental novel Juliet Grenville. The similarity seems to be coincidence.

15 History is briefly noted by Ruth Perry in Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), in the context of prohibitions on premarital sex (see \�261); l aura Rosenthal in the bibliography of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Peterborough:

b roadview Press, 2008); Raymond Stephanson in Yard of Wit:

Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650–1750 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), for its discussion of “sperm-as-man” (38); and Randolph Trumbach in “ l ondon’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Cult\�ure,” in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History\�, ed.

Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone b ooks, 1994), for a reference to hermaphroditism in women. History is not included in ECCO.

16 I therefore disagree further with Wagner, who claims that “comic effects . . . are detrimental” to pornography’s aim of arousal (225). History’s humor may be what causes Wagner to mention it in passing as a “sub-pornographic title” (246\�).

17 See Thomas laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York:

Zone, 2004), 302–16 and Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge ( b altimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), 294–301. See Harvey, 61–76 for her account of group reading.

18 Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1999), 10.

19 See Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 42–57. Roy Porter and l esley Hall survey the “amalgam of traditional medico- scientific learning with other sorts of information” made available to various strata of eighteenth-century society (The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1750–1950 [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995], 65).

20 “Shooting the bridge” is a nautical reference common in literary a\�ccounts of posture girls. “The nature of this routine can only be guessed at, but it all\�udes to the hazards of negotiating l ondon b ridge by boat,” a passageway that was narrow and precarious, water levels being variable on each side of the bridge (Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vol. [ l ondon: The Athlone Press, 1994], 3:1077–78). The “warm cataracts” suggest\� Camillo is showered by one kind of bodily fluid or another.

21 “Supposititious” means something like “supposed.” The OED’s meanings include both insidiously deceptive and simply imaginary: “1. Put by devious m\�eans in place of Kathleen lubey 932 another; fraudulently substituted for the genuine thing or person,” or “2. Pretended or imagined to exist; feigned, fictitious.” The first definition would align more fully with the feminist meaning I’m locating in the passage.

22 Harvey, 28. See also Peakman, 14–24. Constraints come to be imposed in 1787\� by William Wilberforce’s Proclamation Society, devoted to suppressing “loose and licentious” publications, and later by the Society for the Suppressio\�n of Vice in 1802 (Colin Manchester, “ l ord Campbell’s Act: England’s First Obscenity Statute,” Journal of Legal History 9 [1988]: 224).

23 I consider Progress along with History in a discussion of sex as an epistemology in mid-century novels. See l ubey, 120–30. Progress appears only in the microform collection Early British Fiction: pre 1750 and is not listed in the English Short Title Catalogue or ECCO. To my knowledge this binding contains the only extant copy of Progress. The b ritish l ibrary has assigned the 1744 date, which was erased from the title page but is corroborated by the Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1744. T.

Wiltshire is most surely an alias, as no other titles with this imprint a\�ppear in this volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine or the b ritish l ibrary catalogue, and Wiltshire has no entry in Plomer’s Dictionary.

24 See Charles Mosley, ed., Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage, 107th ed., 3 vol. (Wilmington, DE: b urke’s Peerage & Gentry, 2003), 2:2353–56. The spelling of Weir was changed to Vere at some point after Catherine Weir’s death. Architect Robert Adam’s account of the Grand Tour he undertook with Hope-Weir in 1754 depicts him as socially connected and fashionable, even foppish, on one \�occasion a “childish coxcomb” (John Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome [ l ondon: John Murray, 1962], 150). See also the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Monson, [née Vane], l ady Anne,” by Janet b rowne.

25 Jan Fergus’s research shows the ways in which the historical record can obscure the gender of readers. See Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 41–52 and 209–11. Peakman finds some evidence of women reading and selling erotic works (see Peakman, 26, 35–37), but Harv\�ey argues that women’s involvement with erotic texts was “highly circumscribed” (43).\� 26 The Mysteries of Love Reveal’d: or, Rules for the Conduct of Ladies and Gentlemen in their Amours ( l ondon, n.d.), 125. l ibraries variously date it 1715 and circa 1740.

The 1715 dating seems erroneous. The London Magazine lists it under new titles in 1738, and its “just publish’d” advertisements contain titles da\�ted 1736.

27 Eliza Haywood’s authorship is implied by the “E.H.” on the title page. The attri\�- bution is not certain, nor is it particularly important to my discussion\�. The collector, after all, was not concerned to include authors’ names in the table o\�f contents, and all the other texts are anonymous.

l eah Orr finds the Mercenary Lover attribution to be dubious, and does not mention The Padlock in “The b asis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library, 7th series, 12.4 (2011): 335–75.

28 The shelfmarks of these two holdings are sequentially close, 12315.bbb.3\�2 and 12316.bbb.38(3.), suggesting they may have been acquired at the same t\�ime, possibly as part of the same bequest that contained the binding of History and Progress.

Perhaps this owner removed the amatory works from the binding and shelved them separately, preserving the physical binding for the works deemed to have a greater degree of sexual interest.

29 Charles Ramsden finds ornamentation to be on the rise in bookbinding p\�ractices by around 1765, and definitively by 1780; see London Bookbinders, 1780–1840 ( l ondon: b . T. b atsford l td., 1956).

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 933 30 On the origins of the Private Case, see Peter Fryer, Private Case—Public Scandal ( l ondon: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1966), reprinted as Secrets of the British Museum (New York: Citadel Press, 1968), 41–42. Fryer emphasizes the l i brary’s secrecy of these holdings and the exclusivity of access granted to elite men. The Private\� Case’s inception overlaps closely with the first Parliamentary statute against obscene \�publications. See Manchester, “ l ord Campbell’s Act,” 226–32.

31 The three volumes of Ashbee’s bibliography—Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), and Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885)—were privately printed and published under the pseudonym Pis\�anus Fraxi.

Ashbee bequeathed his 15,229-volume private library, which included much sexual material, to the b ritish l ibrary upon his death in 1900. See Fryer, Secrets, 47–50 and Forbidden Books of the Victorians ( l ondon: The Odyssey Press, 1970), 14.

32 Patrick Kearney, The Private Case: An Annotated Bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library ( l ondon: Jay l andesman l imited, 1981). On the reassignment of shelfmarks, see pages 62–69. Peakman, \�for example, read most comprehensively according to Kearney’s bibliography and so inherits the parameters of the Private Case shelfmarks (195–96). The b ritish l ibrary now holds Kearney’s illuminating S upplement to the Private Case of the British (Museum) Library (1982): comprising books that used to be in the Private Case (Santa Rosa: Scissors and Paste b ibliographies, 2002).

33 For example, The Whore’s Rhetorick (1683), Edmund Curll’s edition of Venus in the Cloister (1725), and various editions of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure remain in the Private Case today, while Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb, some editions (but not others) of Rochester’s poetry, and an 1885 edition of The History of the Human Heart have been reassigned non-P.C. shelfmarks.

34 This shelfmark denotes “cupboard books,” works which may or may no\�t be held in a literal cupboard, but in any case are so marked to indicate a degre\�e of sexual content.

l ike D.C. holdings, they are restricted materials and must be consulted i\�n a supervised area of the b ritish l ibrary reading room. The Cup. holdings range from “sexological works, books on contraception, guides to erotic techniqu\�e” to books that “embrace sexual questions, or with piquant illustrations” to “erotic art: nudist and girly magazines, ‘art studies’, books on the cinema containing pictures \�of women” (Fryer, Secrets, 22–23). Harvey’s Reading Sex works largely from Cup. shelfmarks, but she does not remark on how this designation shaped her research methods.

35 Comparing bibliographies that drew on the Private Case, one can detect C\�up.

reassignments. b y the time the binding of History and Progress was acquired in 1982, for example, an 1885 reprint of History had been declassified from P.C. to Cup., a change that took place sometime between Fryer’s 1966 account and Kearney’s 1981 bibliography, and so the 1749 edition likely went into the “cupboard” with it.\� This later acquisition and less restrictive shelfmarking practices would also explain why the 1749 History does not appear in any of the extant bibliographies of the Private Case, most notably Kearney’s, and therefore why it has not been pursued by scholars seeking early pornographic texts, who trust the P.C. shelfmark to lead them to the most pertinent material. Works I consulted include Ashbee’s bibliography; Rolf S.

Reade’s Registrum Librorum Eroticum (1936); Fryer’s Private Case—Public Scandal (1966); Kearney’s Private Case (1981); and Peter Mendes’s Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800–1930 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), as well as the b ritish l ibrary’s online catalogue. Most of the P.C. declassifications I saw occurred between Fryer’s 1966 study and Kearney’s 1981 bibliography. New titles are still added to the Private Case, as Kearney tracks on his website, http://www.scissors-and-paste.net/PC_additions.html.

Kathleen lubey 934 36 Ashbee attributes the little information he has on the first edition o\�f History to Reddie in a footnote. See Catena Librorum Tacendorum, reprinted as The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (New York: Documentary b ooks, 1962), 121. See also Fryer, Forbidden Books, 10–11.Mendes states that Reddie was “a pivotal figure in the w\�orld of Victorian pornography, as collector, translator, author and transmitter of texts from authors to publishers” (3).

37 On Reddie’s meticulousness, see Ashbee, Catena, xlvii–xlviii. 38 Ashbee, Catena, 121. Scholars who inherit this error include Fryer, Secrets, 80; Kearney, A History of Erotic Literature ( l ondon: Macmillan, 1982), 108; and Wagner, Eros Revived, 246.

39 Ashbee, Catena, 121, 124, 122.40 See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworlds: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 204–231 and l isa Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New b runswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002), 15–49, both of whom link the origin of the market in pornographic publication with political radicalism and freethinking. Colette Colligan argues that textual circulation within an\�d beyond b ritain shaped conceptions of obscenity in the period. See From Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 9–22.

On the move of English pornographic production to the continent, see Mendes, 24–41.

41 lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 164.

42 See Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, 68–70. Ashbee lists several American printings as well. On William Dugdale’s career and many imprisonments, see Kearney, History, 107; McCalman, 210–211; and Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 18–23. Sigel points out that his legal troubles stemmed from his selling to working-class re\�aders, who were thought to be more prone to moral corruption than the middle and leisure\� classes; Nead suggests he also had links to moneyed and influential customers w\�ho helped him out of his prison sentences (180–81).

43 On Dugdale’s legal skirmish with byron, see Deana Heath, Purifying Empire:

Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India, and Au\�stralia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 47.

44 Mendes points out the scarcity of English titles in british library’s collection from the period 1820 to 1883, suggesting much nineteenth-century material was\� eliminated.

In his bequest, Ashbee allowed for the destruction of duplicates in his \�collection, but Mendes provides evidence that T rustees also permitted the destruction of “offensive” material in his collection (466).

45 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 47.46 See Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, in The Exquisite: A Collection of Tales, Histories and Essays, funny, fanciful and facetious, interspersed with Anecdotes…Illustrated wit\�h Numerous Engravings, 3 vol. ( l ondon: Printed and Published by H. Smith [William Dugdale], 1842–1844), 3: 125–248. Hereafter cited parenthetically\� by page number and abbreviated D. “H. Smith” was one of Dugdale’s several aliases. See Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, 339–43 and Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 45. A reproduction of The Exquisite is available in the microfilm collection Sex and Sexuality, 1640–1940:

Literary, Medical, and Sociological Perspectives, Part 3, ed. Mudge (Marlborough:

Adam Matthew Publications, 2002).

47 Quoted in Mendes, 141.

Making Pornography, 1749–1968 935 48 Fryer quotes from this edition in Private Case—Public Scandal, indicating it was held in the Private Case (P.C.27.a.19) in the 1960s, but it does not appear in Kearney’s bibliography so had been reassigned by 1980. The two other copies (Cup.\�804.p.41 and 43) bear the bookplate of J. b . Rund, a collector who made a donation of erotic books in the later twentieth century (Private Case, 65).

49 This coterie context corresponds to Sigel’s account of literary pornography’s increasing exclusivity in the late nineteenth century, in which men of Ashbee’s elite milieu produced and circulated expensive texts (see Governing Pleasures, 55–63). On the Rochester series and the Avery-Reader partnership, see Mendes, 12–13, 141–142, and 452–453.

50 Heath, 45. On this corpus of pornographic fiction, see Marcus, 197–251 and Ellen b ayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003).

51 Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure, ed. James Graham, pseud. ( lon don: Tandem, 1968).

Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated G.

52 Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercours\�e during the l ong Eighteenth Century in England,” Genders 6 (1989): 127, 126; reprinted in Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

53 Abelove, 129. See also E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97.

54 Abelove, 129. Hitchcock provides supporting evidence. See English Sexualities, 1700–1800, 24–41. Joseph Drury links Abelove’s thesis to the pleasures of “unfore- seen stoppages” in Sterne’s practice of narrative digression. See “The Novel and the Machine,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42 (2009): 340–41.

Kathleen lubey