READING OBSCENE TEXTS AND THEIR HISTORIES

Abstract

Histories of pornography and obscenity attained academic respectability relatively recently. They attempt to show when the cultural categories of pornography and obscenity came into being, and most agree that they are coextensive with modernity (defined in various ways, but mainly as coincident with the rise of print between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries). Historians see a distinction between sexual representation in early modern Europe, which was used primarily for satirical purposes, and modern pornography, in which sex is isolated from its social and cultural context and presented as a thing in itself. However, we should be critical of this stark distinction, as the modern legal–cultural category of the obscene is much wider than that of the pornographic, and contains many of the diverse elements of earlier cultures of erotic writing, bawdiness and pseudo-intellectualism. Modern historians could profit by using the techniques of early modern literary history, and by studying print forms.

Keywords:

• obscenity
• pornography
• reading
• history
• laws
• culture

Notes

1.

Take the very lowest instance, the picture post card sold underhand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them have been of an ugliness to make you cry … Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty. It is the same with the books they sell in the underworld. They are either so ugly they make you ill, or so fatuous you can't imagine anybody but a cretin or a moron reading them. (Lawrence13)

2. The first use of ‘pornographe’ is in Restif de la Bretonne's Le Pornographe (1769) in reference to writing about prostitutes. Hunt identifies as the first use of pornography in its modern sense as Etienne-Gabriel Peignot's Dictionnaire Critique, Litteraire et Bibliographique des Principaux Livres Condamnes au Feu, Supprimes ou censures (Paris 1806).

3. On the medieval obscene see Camille.

4. Curll was prosecuted for publishing Meibomius’ De Flagrorum Usu, A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (first Latin edition 1639).

5. Kappeler in The Pornography of Representation (1986) concluded that ‘Art will have to go’ (Richlin xvii).

6. Toulalan concedes that:

There was clearly a contemporary idea of a kind of sexual literature that was of a particular nature, but that encompassed a very wide range of styles of writing, format and subject, and in which the explicit or realistic depiction of sex was not as crucial an issue as it is for modern commentators … Pornography in this period also reveals preoccupations, and addresses issues that do not necessarily conform to what a modern audience, or readership, would expect to find in a work of pornography.

All of which begs the question of why ‘pornography’ should be used at all in this context (Toulalan 17).

7. The genre of ‘secret papers’ included ‘The Life of Calcraft, the Hangman’ or ‘The Secret Doings at the White House, Soho’, which though salacious were not pornographic. ‘Strawing’ or selling packets of pamphlets could include the sale of illegal or dubious genres like ‘indecent papers, political songs and the like’ (Mayhew 104).

8. On the postcard trade in the 1920s see National Archives ‘Report of Chief Inspector’.

9. On the ‘illustrated press’ see National Archives Indecent Prints.

10. On Jacobus X see National Archives ‘Circular from Panurge Press’.

11. Mass Observation, Topic Collection, TC 20, Box 20/7/A Force's Reading, Mass Observation survey of Reading Habits, 1937–1947, Mass Observation Online.

12. The most successful ‘Hank Janson’ was the jack-of-all trades writer Stephen Frances who was Hank in the early 1950s.

13. Colligan sees pornographic commentary on slavery in books written long after the end of slavery (122–3).