The autobiography of a Victorian pornographer: Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life

ABSTRACT

Written by Edward Sellon just before his suicide, The Ups and Downs of Life (1867) is at once a book of pornography and a pornographer’s philosophical testament. This article analyzes the literary strategies, discursive practices and ideological implications that inform this ‘erotic autobiography’, a remarkable text so far neglected by scholarship. With the methodological tools of gender studies and feminist literary criticism, the article examines the porno/autobiographer’s efforts to construct a heroic, heterosexual masculine identity through the discourse of philosophical libertinism, and his tragic failure. The Ups and Downs expands our knowledge of the Victorian subculture of pornography and sheds further light on the relationship between libertinism and masculinity, as well as on the power of pornography to challenge dominant public and literary discourses. With his skilful manipulation of generic categories (the realist novel, the ‘men of letters’ autobiography) and the search for a metaphysics of the flesh, Sellon destabilizes the boundaries between high and low culture: by choosing to recount the ‘ups and downs’ of his life (and of his penis) as an experiment in pornographic writing, he invents a textual space for articulating counter-hegemonic discourses otherwise unspeakable in Victorian culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Victorian pornography
• Victorian literature
• autobiography
• feminist literary criticism
• gender studies
• queer theory

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful and stimulating comments, and to Antonia Anna Ferrante for her queer support in the analysis of transvestism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Existance’ (sic) was later substituted, probably by the publisher William Dugdale, with the less philosophical ‘Life’.

2 See, among others, Sigel (2002), Rosenman (2003), Dau (2014) and Joudrey (2015).

3 Like Kearney, pornography scholars who mention The Ups and Downs do not question its autobiographical ‘authenticity’, with the exception of Gibson (2002, 53 and 195). My use of the term ‘authentic’ in quotation marks refers to the vast critical debate on the issue of authenticity and fiction in scholarship about life writing. See note 8.

4 In the dedicatory letter to his uncle in his novel Herbert Breakspear, Sellon (1848) declares that he spent ‘nearly six years’ in India, in contrast with the ‘ten years’ mentioned by the narrator of The Ups and Downs.

5 Like Sellon, Richard Burton ‘drew on Orientalism to criticise English pruderie’ (Colligan 2006, 34). Burton published the first English translations of two Hindu treatises on love: Kama Sutra in 1883 and Ananga Ranga in 1885 (on Burton and obscenity, see Colligan 2006). About 20 years earlier, Sellon had published an essay on Tantric worship, ‘Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus’ ([1865] 1902), which would become an influential text in the sexually-oriented British occultist tradition culminating in Aleister Crowley's ‘sex magick’ (see King 1971, 10; Urban 2006, 94–95).

6 The boundaries between anthropology and pornography in the late Victorian age were very unstable (Lyons and Lyons 2004, 57; Sigel 2002, 50–72): Sellon belonged to the notorious Cannibal Club, the inner circle of the Anthropological Society of London, founded by Richard Burton, whose members were all connected with pornography, as writers, collectors or consumers (see Sigel 2002, 50–55). The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was also one of the ‘Cannibals’.

7 According to Campbell, Sellon's original memoirs were ‘twice as long at least as the printed version’. After Sellon's death, Campbell sold the manuscript to the publisher William Dugdale, who asked him to excise the majority of non-erotic passages. This information is contained in Campbell's letter to Ashbee, dated 21 January 1877, in the possession of Patrick J. Kearney, who believes it is authentic (Kearney 2008, n.p.). The text is consistent with the information provided by Ashbee in the Index and, more importantly, Campbell's intervention in the original manuscript would explain the brusque narrative turns of some passages in The Ups and Downs, such as the reference to the protagonist's life as a coach driver: ‘The adventures of that part of my life alone would form a volume, but as this proposes to be an erotic autobiography, I abstain’ (Sellon 1996, 100–101; emphasis added).

8 As Starobinski notes about the genre of autobiography: ‘No matter how doubtful the facts related, the text will  …  present an “authentic” image of the man who “held the pen”’ (1980, 75). A similar observation is made by Rosenman about My Secret Life: ‘no matter what its historical status, the text is an invaluable record of the fantasies produced by heterosexual masculinity’ (2003, 170).

9 There are exceptions to this general tendency: topographical and historical references are present in a larger measure, for instance, in the fin-de-siècle gay novels The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) and Teleny (1893) where the urban setting plays an important role. See Cook (2003, 18–22).

10 Sellon played ‘the part of Laura in Love, Law and Physic’ ([1867] 1996, 74), a farce in two acts by English dramatist James Kenney.

11 On the language of Victorian pornography, see Sigel (2000) and Virdis (2015). This weaving together of base language and a high register is a stylistic peculiarity of The Ups and Downs that characterizes Sellon's pornographic subversion of the ‘men of letters autobiography’.

12 This of course blatantly contradicts Marcus' definition of pornotopia as a textual space where ‘women are immortal’ (1966, 270), and where time, space and social reality are irrelevant. I use the term ‘pornotopia’ throughout this article by re-signifying it in contrast with Marcus' definition: whereas Marcus used it to describe pornographic fiction as a mere ‘utopian fantasy’, a mechanistic textual operation aimed at the erotic stimulation of the reader, devoid of social and political significance and incapable of any true subversive purpose or effect, I appropriate the term to describe pornography's potential for both formal experimentation and social critique – as Sellon's porno/autobiography exemplifies.

13 For this claim, see Ashbee's (1877) Index, where the poem is also quoted in full. ‘No More!’, first published in 1870, has been reprinted in The Ups and Downs 1996 edition.

14 Parallel readings of Sellon's porno/autobiography and of the anthropological essays he was writing at the same time reveal fascinating connections and would provide an interesting terrain for future analysis.