Notes Chapter 1 The traffic in obscenity 1 John Ashcroft, Remarks, Federal Prosecutors’ Symposium on Obscenity, National Advocacy Center, Columbia, SC (6 June 2002); Report from the Joint Select Committee on Lotteries and Indecent Advertisements (London: Vacher & Sons, 1908). 2 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic, 1964). 3 The earliest legal term for this print crime in Britain was obscenity, and I therefore prefer it to more recent terminology. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2001). 5 Society for the Suppression of Vice (London: S. Gosnell, 1825), 29. 6 Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995); Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT, 1999); Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree eds, New Media, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, MA: MIT 2003); and David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, eds, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 7 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1. 8 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1988), 22, 24. 9 Laurence O’Toole, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1999), 51. 10 Baudrillard, The Ecstasy, 24. 11 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 87. 12 Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128. 13 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912, 1991 (London: Abacus, 2001), 140, 122. 14 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols, trans. Sir Richard Burton (London: Printed by the Kama-Shastra Society, 1885–[6]), vol.10, 251. 15 ‘Is Empire Consistent with Morality?’ Pall Mall Gazette (19 May 1887) 3. 16 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 90. 17 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 18 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); O’Toole, Pornocopia; Frederick S. Lane III, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age (London: Routledge, 2001). 19 Peter Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800–1930: A Bibliographical Study (Hants: Scholar, 1993); Patrick Kearney, The Private Case: An Annotated 173 174 Notes Bibliography of the Private Case Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library (London: Jay Landesman, 1981). 20 Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers; Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, (New York: Zone, 1993). 21 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Lisa Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth- Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Bradford Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For early scholarship on historical obscenity, see Ivan Bloch, Sexual Life in England Past and Present, trans. William H. Forstern (London: Francis Aldor, 1938); Ralph Ginzburg, An Unhurried View of Erotica (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959); David Loth, The Erotic in Literature: A Historical Survey of Pornography as Delightful as it is Indiscreet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961); H. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography (London: Heinemann, 1964); Wayland Young, Eros Denied (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965); Gershon Legman, The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (New York: University Books, 1964); Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969); Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London: Heinemann, 1976); Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (London: Sheldon, 1977); and Wendell Stacey Johnson, Living in Sin: The Victorian Sexual Revolution (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979). For more recent studies on specific aspects of nineteenth-century obscenity, see Peter Webb’s thematic survey of Victorian underground novels in ‘Victorian Erotica’, The Sexual Dimen- sion in Literature, ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision, 1982); Frank A. Hoffman’s study of the underworld in Sherlock Holmes’s novels in ‘The Victorian Sexual Subculture: Some Notes and a Speculation’, The Baker Street Journal, 35:1 (1985) 19–22; Coral Lansbury’s exploration of the connections between medical science, vivisection, and obscenity in The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisec- tion in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Tracy Davis’s discussion of ‘The Actress in Victorian Pornography’, Theatre Journal, 41 (1989) 294–315; William Scheick’s suggestion that H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines functioned as ‘adolescent pornography’ in ‘Adolescent Porno- graphy and Imperialism in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines’, English Literature in Transition, 34:1 (1991) 19–30; John Woodrow Presley’s tenuous discussion of James Joyce’s allusions to The Pearl in ‘ Finnegans Wake, Lady Pokingham, and Victorian Erotic Fantasy’, Journal of Popular Culture, 30:3 (1996) 67–80; Tamar Heller’s study of flagellation in ‘Flagellating Feminine Desire: Lesbians, Old Maids, and New Women in “Miss Coote’s Confession”, a Victorian Porno- graphic Narrative’, Victorian Newsletter, 92 (1997) 9–15; Michael Gamer’s theory of how protean versions of ‘gothic’ and ‘pornographic’ came into existence at the same time in ‘Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic’, PMLA, 114 (1999) 1043–54; and, finally, James Nelson’s examination of Leonard Smithers’s involvement in London’s obscene print culture in Publisher to the Notes 175 Decadents. Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 22 McCalman, Radical Underworld, 235. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 24 Henry Spencer Ashbee [Pisanus Fraxi], Index Librorum Prohibitorum (London: Privately Printed, 1877); Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (London: Privately Printed, 1879); Catena Librorum Tacendorum (London: Privately Printed, 1885). 25 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works: Lord Byron, 7 vols, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93). 26 The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; Supplemental Nights to the Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, 6 vols, trans. Richard F. Burton (London: Printed by the Kama Shastra Society for Private Subscribers Only, 1886–8); The Perfumed Garden of the Sheik Nefzaoui or, The Arab Art of Love (Cosmopoli: For Private Circulation Only, 1886). 27 Oscar Wilde, Salome (London: John Lane, 1894). 28 The history of obscenity has been made possible only by the persistence of collectors and librarians who believe that obscenity has cultural value and is worth preserving and discussing. The British Library houses the largest and most significant collection of European obscenity – the Private Case. It was established as early as 1841 at the British Museum, and collectors and library officials – most notably Henry Spencer Ashbee, E. J. Dingwall, and Charles Reginald Dawes – have enlarged the collection over the years. It is worth noting that Dawes’s unpublished manuscript on nineteenth-century obscenity is housed at the British Library and is a particularly rich source of titles; see P. J. Cross, ‘The Private Case: A History’, The Library of the British Museum, Retrospective Essays on the Depart- ment of Printed Books, ed. P. R. Harris (London: The British Library, 1991), 203, 209, 214, 219; and Charles Reginald Dawes, A Study of Erotic Literature in England, Considered with Especial Reference to Social Life (1943, unpublished). Other major collections of European and American obscenity are housed at The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, The Bodleian Library in Oxford, and The Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. For more bibliographical information about these collec- tions, see Mendes, Clandestine Erotic Fiction; Sigel, Governing Pleasures; and Martha Cornog, ed., Libraries, Erotica, Pornography (Phoenix: Oryx, 1991). For biblio- graphies on historical obscenity, see Ashbee’s three annotated bibliographies, published clandestinely under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Centuria Librorum Absconditorum, and Catena Librorum Tacendorum. Also see William Laird Clowes’s (writing as Speculator Morum), Bibliotheca Arcana Seu Catalogus Librorum Penetralium Being Brief notices of books