| Review of: |
Eighteenth-Century British Erotica edited by Chris Mounsey, Rictor Norton
Pickering & Chatto, London, 2002
£450 |
| Reviewed By: |
Michael T. Davis |
| Reviewed in: |
Australian Journal of Politics and History |
| Date accepted online: |
11/01/2005 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 50, Issue 3, Pages 440-468 |
Book Reviews
To recommend the reading of erotica - or, as it may be referred to, pornography - may not be a habit I generally make; however Eighteenth-Century British Erotica is an exception to that rule. At first thought erotica may not be the essence of a serious scholastic exercise. Indeed, it may be facetiously argued that the subject embraces less work and more play. But erotica has progressively emerged as a genre of serious academic pursuit. Scholars have in recent times taken libertine literature and its milieu from the realms of the forbidden and dark corners of the academy to new and enlightened heights. Iain McCalman, for instance, in his study of the Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (1988), unravelled the clandestine world of radical politics to reveal its connection with the shadowy environs of the Grub Street pornographers. More recently, in Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England 1815-1914, Lisa Sigel shows how the production and consumption of erotica offered people an avenue for understanding issues of politics, gender, race and class. Eighteenth-Century British Erotica brings together a collection of texts that were produced prior to the periods covered by the McCalman and Sigel studies, but revisits the Grub Street realm to provide the reader with a far-reaching, thought-provoking and most intriguing body of literature. In so far as it is a collection of "erotic" writings the works presented by the editors could be described as bawdy; but they are not, as the editors point out, "quite erotic in the modern sense of stimulating the sexual arousal of the reader" (p. xvii). The writers were producing for their contemporaries works that were more a source of "jovial pleasure and merry conviviality" (p. xvii) than an actual sexual aid, so what we have is rather timid, at least by modern standards. While explicitness is just about absent from these works or at least covered by insinuation, there is no shortage of views on sex, sexuality and sexual relations. The texts can be viewed as a public counter-discourse of the sexual freethinking world, reacting to the new moral turn of the eighteenth century, which found expression in what the editors call the "hellfire rhetoric" (p. xix) of groups likes the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Through these texts we gain a valuable insight into the social and cultural norms of British society during the eighteenth century and are able to gauge contemporary perceptions of gender, sex and the "sexual trade". The collection brings together fifty texts covering broadly the period of the eighteenth century, though the majority of the works date from the early to mid eighteenth century. The editors offer informative headnotes and editorial notes to each work and have done a good job in dealing with sometimes difficult texts: "Printing errors in every other line suggest either dyslexic compositors or, more likely, the speed with which the compositors worked". The facsimile reproductions are clear and clean, which has become a trademark of the publisher. My only quibble is that there appears to be no logical or stated reason for the order in which the texts have been placed; a strict chronological order may have been more useful. In all, however, this is a splendid collection and it has been added to by the recent publication of a second instalment of five volumes. Librarians should seriously consider a purchase order for both sets.
