Mighty Lewd Books : The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England

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Summary: An Academic Book On Lewd Books
Review: Two hundred years from now, some academic will publish an analysis of pornography on the inchoate internet; how it reflected our medical and social views, how it changed our views of the sexes, how it favored some activities over others, and so on. Everyone knows that humans have enjoyed porn for about as long as they have enjoyed sex, but probably the age of the internet is going to make things different. In eighteenth century Britain, people had to put up with the print media, but the eighteenth century was a time of rapid change, with advances in medicine, science, and exploration. Many of these were reflected in the erotic works of the time, and such works have now been analyzed in _Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth Century England_ (Palgrave Macmillan) by Julie Peakman. Peakman, who is a historian of sex, has gone through scads of original material from the time; her extensive bibliography, for instance, has four pages of works attributed to that prolific author, Anonymous. Her title comes from a diary entry of Pepys, in which he confesses to reading a little of "... a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world." Peakman's own book is far from lewd; it is a serious academic treatise, and as for villainy, most people who take an interest in this subject are probably not going to be as self-servingly judgmental as Pepys was. There is necessarily some low humor in some of the works covered, the publishers were often a furtive lot whom society wished to castigate, and there are prejudices we now think are unfashionable; but this is far from a catalogue of villainies. Peakman has written in an unjudgmental and detached tone throughout, giving a valuable view of some of the foundations of modern pornography.

Italy had taken the lead in producing erotic books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then France took over as a center of pornography and developed a graphic style. The biggest debt English pornography owed to the French was anti-Catholicism. The French version had frequent attacks on the cloistering of nuns or the secrecy of the confessional; such attacks would have been in accord with the British hostility to Catholics due to political distrust, popular fear, and theological disagreement. Corruption in the Catholic church was a popular topic, and so tales of vice within nunneries, or of priests seducing nuns or parishioners, were popular not just as sexual entertainment, but as propaganda. The English detested the Catholic advocacy of flagellation as a penance. With the antagonism to the Catholic Church, English society took to the stories from France having to do with priests, monks, and nuns flagellating each other for sexual rather than sacred reasons. Flagellation, and later other sadomasochistic play, became particularly associated with the English; forty years ago when coyness used to be needed in the personals ads, "English Art" was taken to mean S & M. Peakman shows how pornography incorporated ideas of the time that we should usually not at all regard as erotic, like botany, garden planning, and electrical research.

Peakman makes the useful finding that with literacy increasing, it was not just the upper classes that enjoyed pornography, as might be concluded from the beloved leather-bound limited copies that have come to us from the libraries of the rich. Chapbooks and broadsheets could be bought and enjoyed by the working class. Women had access to such works; prostitutes would keep them in stock. London was, of course, a center for printing and for porn, but there were thousands of itinerant hawkers who would carry pornographic productions to the provinces. Peakman also shows how pornography reflected (and thereby influenced) sexual attitudes; porn before the eighteenth century tended to have men and women equally active and eager for satisfaction, but especially with the anti-Catholic porn, women were put in submissive or victim roles. This is a serious work for those with serious interest in the theme, but given the rollicking nature of that theme, there is reason to smile frequently. After all, in what other bibliography will you find such works as _A Flaming Whip for Lechery or the Whoremonger's Speculum_, _The Birchen Banquet, Or Curious and original Anecdotes of Ladies fond of Administering the Birch Discipline_, or _A Full and True Account of a Dreaded Fire that Lately Broke out in the Pope's Breeches_?