‘The Nature of English Erotic Fiction is Changed:’ The filthy and crapulous Romance of Lust
The Cover of an Edition of Romance of Lust
Last week, we discussed the Victorian gentleman Henry Spencer Ashbee and his various Indexes, which essentially serve as the best surviving record of nineteenth century pornographic novels in all of their great variety and obscenity. One of the most fascinating and ridiculous is the Romance of Lust, which was published anonymously by a publisher named William Lazenby in four volumes between 1873 and 1876. In the third volume of his Index Ashbee asserts it was largely written by William Simpson Potter, a minor 19th century novelist. He also notes that other authors helped: the book was “not the product of a single pen, but consists of several tales, ‘orient pearls at random strung,’ woven into a connected narrative by a gentleman, perfectly well known to the present generation of literary eccentrics and collectors.” He describes Potter as a “shrewd business man, the ardent collector, and the enthusiastic traveler … [with] a patriarchal, almost reverent appearance.” Altogether, Ashbee comments that The Romance of Lust “though no masterpiece of composition” is better-written than most of its competition. But, almost with a frown, Ashbee says that it contains scenes
not surpassed by the most libidinous chapters of [Sade’s] Justine. [which we discussed here]. The episodes, however, are frequently most improbable, sometimes impossible, and are as a rule too filthy and crapulous. No attempt is made to moderate the language, but the grossest words are invariably employed.
A brief survey of the work, which maunders through 300-plus dense pages of description, would give this impression as well. So let us begin!
Please note that some of the text/images below the fold are NSFW (not safe for work).
The Romance is a blow-by-blow account of the amorous career of a boy (and then a man) named Charles, told from his point of view. He begins his tale in his fifteenth year, and states that along with his two younger sisters, “Mamma treated us all as children, and was blind to the fact that I was no longer what I had been … my passions were awakening.” In a revealing detail about how different children were raised, and how beds were shared in a earlier time, as we’ve discussed here and here, Charles notes that
My sisters and I all slept in the same room. They together in one bed, I alone in another. When no one was present, we had often mutually examined the different formations of our sexes. We had discovered that mutual handlings gave a certain amount of pleasing sensation; and, latterly, my eldest sister had discovered that the hooding and unhooding of my doodle, as she called it, instantly caused it to swell up and stiffen as hard as a piece of wood. My feeling of her little pinky slit gave rise in her to nice sensations, but on the slightest attempt to insert even my finger, the pain was too great. We had made so little progress in the attouchements that not the slightest inkling of what could be done in that way dawned upon us.
The death of his father and the increasing illness of his mother causes her to hire a governess named Evelyn to educate and discipline Charles and his two sisters, Mary and Eliza. The mother describes the children to Evelyn as “somewhat spoiled, and unruly; but there is a horse, and Susan will make you excellent birch rods whenever you require them. If you spare their bottoms when they deserve whipping, you will seriously offend me.” This, as they say, is pretty blatant foreshadowing, and it is not too long afterwards that we have our first blatantly sexual scene, one of flagellation. Charles’ sister Mary refuses to do something that Evelyn commanded, and as a result she is placed on ‘the horse,’ which was a device used to administer corporal punishment. Charles’ description of it reads quite like a sex device from a BDSM catalog:
Corporal Punishment used in a School
[Evelyn] placed [Mary] on it, held her firmly with one hand while she put the noose round her with the other, which, when drawn, secured her body; other nooses secured each ankle to rings in the floor, keeping her legs apart by the projection of the horse, and also forcing the knees to bend a little, by which the most complete exposure of the bottom, and, in fact, of all her private parts too, was obtained. . . The rod whistled through the air and fell with a cruel cut on poor Mary’s plump little bottom. The flesh quivered again, and Mary, who had resolved not to cry, flushed in her face, and bit the damask with which the horse was covered. . . Cut succeeded cut, yell succeeded yell —until the rod was worn to a stump, and poor Mary’s bottom was one mass of weals and red as raw beef. It was fearful to see, and yet such is our nature that to see it was, at the same time, exciting.
Woman at her Toilet, Charles watching Ms Evelyn
Inadvertently, for a teenage boy, Charles quickly becomes infatuated with Evelyn and watches her undressing every night in the bedroom he shared with her and his sisters. Being ‘so innocent,’ he of course never thinks of “applying [his] fingers for relief,” and remains innocent. Innocent, at least for a few more pages (and two months later) when his mother is visited by a friend, Mr. B (who seems to have the most reoccurring name in English erotica, he pops up in Pamela, Fanny Hill, and even Justine), and his wife. One night, when trying to get something from a closet, he hears them coming and hides, peeking through a crack in the door:
[Mr. B] got up, and lifted her on the edge of the bed, threw her back, and taking her legs under his arms, exposed everything to my view. She had not so much hair on her mount of Venus as Miss Evelyn, but her slit showed more pouting lips, and appeared more open. Judge of my excitement when I saw Mr. Benson unbutton his trousers and pull out an immense cock. Oh, dear, how large it looked; it almost frightened me. With his fingers he placed the head between the lips of Mrs. Benson’s sheath, and then letting go his hold, and placing both arms so as to support her legs, he pushed it all right into her to the hilt at once. I was thunderstruck that Mrs. Benson did not shriek with agony, it did seem such a large thing to thrust right into her belly. However, far from screaming with pain, she appeared to enjoy it.
A few days later, Mr. B is forced to run away on business, and his wife, Mrs. Benson, who apparently cannot last more than a day or so without getting off, ropes Charles into visiting her room, and then in one long-winded and glorious night, “initiat[es Charles] into all the rites of Venus… the ne plus ultra [highest peak] of erotic pleasure.” The next fifty pages describe, in endless details all of the rites Mrs. Benson initiates him in.
It was a long bout indeed, prolonged by Mrs. Benson’s instructions, and she enjoyed it thoroughly, encouraged me by every endearing epithet, and by the most voluptuous manoeuvres. I was quite beside myself. The consciousness that I was thrusting my most private part into that part of a lady’s person which is regarded with such sacred delicacy caused me to experience the most enraptured pleasure. Maddened by the intensity of my feeling I at length quickened my pace. My charming companion did the same, and we together yielded down a most copious and delicious discharge.
As is quite common in earlier pornographic novels, such as Luisa Sigea or The School of Venus, Mrs. Benson also educates (initiates) Charles into anatomy and biology: “My dear Charles, do you see that little projection at the upper part of my quim, that is my clitoris, and is the site of the most exquisite sensations… you will find as you titillate it with your tongue or suck it, that it will become harder and more projecting,” and cautions him to be careful about how many times in a day he has sex: “I must consider your health. You have already done more than your age warrants, and you must rise and go to your bed to recover, by a sound sleep, your strength.”
Furthermore, she also educates him on how to manage his affairs, which is perhaps the only code of morals that is followed throughout the book. She lectures that he must “show great discretion and ready wit … [for] discretion is the trump card of success” and most importantly, he must let all his lovers “for some time imagine that each possesses you for the first time… you must enact the part of an ignoramus seeking for instruction.”
There, darling, that will do for the moment… I hope, my dear Charlie, that under my auspices you will become a model lover—your aptitude has already proved in several ways. First and best, with all the appearance of a boy, you are quite a man, and even superior to many. You have already shown great discretion and ready wit, and there is no reason to fear that you will become a general favourite with our sex, who soon find out who is discreet and who is otherwise—discretion is the trump card of success with us. Alas! few of your sex understand this… I have one piece of advice to give you as to your conduct to newer lovers: let them all for some time imagine that each possesses you for the first time. First of all, it doubles their satisfaction, and so increases your pleasure.
Shortly thereafter, Charles “ felt my opportunity was at hand to initiate my darling sister into the delightful mysteries that I had just been myself instructed in,” and proceeds to instruct his older sister Mary in all “all those are in the way of kissing and toying with your charming little Fanny,” and shortly thereafter his younger sister Eliza, commenting that “A reflection struck me that it would be necessary to initiate my sister Eliza in our secrets, and although she might be too young for the complete insertion of my increasingly large cock, I might gamahuche her while fucking Mary, and give her intense pleasure. In this way we could retire without difficulty to spots where we should be quite in safety, and even when such was not the case, we could employ Eliza as a watch, to give us early notice of any one approaching. It will be seen that this idea was afterwards most successfully carried out to the immense increase of my pleasure.”
There are some Sadean comments from the author as a result of this: Thus delightfully ended the first lesson in love taught to my sister, and such was my first triumph over a maidenhead, double enhanced by the idea of the close ties of parentage between us. In after-life, I have always found the nearer we are related, the more this idea of incest stimulates our passions and stiffens our pricks, so that if even we be in the wane of life, fresh vigour is imparted by reason of the very fact of our evasion of conventional laws.
The rest of the book is, quite simply, an exercise in increasing bawdiness, endless sex, and trampling of all societal boundaries. The second volume includes his orgies with his sisters and an older gentleman named James MacCallum, and the siblings’ seduction of their new governess, Miss Frankland. The end of the second volume and the beginning of the third concerns Charles’ ‘seduction’ by his aunt and uncle, and then the seduction of an extremely young village boy named Dale by him and his uncle. The fourth book reaches the height of profligacy and hedonism when all of the parties come together in a tumult:
Orgy from de Sades Juliette
myself in my aunt’s cunt, which incest stimulated uncle to a stand, and he took to his wife’s arse while her nephew incestuously fucked her cunt. The Count took to the delicious and most exciting tight cunt of the Dale, while her son shoved his prick into his mother’s arse, to her unspeakable satisfaction. Ellen and the Frankland amused themselves with tribadic extravagances.
And so on. The fourth volume comes to a close with a description of the children of the assorted couples, and how they too were “initiated in all love’s delicious mysteries by their respective parents.” With a final commentary by Charles, the book ends: “we are thus a happy family, bound by the strong ties of a double incestuous lust. It is necessary to have these loved objects to fall back upon, for alas! All the earlier partakers of my prick are dead and gone.”
All concerned, The Romance of Lust manages to cover sexual education, masturbation, heterosexual sex, lesbianism, male homosexuality, flagellation anal sex, double penetration, sexuality, incest, pedophilia, and coprophilia on a the short list. Unlike the stories that this essay began with, there is almost no dialogue, and very little plot that is not related to sex or serving as a vehicle, segue, or bridge to another sexual encounter. Nor is there really an effort at philosophizing or any sort of moral struggle. Lisa Sigel has, perhaps, attempted to redeem the work by arguing that the text is concerned with chronicling “a child’s growth to adulthood through his sexual awakening and activities …the [book] explains, expands, and reinforces the [act of penetration] …penetration becomes the essence of sexual activity.” Although this is true, it seems that the text provides just as many examples of ‘gamahuching,’ or oral sex, as the author calls it, and all other forms of sex abound as well. However, Siegel is right when she notes that “all penetration is good:” the novel presents all sex, sexual act, and sexualities in a positive, enthusiastic manner.
The reality of the issue, however, was that Holywell Street literature had matured into something resembling modern pornography in all but name—and as the word became increasingly popular, erotic literature simply came to fall under the umbrella of ‘pornography.’
Ashbee, perhaps the scholar emeritus of the field, also noted this in the introduction to his final (and most modern) Index:
We cannot fail to perceive that while in the former books [like Fanny Hill] the characters, scenes, and the incidents are natural, and the language not unnecessarily gross, those in the latter are false, while the words and expression employed are of the most filthy description. CLELAND’s characters—Fanny Hill, the coxcomb, the bawds, and the debauchees with whom they mix, are taken from human nature and do only what they could and would have done under the very natural circumstances in which they are placed; whereas the persons in the latter works are the creations of a disordered brain, quite unreal, and what they enact is either improbable or impossible. Thus, the nature of English erotic fiction is changed.
Indeed, Ashbee argues that “immoral and amatory fiction…must unfortunately be acknowledged to contain, cum granum salis, a reflection of the manners and vices of the times—of vices to be avoided, guarded against, reformed… English Erotic Novels, I repeat, are sorry productions.” That language of his—‘vices to be avoided, guarded against, reformed’—sounds suspiciously similar to the SSV’s description of their own goals. In truth, it is likely the best one-sentence summary of their entire project that has been written. “Better were it” Ashbee continues, “that such literature did not exist. I consider it pernicious and hurtful to the immature, but at the same time I hold that, in certain circumstances, its study is necessary, if not beneficial.”
Sources:
[2] The Romance of Lust – Anonymous (apparently it also comes in audiobook format?! scandalous.)
