Birchgrove Press brings together in one volume two books representing the developing corpus of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English sexual fiction focusing on flagellation: Exhibition of Female Flagellants (c. 1780) and its sequel, Part the Second of the Exhibition of Female Flagellants (c. 1785). Collections of amusing anecdotes about the pleasures of flogging, these novellas focus on birching in aristocratic domestic and scholastic contexts, emphasise the display of blood, and extol the aphrodisiacal qualities of flowers. The author or authors are not known. Part one, Exhibition of Female Flagellants was first published about 1780, possibly by George Peacock in 1777. Part two, Part the Second of the Exhibition of Female Flagellants, was first published about 1785, probably also by George Peacock. Both books were reprinted in the early nineteenth century and by John Camden Hotten in 1872. This Birchgrove Press edition, which is based on Hotten's reprints, includes an Appendix with bibliographic details excerpted from Pisanus Fraxi's [Henry Spencer Ashbee's] Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877). Ashbee's record provides a fascinating overview of both books' publishing history.

This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates--that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution--Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism, The Whore's Story tracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.

During the period 1900-1940 novels and poems in the UK and US were subject to strict forms of censorship and control because of their representation of sex and sexuality. At the same time, however, writers were more interested than ever before in writing about sex and excrement, incorporating obscene slang words into literary texts, and exploring previously uncharted elements of the modern psyche. This book explores the far-reaching literary, legal and philosophical consequences of this historical conflict between law and literature. Alongside the famous prosecutions of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and James Joyce's Ulysses huge numbers of novels and poems were altered by publishers and printers because of concerns about prosecution. Far from curtailing the writing of obscenity, however, censorship seemed to stimulate writers to explore it further. During the period covered by this book novels and poems became more experimentally obscene, and writers were intensely interested in discussing the author's rights to free speech, the nature of obscenity and the proper parameters of literature. Literature, seen as a dangerous form of corruption by some, was identified with sexual liberation by others. While legislators tried to protect UK and US borders from obscene literature, modernist publishers and writers gravitated abroad, a development that prompted writers to defend the international rights of banned authors and books. While the period 1900-1940 was one of the most heavily policed in the history of literature, it was also the time when the parameters of literature opened up and writers seriously questioned the rights of nation states to control the production and dissemination of literature.

This highly acclaimed study draws on information from spy reports and contemporary literature to look at English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government "Terror" of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. The book traces for the first time the history of theunderground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between "high" and "low" culture, McCalman illuminates the darker, more populist sides of Romanticism. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries ofpopular politics and culture by exploring a political underworld connected with poverty, crime, prophetic religion, and literary culture.

Mighty Lewd Books describes the emergence of a new home-grown English pornography. Through the examination of over 500 pieces of British erotica, this book looks at sex as seen in erotic culture, religion and medicine throughout the long eighteenth-century, and provides a radical new approach to the study of sexuality.

Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation's great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of fancy publishers, flash editors, and racy novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America's daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards. In nineteenth-century New York, the business of erotic publishing and legal attacks on obscenity developed in tandem, with each activity shaping and even promoting the pursuit of the other. Obscenity prohibitions, rather than curbing salacious publications, inspired innovative new styles of forbidden literature--such as works highlighting expressions of passion and pleasure by middle-class American women. Obscenity prosecutions also spurred purveyors of lewd materials to devise novel schemes to evade local censorship by advertising and distributing their products through the mail. This subterfuge in turn triggered far-reaching transformations in strategies for policing obscenity. Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. By revealing the paradoxes that characterized early efforts to suppress sexual expression in the name of morality, she suggests relevant lessons for our own day.

In this final volume of the 1877 work that established him as England's leading authority on pornography, Henry Spencer Ashbee describes scores of "curious, uncommon and erotic books" that were banned or otherwise prohibited from legitimate sale during the Victorian era. Included in this volume are such "gentlemen only" titles as Intrigues and Confessions of a Ballet Girl, The Pleasures of Kissing and Being Kissed, and the infamous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. This catalog of mostly forgotten works is an invaluable-and highly entertaining-resource for bibliophiles, students of erotica, and collectors of Victoriana. British book collector, travel writer, and bibliographer HENRY SPENCER ASHBEE (1834-1900), aka Pisanus Fraxi, is thought by some to have authored the notorious Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life.