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January 15, 2019

139-Year-Old Copy Of ‘Porn’ Novel Banned For 220 Years Surfaces

A rare copy of Britain’s most notorious porn novel has surfaced after an expert in rare books came across the 139-year-old edition of Fanny Hill by chance while “cataloging a box of cigarette cards,” according to a report in The Daily Mail. Now, the copy of the book, which for more than two centuries was one of the world’s most widely banned works of literature, will go on sale at auction January 22 in England. Originally titled Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by its author, John Cleland, who wrote the book as he sat in a London debtors prison in 1748, the book was banned in Britain a year later for its—relative to its era—frank and explicit descriptions of sexual acts and intimate body parts. In the United Kingdom, the ban remained in place through the 1960s, finally being lifted when that decade wrapped up. "They called it the Swinging ‘60s but clearly erotic literature like this was viewed as too obscene to be seen by the masses half a century ago,” said John Spencer, the antiquarian books expert who discovered the 1880 copy of Fanny Hill said, as quoted by the BBC. “These days, after the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey, it's probably viewed as rather tame. It demonstrates just how much times have changed." In fact, Singapore finally lifted its ban on Fanny Hill in 2015.   Written as series of letters by a wealthy Englishwoman, the narrator tells the story of her “scandalous” youth when as a naive country girl from England’s north, she moved to London and became a prostitute, describing her sexual adventures in painstaking detail. But Cleland’s prose has long been noteworthy for its complete lack of “dirty” words to describe sex acts, forgoing even such clinical terms as “penis” or “vagina.” Instead, the fictional “woman of pleasure” in the novel tells her story using extravagant, inventive and often flowery metaphors, describing her breasts, for example, as “two hard, firm, rising hillocks,” and a woman’s posterior as “luxurious tracts of animated snow that splendidly filled the eye, till it was commanded by the parting or separation of those exquisitely white cliffs.” Male sex organs received similar treatment, with one character’s penis described as a “mighty machine,” and a scrotum as  “that storebag of nature’s prime sweets, which is so pleasingly attached to its conduit pipe from which we receive them.” “Cleland, a fervid, unhinged writer, conceived of Fanny as a hyperactive observer of bodies,” wrote the literary journal The Paris Review, in a recent evaluation of the novel. “No detail is too insignificant to mention, especially where it pertains to a body that’s prone, aroused, or drowsily available.” Since the ban on the book was lifted in the U.K. four decade ago, Fanny Hill has come to be considered a literary classic of sorts, frequently taught in university English courses. But not everyone sees it that way. “If anyone tries to tell you that John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a highbrow literary classic, don’t believe them,” said a recent essay on the novel in the literary journal Ploughshares. “This 18th-century novel, one of the first major English-language pornographic novels, is pure smut. There’s minimal time spent between sex scenes, which feel increasingly repetitive as the book goes on: difficulty of initial penetration, check. Quickening toward an explosive mutual climax, check. An immediate round two: check and check.” Spencer said that the copy of Fanny Hill he recently discovered also contained a newspaper clipping from the 1960s, giving an account of a police raid that seized 20,000 copies of the “pornographic” book from a publisher who dared to defy the ban on Fanny Hill. Photo By Wikimedia Commons Public Domain 

 
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