A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the more there was a sense of taboo, the more people found to blush about. Women became
embarrassed if they had to refer to a chest of drawers; table and piano legs were swathed in frills
because a naked leg - even of wood - might invoke impure thoughts. By the late Victorian age,
even ‘knickers’ had acquired a faint air of naughtiness, and the frills on table-legs - which
suggested long knickers - were replaced by long table cloths. Prudery induced a kind of galloping
inflation in euphemisms.
By the law of reverse effort, the taboos made sex seem wicked and attractive, with the result that
there was suddenly a market for ‘forbidden’ books. On the Continent, there had always been a brisk
trade in what might be called ‘anti-clerical pornography’ - books about priests who seduce their
penitents and monks who indulge in sodomy or bestiality. These now began to be imported into
England, together with some of the classic works of outstanding sexual frankness - Boccaccio,
Margaret of Navarre, Aretino, Casanova. But by 1830, a new tone had begun to creep into the
sexual literature. It can be seen in a work called The Ladies’ Tell-Tale, an undisguised imitation of
The Decameron, containing various descriptions of seduction; the opening story, ‘Little Miss
Curious’, tells of an eleven-year-old girl who watches the butler masturbate through a crack in his
bedroom door, and who finally allows - indeed, encourages - him to seduce her. Here we can sense
the influence of de Sade, with his obsession with ‘the forbidden’. It is no longer a matter of
straightforward couplings, as in Fanny Hill, but of peeping through doors, surreptitious fingerings,
unlikely accidents that provide the excuses for intimacy (the girl loses her virginity by falling on a
stick when chasing a butterfly). The influence of de Sade is also apparent in The Lustful Turk
(published in 1828) about two middle-class English girls who are captured by Moorish pirates and
deflowered in the Dey’s harem by the masterful Turk. The emphasis is all on the pain: ‘he
unrelentingly rooted up all the obstacles my virginity offered, tearing and cutting me to pieces, until
the complete junction of our bodies announced that the whole of his dreadful shaft was buried
within me.’
In 1853, an obscenity act enabled the British customs authorities to seize indecent books and
pictures. The result, of course, was an increase in home-produced pornography. By the mid 1870s,
there were enough books with titles like Chastity Deflowered, Peregrine Penis and Female
Flagellants to enable a pornophile named H. Spencer Ashbee to devote a three-volume work -
Index Librorum Prohibitorum - to listing and describing them. In July 1879 there appeared in
London a ‘journal of facetiae and voluptuous reading’ called The Pearl, which continued for a little
over a year. This is no mere attempt to imitate The Decameron, where the sex and humour are
equally balanced, or even The Lustful Turk, with its touches of geographical authenticity; The Pearl
is quite simply intended as an aid to masturbation. One of its models is the tale of ‘Little Miss
Curious’; in fact, a serial called ‘Lady Pokingham, or They All Do It’ contains a lengthy episode in
which a butler allows himself to be persuaded to seduce a twelve-year-old girl:
‘I don’t care if I die in the effort,’ she whispered softly. ‘Never mind
how it hurts me, help all you can, Willie dear, this time,’ as she raised
herself off him again, and he took hold of her buttocks, to lend his
assistance to the grave girl. Clenching her teeth firmly, and shutting
her eyes, she gave another desperate plunge upon William’s spear of
love, the hymen was broken, and she fairly impaled to the roots of his
affair. But it cost her dear, she fell forward in a dead faint, whilst the
trickling blood proved the sanguinary nature of Love’s victory.