A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The stories in The Pearl are wish-fulfilment fantasies, with no relation to reality. They can also be
seen as reaction to Victorian prudery. Victorian girls were expected to blush at the least suggestion
of indelicacy; so most of the young ladies in The Pearl are an impossible mixture of demure
schoolgirl and nymphomaniac.
Her face was crimson to the roots of her hair, as her hand grasped
my tool, and her eyes seemed to start with terror at the sudden
apparition of Mr John Thomas; so that, taking advantage of her
speechless confusion, my own hand, slipping under her clothes, soon
had possession of her mount, and, in spite of the nervous contraction
of her thighs, the forefinger searched out the virgin clitoris. ‘Oh, oh,
oh! Walter don’t! what are you about...’
A moment later she is gasping:
‘Oh, Walter, I’m so afraid; and yet - oh yet, dearest, if I must die I
must taste the sweets of love, this forbidden fruit...’ She lay before
me in a delightful state of anticipation, her beautiful face all
blushes of shame.
And so the conquest is completed. And in story after story, for the next eighteen issues, the same
kind of thing happened, varied with floggings and mixed orgies. It seems probable that the
magazine expired because the writers could think of nothing new to say.
Spencer Ashbee, the author of the Index of Prohibited Books, is also suspected of having written
the enormous sexual autobiography My Secret Life, published in eleven volumes in Amsterdam
between 1888 and about 1892. It reveals a mind totally obsessed by sex from a very early age. As a
small boy, ‘Walter’ seizes an opportunity to look at his baby sister’s genitals, hides behind
lavatories to watch elder sisters urinate, and creeps into the bedroom of female cousins on a hot
night to spy on their nakedness. While still a schoolboy he seduces a maidservant, then the cook.
He and his cousin Fred hide in a basement to peer up women’s skirts through a grille in the
pavement. This enormous work - of over four thousand pages - gives the impression that ‘Walter’
thought about sex for every waking moment of his life. He obviously found it all so delicious and
exciting that he settled down to describing it in detail when he was in his early thirties.
It is instructive to compare My Secret Life with the memoirs of Casanova, written a century earlier.
Casanova loved sex; but he also loved travel (preferably in his own carriage), mixing in society,
eating good food and conversing with intellectuals (such as Voltaire and Rousseau). He loved
attractive women because they were essential to his picture of himself as the complete man of the
world; but his attitude towards them was as straightforward as that of a hungry man towards a good
dinner. By contrast, Walter is apparently interested in very little besides sex, and his attitude
towards it is that of a thief. Every woman has a secret, which he longs to steal. They can be fat or
thin, tall or short, dark or fair; he still longs to know the exact appearance of their genital organs.
As a lover, he has no finesse; his idea of seduction is ‘entreating her to let me see and feel her cunt,
using all the persuasion and all the bawdy talk I could.’ ‘I watched my opportunities; my
conversation... was one repetition of lustful wants and prayers; I used to pull my prick out, beg her
to see and feel it.’ And once he has achieved his objective, he needs to tell himself he has achieved
it. ‘I put my hand down and felt around. What rapture to feel my machine buried! nothing but the
balls to be touched, and her cunt hair wetted with my sperm, mingling and clinging to mine; in
another minute nature urged a crisis, and I spent in a virgin cunt, my prick virgin also. Thus ended