The Secrets of Nature Revealed opens with an image of a nude woman. Lurid red drapes frame her body, lit by a candelabra suspended over her head. She is clutching a bedsheet, as if it has just slipped. A book – this book? – lies open on the table beside her. Mirroring her exposed body, its naked pages promise to give secrets away, to unveil, as the subtitle on the facing page suggests, “mysteries of human procreation and copulation.” If you were to turn Secrets of Nature over and look at the back of its cheap paper cover, you would see a list of novels and illustration series that sound at least as racy as this image. Woman of Pleasure. Voluptuarian Cabinet. Wanton Widow. Secrets of Nature, however, is not that kind of fiction. It’s a compilation of chapters from two old manuals on procreation, the anonymous Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684) and an English translation of the French physician Nicholas Venette’s La génération de l’homme, ou tableau de l’amour conjugal (1675), which the publisher is passing off as a translation of the alchemist Michael Scot’s (1175–c. 1232) much older treatise, De physiognomia et de hominis procreatione (Figure 1.1). Together, these remnants from early modern print culture form a manual that describes the structure of the reproductive organs and outlines the ebbs and flows of female desire, offers advice about how to conceive strong children, and suggests remedies for impotence and infertility. Only the frontispiece is original to the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹

Figure 1.1 Frontispiece and title page, The Secrets of Nature Revealed; or, The Mysteries of Human Procreation and Copulation Considered and Explained (London: Printed for the Booksellers in Town and Country, 1832), Cup.365.a.36, BL.

By courtesy of The British Library.

The Secrets of Nature Revealed was first published in the 1830s by the printer, publisher, and bookseller William Dugdale (1800–68).Footnote ² The deist son of a Stockport Quaker, Dugdale moved to London in 1818 to agitate for revolution, where he became known, appropriately enough, as the Radical Quaker. By the time Secrets of Nature was published, he was well on his way to transforming himself into the Ogre of Holywell Street: the most notorious and successful of a number of publishers of sexual material who kept bookshops in Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near London’s Strand. Publishers like Dugdale are best known for their trade in graphically explicit fiction and images, and widely considered Britain’s first career pornographers.Footnote ³ Yet, just as Holywell Street was a more diverse space than its Victorian usage as a synonym for indecency would suggest, home to newspaper offices and pubs, butcher shops and clothiers, Holywell Street publishers sold many works that do not fit neatly into most definitions of pornography. These works include books and pamphlets on reproduction and sexual health, which they hawked throughout the first decades of the Victorian period alongside salacious periodicals, bawdy song and joke books, contraceptive devices, and guides to London’s nightlife.

This book begins at these shops where Secrets of Nature and Woman of Pleasure met. What look like very different modes of sexual representation to us today were less distinct at the dawn of the Victorian period. Just as Secrets of Nature’s frontispiece bore some resemblance to illustrations in Dugdale’s clandestine novels, medical and pornographic literature shared a set of features. Both depicted the sexual body in detailed and sometimes lyrical ways. Secrets of Nature’s descriptions of “that rising hill which is called the Mount of Venus,” the “sinewy and hard body” of the clitoris, the red flesh of the labia could be taken from early nineteenth-century pornography.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, neither genre was reliably erotic. Emergent, experimental, and “temperamentally inconsistent,” pornographic fiction lapsed into narrative digressions, comic spectacles, and grotesque scenes.Footnote ⁵ Just as medical texts put the body’s failures on display, pornography’s heroes endured the ravages of venereal disease, were embarrassed by impotence, and suffered from incontinence.

Disreputable booksellers had a long tradition of drawing attention to medical eroticism, and Holywell Street publishers followed in that tradition. However, like most Victorians, they did not think of medical and pornographic works as identical. Publishers like Dugdale were actively working to refine pornography into a more distinctive, more potent media form, one more concentrated on sexual fantasy.Footnote ⁶ In this context, they recognized and capitalized on the fact that medical works offered something valuable that was harder to come by in fantasy narratives: practical information about the body and its operations that could be readily applied to support active, satisfying sex lives. While tracing how Holywell Street publishers built a nationwide trade in sexual material, this chapter shows how they brought the medical and the erotic into conversation in new ways inspired by their roots in radical politics. By employing strategic editorial techniques and suggestive advertising, Holywell Street publishers encouraged Victorian readers to use even the most dated and most moralizing medical works according to a vision for modern life adapted from the libertine fictions of revolutionary France: one in which men and women educated themselves about the body and its failures, and used their knowledge to embrace the pleasures of the flesh.

The Holywell Street trade emerged in a changing print world, one in which new printing and paper-making technologies, falling taxes on advertising, and expanding press and postal infrastructures fostered the rapid growth of trade in cheap medical works. Publishers like Dugdale were fixtures in this trade through the mid-nineteenth century, and probably the most significant source of practical works on contraceptive techniques. Yet, their traffic in medical works has scarcely attracted scholarly notice. I begin with an account of their work partly to draw attention to a kind of business that uniquely interpolated Victorian readers of works on sexual matters as savvy, street-smart agents: interested in sexual pleasure, justifiably eager to take control of their reproductive lives, and, like Holywell Street publishers themselves, perfectly equipped to take what was useful from a rag-bag of printed knowledge and leave what was not behind.

Beginning with the Holywell Street trade also helps introduce historical developments and perspectives that are crucial to understanding the larger story that this book has to tell. By tracing the trade’s development, we can witness the rapid expansion of a brash traffic in sexual material that brought the medical and the erotic into conversation on an unprecedented commercial scale. The eclectic catalogues that Holywell Street publishers developed and the applications of medical material that they drew attention to would galvanize debate about the boundaries of obscenity, and set in motion many events examined in this book. The history of the Holywell Street trade also offers a particularly concrete illustration of the Victorian publishing industry’s reliance on old content, and the extent to which authors and publishers relied on context to steer interpretation in the directions they wanted. Although they were sometimes marketed as such, the medical works that Holywell Street publishers sold were not usually rare or novel works. Many could be found in bookshops and bookstalls all over the country. What made Holywell Street publishers’ trade in medical material distinctive was how they framed it.

Medical Eroticism at the Birth of the Pornography Trade

Pornography’s emergence as a distinct genre and the development of an industry focused on its distribution were intertwined processes. From the early modern period, a dispersed traffic in a variety of genres that depicted sex with varying degrees of explicitness gradually crystallized into a more concentrated trade in a more discrete range of material increasingly oriented around graphic depictions of sexual acts.Footnote ⁷ Radical politics and libertine philosophy played crucial roles in this history. The revolutionary foment of eighteenth-century France, in which philosophes used sexual allegation to undermine the monarchy and the Church, gave birth to works now considered landmarks in the genre’s development – most famously, the writings of the Marquis de Sade. In Britain, early nineteenth-century radical print culture laid the groundwork for the Holywell Street trade, a key precursor to the modern pornography industry.

English Republican agitators famously used the humour and shock-value of smut to expose the hypocrisies of the clergy and aristocracy, press for their abolishment, and push for the expansion of the franchise.Footnote ⁸ For some of these agitators, though, obscene expression was more than just an arresting tool for critique: it was a revolt against blinkered sexual ideologies in its own right. Influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of revolutionary France, radical pressmen like Dugdale, William Benbow, and George Cannon advocated a class-conscious brand of libertinism that collapsed political, intellectual, and sexual freedom. Sexual desire, they maintained, was a “secret spring” implanted in man by Nature. By “yielding to the dictates of love, and in performing its joyous rites,” they rejected the strictures of Christian morality in favour of a “religion of NATURE” that enabled piety without hypocrisy, “real instead of pretended inspiration,” harmony instead of “wars, and jars, and brawls, and strife.”Footnote ⁹ Publications from French and older English libertine traditions flowed from their presses alongside more straightforwardly revolutionary works.Footnote ¹⁰

Other agitators rejected revolutionary libertinism but agreed that political change and sexual freedom went hand in hand. Inspired by the economic arguments of Thomas Robert Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) predicted cataclysmic population growth, the social reformer Francis Place embraced contraception as the answer to some of Britain’s most pressing political problems.Footnote ¹¹ Place considered Malthus’s solution to overpopulation – sexual abstinence – unrealistic, but he thought that in working-class hands, contraception could be transformative. As well as alleviating the economic pressures of population growth, knowledge of the practice could enable working people to force wage rises and end child labour. By 1823, Place was distributing pamphlets on contraceptive techniques in London’s East End, which were quickly reprinted in radical periodicals.Footnote ¹² In 1825, the printer and publisher Richard Carlile issued essays of his own in his radical periodical the Republican, which wove practical instruction on contraceptive techniques together with an argument for a sexually egalitarian society in which sex education was taken seriously, premarital sex was not looked down on, and women’s pleasure was valued as much as men’s. A stand-alone pamphlet, Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love?, followed in 1826.Footnote ¹³

By the time Carlile published Every Woman’s Book, radicalism was in crisis. The passage of the Six Acts in 1819 and the election of a suppressive Tory government the following year had made political publishing and demonstrating dangerous. Public appetite for revolution was also on the decline. Radical pressmen were struggling to sell their stock, and the circles that Carlile and Place ran in were shifting their focus away from confrontational politics in favour of a reformist approach focused on working-class education. This turn to compromise spurred efforts to distance the movement from immorality, and dealt a huge blow to Carlile’s vision for sexual life. His pamphlet, and later two American pamphlets inspired by it – the social reformer Robert Dale Owen’s Moral Physiology (1830) and the physician Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832) – were charged with promoting promiscuity, blasphemy, and atheism.Footnote ¹⁴ As we will see in Chapter 6, some social reformers printed editions of Moral Physiology and Fruits of Philosophy into the 1870s, selling them in small numbers in their bookshops, by mail order, and through third-party dealers alongside radical classics, like the works of Thomas Paine. By and large, though, support for contraception lost traction in these circles along with hope for revolution.

But the fraught conditions of the 1820s also fostered the birth of the Holywell Street trade, which brought Every Woman’s Book, Moral Physiology, and Fruits of Philosophy into conversation with a very different kind of reading material. As they faced a shrinking audience for incendiary political literature, Dugdale, Benbow, Cannon, and a few other radical pressmen identified a growing market for sexual entertainment, and pivoted to serve it.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of these men continued to attend political meetings and sell political material. In addition to issuing works by the likes of Voltaire and Paine, Dugdale wrote and published fiery pamphlets against the Poor Laws and the Corn Laws in the 1840s, and issued Bell’s Penny Dispatch (1841–2), a short-lived periodical that railed against slavery, child labour, and worker exploitation.Footnote ¹⁶ However, these kinds of publications played an increasingly marginal role in their businesses. By the end of the 1830s, they had developed trade in sexually themed publications into a specialized line of work, one that was attracting new players, in league with an array of other urban suppliers of information and entertainment, and chiefly associated with London’s Holywell Street.

Inventing a specialized trade in sexual material took time, effort, and willingness to experiment. The libertine dialogues that these publishers had issued at the beginning of the 1820s had an obvious appeal to audiences in search of sexual entertainment. To develop a concentrated trade in sexual material, however, they needed to expand their lists. Practically, there were four routes that publishers could take to get their hands on new content: (1) they could acquire new works by purchasing or commissioning publications, (2) they could write them themselves, (3) they could reprint old publications, or (4) they could rework old publications to create new ones.

From the middle of the 1820s, Cannon, Dugdale, and Benbow distinguished themselves from other publishers by issuing new, straightforwardly erotic novels and prints with niche (usually wealthy) audiences in mind. Some, such as The Spirit of Flagellation (1827), a whipping fantasy purporting to be the “Memoirs of Mrs. Hinton, who kept a school many years at Kensington,” were engineered to appeal to the sexual tastes of former public school pupils. Others, such as The Seducing Cardinal’s Amours (1830), which portrays a group of sex-trafficking monks, and The Lustful Turk (1828), which recounts the abduction and sale of an English woman to Ali, the Dey of Algiers, were inspired by anti-Catholic libertine literature and orientalist travel narratives. These works were prized by collectors. However, they were too expensive (early editions of The Lustful Turk cost more than four pounds), too labour-intensive to produce, and probably too graphic to sustain a dedicated business.Footnote ¹⁷ At a time when copyright laws were not as expansive as they are today, and old books were easy to acquire, these publishers also made use of a faster, cheaper method to expand their lists of sexual material and make them attractive to a wider range of readers: they recycled existing publications.

In many cases, Holywell Street publishers expanded their catalogues by renovating old works, bringing their focus to sexual acts by rearranging, deleting, and rewriting portions of the text and appending it with explicit images. Dugdale transformed the eighteenth-century novel The History of the Human Heart (1749) into the much racier Memoirs of a Man of Pleasure (1827), for instance, by cutting away swaths of material that did not focus on sexual acts and adding steamy illustrations.Footnote ¹⁸ They also pirated each other’s publications and reprinted a motley assortment of old productions that seemed likely to appeal to audiences interested in sex, from classic works of erotic fiction, such as John Cleland’s novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), popularly known as Fanny Hill, to translations of Ovid’s Art of Love (2 CE). By mixing new and classic works of erotic fiction and poetry with revised or reframed works from other genres, Holywell Street publishers established an economical product makeup, one that enabled them to tap the cheaper end of the market for sexual entertainment while serving readers who wanted to consume sexual material for other, or additional, reasons. Although the products would change over time, these production principles remained a fixture of the pornography trade through the rest of the century.

Medical works began to trickle into Holywell Street publishers’ lists in the 1830s. Works on generation and gynaecology had been framed as books of “secrets” – containers of private knowledge that was normally hidden from view – since the late medieval period, and became the focus of increasing concern about inappropriate engagement after print’s introduction in Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ By the seventeenth century, as Sarah Toulalan has argued, it was taken for granted that “reading about and discussing sexual matters, even in a medical context, was likely to be sexually arousing,” and that medical works that addressed such matters needed to be presented to “the right kind of reader who would approach the text with the ‘right’ attitude.”Footnote ²⁰ Medical writers often sought to diffuse concerns that they catered to prurience by asserting that the sexual content in their books was necessary and intended only for readers with the appropriate mindset. However, this could have the undesirable effect of highlighting their works’ prurient appeal. Disreputable booksellers understood this, and exploited it by producing exaggerated versions of the defences these writers employed: they drew attention to sexual content in works on generation, midwifery, venereal disease, and masturbation by appending them with facetious apologies and warnings. These devices encouraged understandings of sexual knowledge as “secret” in a second sense: voyeuristic, exclusive, and desirable partly because it was dangerous.Footnote ²¹

The activities of John Joseph Stockdale (c. 1776–1847) illustrate that techniques employed to exploit medical eroticism had not changed much when Holywell Street publishers arrived on the scene. The son of a Republican bookseller, Stockdale acquired his own bookshop in Pall Mall in 1806.Footnote ²² From these premises, he issued a wide range of works, from an attack on the M.P. William Cobbett using quotations from his own work, Cobbett Against Himself (1807), to a science encyclopedia for schoolchildren.Footnote ²³ In 1811, more by accident than design, Stockdale began to publish the work of John Roberton. A Scottish specialist in venereal disease, Roberton occupied an awkward place in the medical world. He had little formal training as a surgeon, and his first published work, A Practical Treatise on the Powers of Cantharides (1806), has been called “little more than a literary personal advertisement.”Footnote ²⁴ However, he was well-connected in medical circles, and a member of the prestigious Edinburgh Royal Medical Society. Roberton was hungry for influence, and in 1809, he published a more ambitious book, a 700-page Treatise on Medical Police. His ambitions were dashed the following year, when he was expelled from the Medical Society following allegations that he had written “obscene epithets” on ballot papers for its presidential election.Footnote ²⁵ Roberton moved to London, where he arrived with the manuscript for a third book, On the Generative System, which he hoped would ingratiate him to the city’s medical elite.

Plans for the book to be published by Richard Phillips, a Republican and publisher of the Medical and Physical Journal (1799–1814), fell through, and Stockdale issued Generative System in 1811.Footnote ²⁶ To Roberton’s horror, Stockdale’s advertising for the book emphasized its sexual content, announcing that its twelve illustrations of the reproductive organs “Laid Open” the “Secrets of Nature.”Footnote ²⁷ Defending sexual content in a medical book was respectable; promoting it in newspapers was not. Roberton frantically published notices in the Morning Post, assuring readers that his work afforded “no foundation whatever for the very indecorous Advertisement which, contrary to agreement with the Publisher, has, even subsequent to my remonstrances, been repeated by him.”Footnote ²⁸ The surgeon wished to gain the patronage of Matthew Baillie, the King’s physician, and worried that Stockdale’s advertisements would undermine his attempt to flatter Baillie by dedicating Generative System to him.

Roberton’s bid to win Baillie over was a disaster. Baillie hated the book. He was also so suspicious of Roberton’s claims to medical expertise, and so disgusted with Stockdale’s advertising, that he published his own letters rebuking Roberton for affixing his name to “an obscene book.”Footnote ²⁹ Commercially, however, Generative System was a success. In the end, Roberton capitulated. He not only permitted Stockdale to issue a new edition but also agreed that Stockdale would become the “sole Proprietor of [his] valuable publications.”Footnote ³⁰ The partnership produced several editions of Cantharides, Generative System, and Medical Police, and several new compilations on sexual health.

Stockdale continued to frame Roberton’s medical publications as entrées to the secrets of the body in advertising material throughout the 1810s. In the 1820s, he set about exploiting the market for sexual material in a more concerted fashion. Fearing for his business’s survival after a series of setbacks, including a fire that razed his Pall Mall shop, Stockdale instigated numerous legal battles over his copyrights, and expanded his production of sexually detailed works to pay the bills.Footnote ³¹ Most famously, in 1825, he issued The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson, a tell-all that he and Wilson, a courtesan to aristocrats, used to blackmail those connected with its anecdotes before it was issued, which reportedly attracted a crowd of buyers “ten deep” to his shop afterwards.Footnote ³² Less well known are Stockdale’s quasi-medical productions, starting with Kalogynomia, or The Laws of Female Beauty (1821). The book, published under the pseudonym Dr. T. Bell, is sometimes attributed to Roberton, but if Roberton was connected with its composition, he wrote relatively little of it himself. Kalogynomia, which details a “Complete system of that Science” of female beauty, is a composite text, constructed by copying from older publications on aesthetics, history, geography, anatomy, physiology, and venereal disease, including Roberton’s Generative System, and filling in the gaps with original writing.Footnote ³³

The result, Roberta McGrath has argued, is a jarring hybrid of medical instruction and erotic narrative, one that purports to teach male readers how to judge female beauty by furnishing them with mixture of anatomical, aesthetic, and sensual descriptions of women’s bodies.Footnote ³⁴ The section “On Sexual Intercourse,” for example, instructs readers on the anatomical structure of the reproductive organs. Where “the [prostate] gland ceases to surround the urethra, and where the caput gallinaginus or verumontanum is found,” the book states, borrowing from Generative System, “the urethra assumes the name of THE MEMBEROUS PORTION OF THE URETHRA.”Footnote ³⁵ The tone of the prose shifts when describing the signs of arousal:

Kalogynomia’s twenty-four plates mirror its composite textual makeup: the images are a jumble of illustrations recycled from other publications, including sketches of the interior and exterior details of the reproductive organs, interior depictions of sexual intercourse, and etchings of nude female statuary.

Ideas about what counts as science change over time and vary between communities.Footnote ³⁷ Although it is difficult to do so today, some readers (including Richard Carlile, who alluded to it in Every Woman’s Book) viewed Kalogynomia and similar works as serious scientific interventions.Footnote ³⁸ However, as McGrath has emphasized, the book’s editorial material leaves little doubt that Stockdale thought its major value lay in its prurient appeal. Stockdale inserted a nota bene into the book that emphasizes the plates’ eroticism, for instance, by exploiting assumptions that women and youths were especially vulnerable to the influences of print:

This nota bene reworks defences of sexual detail common in medical works to promote Kalogynomia’s eroticism. It suggests that the reader is “a discriminating viewer … [engaging] in scientific observation rather than sexual voyeurism,” even as he invokes the images’ stimulating nature by counselling him to lock them away from those who will be affected.Footnote ⁴⁰ Stockdale used paratext in this way to construct a readership for Kalogynomia that would be complimented by his appeal to their moral prowess even as they were titillated by the dangers he said it represented.

Kalogynomia repeated Generative System’s success. After it was published, Stockdale began to fuse material from Roberton’s books with new plates and extracts from various sources, fashioning a series of books that he marketed as based on, or related to, Kalogynomia.Footnote ⁴¹ He advertised these works openly for years. None attracted opposition until 1836, when government inspectors discovered an 1824 edition of Generative System in Newgate Gaol.Footnote ⁴² Its plates, which were mostly taken from Kalogynomia, shocked the inspectors, who urged city officials to prosecute Stockdale for distributing obscene material. The officials refused, noting Roberton’s profession as a surgeon and (ironically) the book’s dedication to Matthew Baillie. Generative System’s scientific status was debated in court anyway, thanks to an audacious libel suit that Stockdale brought against Hansard, the publishers of Parliamentary reports, for printing the inspectors’ opinion of the book. Opinions as to whether their assessment was correct varied, but after enjoying three years of free publicity from newspaper reports on the suit, Stockdale won on the basis that Hansard did not enjoy Parliamentary privilege.

As Stockdale’s exploits suggests, agents of the book trade were using a variety of techniques to take advantage of medical eroticism at the dawn of the Victorian period. They sometimes sutured texts and images into new combinations to create works for audiences interested in reading about bodies and desires. More often, they simply drew attention existing publications’ prurient appeal through paratextual devices such as advertisements, prefaces, and notes. Holywell Street publishers adapted these techniques as they developed a specialized trade in sexual material; but “adapted” is the key word here. Like many booksellers before them, Holywell Street publishers encouraged their customers to read medical works for pleasure. However, they also used these techniques to encourage another kind of engagement with medical works, one inspired by radical arguments for sex education, reproductive autonomy, and female pleasure: they encouraged readers to see these works as containers of a kind of knowledge that could enable them to live out safe, free, and pleasurable sex lives of their own.

Opening the Catalogue

By 1837, nearly sixty bookshops known for dealing in sexual material operated in London. Many were clustered along a series of thoroughfares stretching out from under the shadow of St. Mary-le-Strand, the Anglican church to the west of the city. Prone to crowding by day and littered with the waste of evening revelry in the West End’s theatres, restaurants, and gin palaces, Holywell Street, Wych Street, and Russell Court suited businesses that traded on desire for “secret” knowledge. Standing between the bright, middle-class bustle of the Strand and the poverty-stricken slums of Drury Lane, Holywell Street publishers’ shops promised to bring the best of both worlds to readers in print: books, pamphlets, and periodicals that would enable them to indulge in unruly urban pleasures without having to come into contact with hunger, poverty, or shame. A reader who slipped into one of these shops could find the latest in novels about adventure, crime, and vice, bawdy song and joke books, salacious periodicals, guides to London’s night life, and, increasingly, medical works on display. Books and prints of a more “curious” nature (“curious” was a common euphemism for sexually explicit content) were available on request. Should readers wish to consider purchases from the comfort of their homes, they could leave with a catalogue of items for sale.Footnote ⁴³

The sheer number of booksellers associated with the trade suggests a healthy market for sexual material. Cannon, Benbow, and Dugdale’s friends and family members joined the business, including Dugdale’s brothers Thomas and John; the printer John Duncombe and his brother, Edward; and Richard Carlile’s son, Thomas Paine Carlile, who operated under his wife’s surname, Ward.Footnote ⁴⁴ Over time, new players without evident connections to radical politics entered the trade, including at least one woman, Mary Elliot.Footnote ⁴⁵ The market was large enough to support a number of players because they did not limit their audience to wealthy readers. They aimed to serve a broad, largely male audience that included students, shop-boys, clerks, and tradesmen as well as professionals and aristocrats. To cultivate this audience, the most successful Holywell Street publishers hammered out advertising partnerships and publishing deals with charismatic impresarios like Renton Nicholson, owner of the Garrick’s Head and Town Hotel in Covent Garden, a famous destination for bawdy sing-alongs and performances featuring scantily clad women. They also sold a range of inexpensive products, including medical works. The median price for the medical works was two shillings and sixpence, and some could be had for sixpence. At these prices, they were considered “cheap” in the book business: easily within reach of middle-class readers, and feasible purchases for some working-class readers.Footnote ⁴⁶

Because Holywell Street publishers constantly pirated, traded, and inherited stock from each other, their lists were practically interchangeable. Around thirty-five medical titles circulated through the trade between the late 1830s and the early 1860s, appearing in one catalogue after another.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a collective, these works make up an incredibly diverse body of publications, one that mixes traditional knowledge about procreation with up-to-date information about anatomy; radical writing about the necessity of sexual freedom for both sexes with forbidding lectures on the dangers of masturbation and promiscuity; and practical instruction on how to practise contraception with philosophical discussions about the nature of desire. However, they can be grouped into a few rough categories.

The smallest comprises two allegedly ancient works on procreation. One was The Secrets of Nature Revealed, which was derived from parts of the early modern manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684) and a translation of Nicholas Venette’s La génération de l’homme (1675), probably Conjugal Love; or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed (c. 1750).Footnote ⁴⁸ The other was Aristotle’s Masterpiece itself. Aristotle, which has no connection to the philosopher, was probably Holywell Street publishers’ best seller. Sold continuously throughout the nineteenth century, it was enormously popular among readers of all classes and genders: the kind of work that women passed down from generation to generation, and young men passed around with their friends.Footnote ⁴⁹ Holywell Street publishers often advertised multiple differently priced editions for sale, some with coloured plates and some without. Just a single copy of an edition issued by John Duncombe has survived.Footnote ⁵⁰ The dearth of extant Holywell Street editions raises the possibility that these publishers did not issue all or even most of the Aristotles they sold, preferring to source them from suppliers who churned them out for many booksellers under a well-known false imprint.Footnote ⁵¹ High demand for Aristotle explains the creation of Secrets of Nature: incorporating parts of the famous manual, it was presented as a similar publication by another ancient scholar.

Itself a compilation, Aristotle evolved over time. Duncombe’s edition is an abridged version popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that provided information about the generative organs, the mechanics of conception, pregnancy, and delivery, and “monstrous births,” as well as advice about how to treat various ailments. However, customers of other Holywell Street publishers may have encountered a somewhat different work. Around the mid-nineteenth century, references to sexual intercourse were edited out of many editions of Aristotle.Footnote ⁵² An essay on the pleasures and duties of marriage and information about venereal disease were added, and the chapter on monstrous births was expanded to include material on living “eccentricities of nature,” such as the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–74).Footnote ⁵³ Some of these changes may have been made to tone down the work during a period in which debate about the limits of publicly acceptable expression intensified: Aristotle had a longstanding reputation as a bawdy book.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, they mainly seem to have been oriented around bringing the manual into conversation with the present. When they read updated editions of Aristotle, Victorian readers experienced the thrill of accessing timeless secrets about generation. However, these secrets were now presented in dialogue with contemporary fascination with congenital variation, concern about venereal disease, and hope for marital fulfilment.

Holywell Street publishers dealt in a wider variety of works on venereal disease, fertility problems, and sexual dysfunction. Many were reprints or translations of bestselling eighteenth-century century works about the dangers of masturbation, including the anonymous pamphlet Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (c. 1712), Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s L’Onanisme (1760), and M. D. T. de Bienville’s La nymphomanie (1771). Others, including James Graham’s Lecture on the Generation, Increase, and Improvement of the Human Species (c. 1783) and newer productions like R. J. Swaine & Co’s Geneseology, or, the Physiology of Woman (1850) and R. and L. Perry & Co’s The Silent Friend (1841), focused on the causes and treatment of infertility, impotence, and venereal disease.Footnote ⁵⁵ Issued by living medical practitioners, works like The Silent Friend offered up-to-date information about the body, drawn from the modern science of anatomy. However, they had the same flavour as the older material, issuing stern warnings about the dangers of masturbation and extramarital sex. During the 1840s and 1850s, Holywell Street publishers hawked these works on behalf of their authors, acting as retailers.Footnote ⁵⁶ By the 1860s, they may have shifted to trading in piracies: these titles were listed at significantly higher prices in their advertisements than they were in advertisements placed by such works’ own authors.

The third category, sex and marriage manuals, is even more varied. Some of these works, such as Venette’s Conjugal Love, were reprints of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century productions that offered a potpourri of advice and anecdotes about fertility, marriage, sexual technique, and desire.Footnote ⁵⁷ Others, such as The Philosophy of Kissing (c. 1840), a rambling paean to the delights of kissing and the insights of the science of phrenology, were original.Footnote ⁵⁸ Few of the latter have survived, but like Kalogynomia they appear to have been compiled from a variety of medical, scientific, aesthetic, historical, and legal works. Most of the text of Dugdale’s Marriage, Historically, Philosophically, Legally, Physiologically and Pathologically Examined (c. 1842), attributed to Henry Horne, M.D., was taken from The Philosophy of Marriage (1837), a book by Michael Ryan, a London-based obstetrician and medical lecturer, which Dugdale also sold intact.Footnote ⁵⁹ To create his Marriage, Dugdale excised parts of Ryan’s work, including most of its religious references, and combined it with a chapter from Robert Dale Owen’s contraception manual Moral Physiology. These editorial manoeuvres transformed the text. Ryan’s Marriage is a sprawling survey of reproductive functions, problems, and arrangements that condemns contraception on the grounds that it would break down restraints on female sexuality. Horne’s Marriage is a shorter cross-cultural exploration of reproductive arrangements that endorses contraception on the grounds that people of both sexes should not suffer for gratifying their desires.

Horne’s Marriage provides a bridge to the final and perhaps most compelling category, works on contraception. This category is a reminder of the Holywell Street trade’s roots in radical publishing: Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book, Owen’s Moral Physiology, and Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy were all staples of Holywell Street publishers’ catalogues.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two of Dugdale’s editions of Knowlton’s pamphlet have survived.Footnote ⁶¹ The main text is identical to contemporary editions issued by social reformers, but Dugdale’s are furnished with two new anatomical plates (Figure 1.2). Printed on a single fold-out sheet appended to the pamphlet’s title page, these images illustrate Knowlton’s descriptions of the female reproductive organs. One is an engraving of the reproductive system, spanning from the ovaries to the opening of the vagina. The other depicts a spread vulva, drawing attention to the locations of the clitoris, clitoral hood, labia, and hymen. If readers flipped to the back of the pamphlet, they would find a numbered key that names each anatomical element, and a letter allegedly written by a physician named Athanasius Griskin, who takes credit for the plates and key. Positioning Griskin as an expert in contraceptive techniques, the letter focuses almost exclusively on the benefits of the baudruche, or “condem” (condom). The device is superior to contraception methods advocated by Knowlton or Owen, Griskin argues, because it is more effective at preventing pregnancy, stops the spread of venereal disease, and can even help “the man who goes off like wild fire” satisfy women by enabling him to “keep himself back” during intercourse.Footnote ⁶²

Figure 1.2 Fold-out illustration and title page of Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, or, The Private Companion of Young Married People (London: Dugdale, Russell Court, Drury Lane, 1838), EPB/A/61972, WL.

Wellcome Collection, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Additionally, Holywell Street publishers sold at least two original pamphlets on contraception.Footnote ⁶³ One, On the Use of Night Caps; or, Seven Years’ Experience on the Practicability of Limiting the Number of a Family, is attributed to “a Married Man with Six Children!”Footnote ⁶⁴ Dugdale published the only extant copy, probably in 1844. Its style and verbatim overlaps with Griskin’s letter suggest that Dugdale was its author. Night Caps was clearly influenced by Carlile’s work. Like Every Woman’s Book, it defends the right of couples to “be the best judges of their own situation,” ridicules religious authorities, and emphasizes women’s right to enjoy sex, freed from the mortal risks of pregnancy and the emotional devastation of miscarriage.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, its tone is markedly different from Every Woman’s Book, which anxiously defends itself against imputations of impropriety, insisting that “all subjects may be philosophically discussed, when they are discussed with a view to the acquisition or communication of knowledge.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Written as a direct address to a mixed-gender readership, Night Caps has the flavour of a sales pitch delivered by a skilled showman, careening between thundering invective, bawdy humour, and gentle cajoling. Its narrator goes out of his way to create an atmosphere of bar-room intimacy: he litters the text with double entendres, often refers to his own sexual experiences, and makes naughty asides. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he exclaims at one point, “I hope you are all married. If you are not, the omission cannot be attributed to me.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Although Night Caps describes several contraceptive techniques, most of the text is devoted to addressing reservations that readers might have about its recommended method, the “night cap,” or “French letter” (condom). Night Caps’ narrator concedes that the device dulls sexual sensation for men. However, he suggests strategies for improving it and appeals to readers’ sense of manly virtue, opining that a husband’s first duty is not to his own pleasure but to his wife’s well-being. Women must be protected from the ravages of childbearing, and if their partners are willing to experiment with using the night cap, they will be rewarded for their efforts:

Night Caps anticipates and diffuses other objections, too: about condoms’ reputation as filthy devices used by prostitutes, about the expense of using them, about the risk of breakage, and even about judgement from friends. “Pshaw! madame,” the narrator retorts. “It is no affair of theirs whether you lie in lawn, linen, or calico, or whether your husband does, or does not, cover his head with a night cap.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Eventually, it becomes clear that Night Caps was meant to function, at least partly, as an advertisement: the pamphlet winds up with an appeal to readers to purchase night caps from the publisher.

The other pamphlet, The Connubial Guide; or, Married People’s Best Friend, draws on radical writing about contraception in a very different way. The only extant copy was issued by Edward Duncombe under the name John Wilson in the early 1840s and published under the pseudonym “Intercidona.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Although the title and pseudonym, the name of a Roman goddess of protection for labouring women, suggest a sex manual or midwifery book, the front cover offers a clue to the pamphlet’s contents by quoting lines from George Gordon, Lord Byron’s drama Cain (1821):

The Connubial Guide is essentially a digest: the twelve-page pamphlet streamlines material from radical works on contraception, cutting away almost all of their philosophical content to offer a focused survey of contraceptive techniques. Stating their object “to diffuse … necessary knowledge amongst all ranks,” Intercidona only briefly defends contraception from what they consider the sole plausible objection to it: that it is “unnatural, seeing that no part of the bodily organization is adapted for the purpose.”Footnote ⁷¹ Reminding readers that over-population gives rise to poverty and hunger, and that humans “interfere with the intentions of nature” every day, Intercidonia reasons, “Is it not better for us, being, as we are, in an artificial state, to adopt artificial means to prevent an artificial increase in our numbers?”Footnote ⁷²

The rest of the pamphlet describes a variety of methods of controlling reproduction, citing Owen, Knowlton, and Carlile’s pamphlets and the wisdom of several unnamed individuals. However, it rejects all but one. In Intercidonia’s opinion, withdrawal is too difficult for men to follow through with. Vaginal sponges are unreliable. French letters are “likely to tear,” and also “filthy,” and it is “impracticable” for female partners to take exercise immediately after intercourse. Unusually for birth control pamphlets, The Connubial Guide provides a recipe for an abortifacient containing sulphate of potass or soda, though it claims that the recipe is also useless, producing only “a violent action on the bowels.”Footnote ⁷³ Ultimately, Intercidona advocates vaginal douching with an alkaline solution after intercourse, noting that the method is proposed in Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy. Conveniently, a Dr. M. sells such a preparation through Wilson’s shop. The final paragraph, which describes the symptoms of pregnancy, obliquely suggests that Wilson’s customers can also arrange abortions with Dr. M.Footnote ⁷⁴

Just on its own, this motley collection of publications highlights some important features of sexual knowledge’s circulation during the first decades of the Victorian period. First, it emphasizes that old ways of thinking about the body and sexuality continued to circulate in print beyond exchanges of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, though Aristotle was undoubtedly the most popular early modern work on procreation. Holywell Street editions of early modern medical works and descriptions of them in sales catalogues also suggest that readers would not necessarily have perceived the ideas that they communicated as “old”: while publishers highlighted and even fabricated the “ancient” status of some productions, such as Secrets of Nature, other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, such as Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, were reprinted and sold alongside newer works like The Silent Friend without a word about their origins. While scholars have long recognized that medical perspectives from earlier periods lived on in oral tradition, these catalogues underscore just how much currency older models of the body and sexuality had in cheap print during the first decades of the Victorian period.

This material also emphasizes that trade in birth control literature was far more active than previously thought. Historians often assume that works describing contraceptive techniques circulated in low numbers between the mid-1830s and the mid-1870s, and that their sole sellers were social reformers who inherited Knowlton’s and Owen’s pamphlets.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet, other players clearly sold these pamphlets and Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book; wrote, published, and sold other works inspired by them; and sometimes inserted extracts from them into other kinds of publications, as in Dugdale’s made-over edition of Michael Ryan’s Philosophy of Marriage. It is also clear that these pamphlets, and reworkings and elaborations on them, were used to promote products (and possibly, The Connubial Guide suggests, services) that theoretically enabled people to prevent or end pregnancy, protect themselves or their partners from venereal disease, and have more satisfying sex lives. As well as promoting condoms, contraception pamphlets sometimes served as resources for copy for stand-alone advertisements for the devices, where their utility as a prophylactics for venereal disease was often highlighted alongside, or instead of, their utility for preventing pregnancy.Footnote ⁷⁶ Prices for the pamphlets ranged from two pence to two shillings and sixpence, but the condoms, which were made by hand out of treated animal gut, were quite expensive, priced between six and twenty-one shillings per dozen. Nevertheless, they had buyers. One customer annotated a sales catalogue with a note indicating the price for William Dugdale’s “best quality” condoms (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Advertisements for French letters and medical works. Ward’s New Catalogue of Parisian Novelties (Strand: W. Ward, c. 1850), page 16 and inner back cover, DA 676, box 8, item 22, MSCE.

Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Access to these materials was not confined to people living in London. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented expansion for the press, and it quickly became the primary mechanism through which Holywell Street publishers connected with readers. Over time, it enabled them to expand their advertising out of London and across the country, penetrating even the smallest provincial towns. During the 1830s and early 1840s, Holywell Street publishers advertised in a handful of papers that targeted urban male readers. Favoured venues included Bell’s Life in London, which published news on sports, politics, foreign events, entertainment, and crime; the Tory weekly The Age, whose readers were thought “fast gentlemen”; and the Poor Man’s Guardian, a radical penny weekly.Footnote ⁷⁷ Over the course of the 1840s, however, they steadily advertised in more and more urban venues. Some Holywell Street publishers dabbled in periodical publishing, and advertised medical works in their own productions. Dugdale promoted them in every issue of Bell’s Penny Dispatch, and later in his salacious penny periodical Peeping Tom (1850), which targeted an overlapping audience to Bell’s Life. He also advertised medical works in his 4d weekly The Exquisite (1842–4) and 3d weekly Gems for Gentlemen (c. 1850), which serialized erotic stories and were aimed at a slightly more upmarket audience (Figure 1.4).Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 1.4 Holywell Street publishers’ advertisements. The Era, June 2, 1844, 2. Content provided by The British Library Board, with thanks to The British Newspaper Archive.

The late 1840s and early 1850s marked enormous expansions in Holywell Street advertising, thanks to new opportunities opened up by the abolition of most “taxes on knowledge”: duties on newspapers that had been introduced in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the aim of suppressing dissent.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ending of taxes on newspaper advertising in 1853 seems to have been especially significant. The tax represented such a huge expense to publishers that one industry commentator claimed its effect was “the virtual suppression of pamphlets and low-priced books.”Footnote ⁸⁰ While massive increases in the production of cheap print during the 1840s emphasize that this assessment was exaggerated, the abolition of the tax cut the costs of advertising in newspapers in half.Footnote ⁸¹ Publishers like William Dugdale and Edward Duncombe put their savings to work and promoted their wares across the country in a plethora of provincial newspapers, such as the North Wales Chronicle, and periodicals for bored travellers, like Herapath’s Railway Journal. Advertising in these venues may not have changed their audience much in terms of its demographics: although women and working-class men did read them, these periodicals’ largest audience was middle-class men.Footnote ⁸² It did mean, however, that Holywell Street publishers now reached prospective readers across the country.

Advertising so widely would have been pointless without the postal service, whose dramatic expansion in the 1830s, and introduction of the penny stamp in 1840, enabled Holywell Street publishers to communicate with readers in remote locations and transport their wares to them cheaply and easily.Footnote ⁸³ Readers living virtually anywhere in the United Kingdom could send away for the medical publications that they advertised in newspapers, or for their sales catalogues, which described them alongside explicit fiction and images. In doing so, Holywell Street publishers claimed, readers could rest assured that their transactions were private. Orders could be placed under pseudonyms, paid for with postage stamps enclosed with the order, and picked up at “any Post-office in the United Kingdom” in a sealed envelope. “If [the reader’s] name be Ramsbottom, or Cockburn, or any other name,” Dugdale advised winkingly, “he may write … under the signature of Harrison, Jackson, Williamson, or plain A.B.C., Post-office, — to be left till called for.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In reality, readers could not be assured of discretion. Letters and packages were sometimes opened. However, in Britain, pornographers’ mails were not subject to concerted attempts at interception until end of the century. Readers could reasonably expect privacy, though not quite to the degree that Holywell Street publishers claimed.Footnote ⁸⁵

Marginalia in sales catalogues further emphasizes the material accessibility of these works, showing that readers could compare prices and choose among suppliers. One reader annotated a number of entries in Ward’s New Catalogue of Parisian Novelties (c. 1850) with different prices. At top of the catalogue’s opening page, he wrote, “The prices written here are the ones charged by H.S. Smith 37 Holywell St Strand, or W. Johns 35 Holywell St also sent Thos Ward 2 St Martin’s Ct St Martin’s Lane + T Hicks 34 Holywell St. H.S. Stands for Henry Smith [William Dugdale] who is decidedly the cheapest of the lot.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Other marginalia emphasizes that Holywell Street publishers did not uniformly serve a well-educated audience, though it also draws attention to the fact that some readers would have had difficulty interpreting their wares. One reader of a catalogue called A Select Catalogue of Books; Facetious and Amorous (c. 1845) had to look up, or ask someone to translate, unfamiliar terms.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the first page of the catalogue, words in a blurb for a work of erotic fiction are numbered “1” and “2” and clarified at the bottom of the page: “1 lanugo – soft hairs, 2 labia – cunt.” On the second page, this reader attempted to decipher a riot of terms in a section advertising French prints for sale, writing “Chastity” alongside “La Pudeur”; “maiden-head” alongside “Le Pucelage”; “favours” alongside “Bien fait.” As if delighted with his discoveries, he appended a translation of a banner reading “Petite Bibliotheque [sic] Joyeuse” with an exclamation: “THE JOLLY LITTLE LIBRARY O! HO!”

The Jolly Little Library

How did Holywell Street publishers want readers to engage with the medical works that they sold? In amplifying radical views about the necessities of sexual freedom and equal pleasure, works like Night Caps, The Connubial Guide, and Horne’s Marriage suggest that some shared Carlile, Owen, and Knowlton’s beliefs that medical knowledge could help people live better, more egalitarian lives, freed from shame about their bodies and desires, and the burden of children they could not afford to feed. When he transformed Michael Ryan’s Philosophy of Marriage into a godless marriage-guide-cum-contraception-manual, perhaps Dugdale still saw himself as a soldier in a war against blinkered sexual ideologies. Yet, this literature’s function as advertising material raises questions about his and other Holywell Street publishers’ aims in spreading these views. Additionally, only a handful of the medical works that Holywell Street publishers sold are obvious contributions to a progressive political project. Even in their updated forms, manuals like Aristotle were incredibly old-fashioned, and hasty compilations like The Philosophy of Kissing were incredibly vapid. Works like The Silent Friend and Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, with their dire warnings about the dangers of masturbation and promiscuity, are even more awkward companions to the contraception literature.

At the same time, many of these works are not obvious companions to the pornographic fiction and images that made Holywell Street publishers notorious. Some do have a clear prurient appeal. Venette’s Conjugal Love describes the mechanics of copulation in lyric detail, while Ryan’s Marriage reproduces titillating excerpts from travel narratives that inspired novels like The Lustful Turk.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet, critics of The Silent Friend claimed that its descriptions of venereal disease and sexual debility were engineered to elicit horror and anxiety in readers, and readers of Aristotle’s Masterpiece often expressed disappointment on discovering that its main focus is the development of the foetus and not, as its reputation implied, sexual acts. Richard Carlile grumbled that Aristotle was a bestseller solely because it was known “as a smuggled book.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Even thematically, Holywell Street publishers’ medical and pornographic output is an awkward fit. Much of the latter, for instance, depicts queer sex. Sex scenes between women are common, and many novels feature gender-bending scenes involving cross-dressing, ejaculating dildoes, and other props. Holywell Street publishers were clearly conscious of a market for material on queer sex and gender presentation outside fiction. Several sold reprints of old pamphlets about the lives of cross-dressers and “hermaphrodites.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Dugdale issued an original work that provided men seeking male sex partners with a guide to cruising: under the guise of telling readers how to avoid “Margeries, Poofs, &c” on forays around London, his Yokel’s Preceptor (c. 1844) spells out exactly where such men gathered, how readers could identify them, and how they signalled sexual interest.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet, medical descriptions of queer bodies, acts, and desires were rare in the Holywell Street trade. A handful of the medical works briefly discuss conditions that disturb gender binaries, such as “hermaphrodism” (Aristotle’s Masterpiece) and eunuchism (Ryan’s Marriage). Medical discussions of same-sex sex did not appear in the pornography trade until 1881, however, in essays appended to the novel The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.Footnote ⁹²

The medical material’s overwhelming focus on white bodies is also conspicuous when set against nineteenth-century pornography, which often luxuriates in describing racialized bodies and supposedly foreign sexual practices. The Lustful Turk, for instance, unremittingly exoticizes the Dey’s body, those of his eunuchs, and those of the members of his multiethnic harem, and ends with a triumphant imperial twist: finally freed, the Dey’s “white slave” carries his severed penis and testes back to Britain in a jar, where they are put on display as specimens in a girls’ school.Footnote ⁹³ References to racialized bodies and allegedly foreign sexual practices appear in a number of the medical works. However, they are never the main focus of the text, and usually very brief. Only Ryan’s Marriage breaks with this trend by including lengthy discussions of polygamy and sexual development among the inhabitants of “warm countries.” Dugdale clearly thought this material would compel readers: he not only retained them in the text of Horne’s Marriage but highlighted them on the title page. Yet, neither he nor his competitors adapted other medico-scientific material with this focus.

To make sense of Holywell Street publishers’ hopes for their medical works, it is less helpful to try to find commonalities across their wares than it is to consider how they were framed. These publisher-booksellers’ lists were not painstakingly curated affairs. They were thrown together on an ad hoc basis, shaped by a combination of opportunity, perceptions about what would sell, book-trade traditions, and, in my estimation, political beliefs. Diverse as they were, though, each publication contributed to something larger: a catalogue of sexually themed products – a “jolly little library,” if you will – that could serve a wide range of needs, tastes, and budgets. It was the catalogue itself that brought these works into coherence, presenting them as materials that, in different ways, supported the enactment of a hazy, pleasure-centred fantasy of sexual autonomy that complemented the convictions of revolutionary libertines like Dugdale and was also very good for business. By placing individual works within this larger context and further steering interpretation through strategic editing and paratextual devices, Holywell Street publishers encouraged readers to “yield to the dictates of love and perform its joyous rites” by performing multiple readings and consuming multiple products.

Holywell Street publishers marketed a number of medical works as titillating reading material. This was especially true of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works on masturbation, fertility, and generation, which already had a history of being framed as containers of secret knowledge in the book trade and depicted bodies and desires in ways that may have felt racier than modern productions, which often had a more technical focus on anatomy and physiology. Holywell Street publishers often used elements of the language they employed to market pornographic novels to describe these works. Sales catalogues allude to the “Extraordinary and Curious” nature of these publications, the “remarkable,” “unexpurgated” detail of the cases they recount, and sometimes warn readers of the moral danger that the “Secrets of Nature” they unveil might present to “youth and unmarried females.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Sometimes, titles would be altered to suggest “secret” content. Edward Dyer framed a translation of Tissot’s forbidding L’Onanisme in voyeuristic terms by titling it Onanism Unveiled; or, The Private Pleasures and Secret Habits of the Youth of Both Sexes Exposed, while William Dugdale swapped the prosaic title of one eighteenth-century fertility pamphlet, The Nature and Causes of Impotence in Men, and Barrenness in Woman, Explained, for a title that heralded revelation: Conjugal Love; or, The Mysteries of Hymen Unveiled.Footnote ⁹⁵

Carlile’s comment about Aristotle’s undeserved reputation suggests that some readers considered this framing fraudulent. However, others probably found medical works exciting sexually. Francis Place reported feeling “a near-erotic thrill” as a teenager when he rummaged through anatomy textbooks in second-hand bookshops.Footnote ⁹⁶ Aristotle reportedly acted as an equivalent for less well-off readers, providing, as Mary Fissell has pointed out, “the most easily accessible pictures of a naked woman in cheap print.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Walter, the narrator of the anonymous autobiography My Secret Life (1888), paints a vivid picture of these reading experiences, describing how he devoured Aristotle with a friend in his youth, then lent it to a servant in hopes of seducing her.Footnote ⁹⁸ Holywell Street publishers sometimes added material to medical works to enhance their prurient appeal. John Duncombe met readers’ expectations of a book with a bawdy reputation by furnishing his edition of Aristotle with a bawdy frontispiece (Figure 1.5). “AN AMOUROUS WIDOW Gazing on Forbidden Fruit!!!” its caption exclaims. The frontispiece depicting a nude woman in Secrets of Nature performs a similar kind of work, adding an erotic element to the book and setting a tone that could make its descriptions of procreation more exciting. The frontispiece to Horne’s Marriage, which depicts one woman undressing another while a third peeps through the door, functions in a similar way.Footnote ⁹⁹ The image of the vulva that Dugdale appended to Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy could be interpreted as another device in this tradition.

Figure 1.5 Frontispiece and title page, Aristotle’s Master-Piece; or, Every Woman’s Book! Displaying All the Secrets of Nature, as Exhibited in the Creation of Man! (London: Printed for James Duncombe, c. 1830), WZ 290 A718 1800, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University.

By courtesy of McGill University Libraries.

Night Caps offers a more elaborate example of an addition that turned a notably bawdy medical work into a means of entertainment. The pamphlet is appended with a short fictional vignette, “A Case Worth Knowing By All Females,” which tells the story of a physician who diagnoses an unmarried young woman with “unsatisfied … sexual sensations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At her mother’s request, he treats her anxiety, depression, and menstrual problems by having sex with her. This narrative is allegedly appended to the pamphlet to demonstrate the benefits of the “night cap,” which the doctor employs to ensure that he does not get his patient pregnant or pass on a venereal disease. The vignette is not sexually explicit, and arguably more medical than fictional: most of the text is given over to the doctor’s explanation of the mechanics of conception and contraception, which reprises information covered in Night Caps’ main text. Nevertheless, it’s a titillating device for reinforcing the pamphlet’s message, one that turns the whole manual into a kind of erotic story by association.

Although they can be interpreted as erotic, it is important to recognize that the vignette appended to Night Caps and the illustration of the vulva in Dugdale’s editions of Fruits of Philosophy are also didactic. Both communicate information about the human body – the mechanics of conception and the location of the clitoris – covered in the main text, offering instruction in alternative ways that readers might consider more interesting or accessible. The degree to which Holywell Street publishers emphasized the utility of medical information on sexual matters is what set them apart from previous disreputable publishers, who capitalized on medical eroticism by winking and nudging at “secret” content. While they did their own winking and nudging, Holywell Street publishers always apprised readers of their medical works’ practical use-value. One of the bookseller Edward Dyer’s catalogues, for instance, emphasizes that Secrets of Nature relays “safe and certain methods” of curing impotence and fertility; that a work on venereal disease called Tabes Dorsalis offers “an explanation of the symptoms and precautions, and the method of cure”; and that Fruits of Philosophy provides “a review of the most efficient checks of impregnation.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, Holywell Street publishers wove medical knowledge together with fantasy in ways that demonstrated how readers could apply it to enjoy the kinds of sex lives they aspired to. Night Caps’ vignette offers perhaps the most direct example of this technique. However, Holywell Street publishers also did so more subtly by evoking idealized unions in which couples enjoyed frequent, mutually pleasurable, non-reproductive sex in contraception literature, and, in works aimed at single young men, an aspirational figure from low urban culture: the fast man.

The latter is best illustrated by Holywell Street publishers’ insertion of medical material into two ephemeral genres: night guides and flash periodicals. Flash periodicals, which sported suggestive titles like Sam Sly, The Fast Man, and Peeping Tom, were extremely popular during the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote ¹⁰² They usually cost a penny and were not sexually explicit. However, they skirted the bounds of propriety, offering up lurid stories about love, vice, and crime; biographies of courtesans; bawdy jokes and sketches; theatrical reviews; and local gossip. Taken together, this material painted a glamourous picture of fast life in London and other urban centres engineered to appeal to young male readers. Dugdale’s Peeping Tom routinely reprinted extracts on venereal disease, reproductive physiology, and contraceptive techniques from Dr. Graham’s Lectures, The Silent Friend, Night Caps, and other medical works that he listed for sale in the periodical’s advertising section.Footnote ¹⁰³ With the exception of the excerpt from Night Caps, which urges readers to purchase night caps from Peeping Tom’s publisher, these extracts were presented without any direct contextualization. However, while their placement in a bawdy periodical could be taken to suggest that medical information was titillating, it also relayed a different message: that readers who wanted to live like fast men needed medical knowledge.

Night guides made what was implicit in flash periodicals explicit. This genre of guidebook is best known for providing addresses and reviews of brothels in major cities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, night guides also functioned as a combination of conduct manual and escapist reading: they evoked the fantasy of a sexually sophisticated, self-assured man about town and purported to teach readers how to be one. Most night guides contain “flash dictionaries,” which induct readers into the mysterious wordplay of cockney slang. Some include pages of advice about how to dress, speak, drink, gamble, fight, and pay sex workers. And some provide advice on how to avoid the most undesirable outcome of a night in a brothel: venereal disease. The medical advice that these works proffered was, again, not original. It was mostly excerpted from works that Holywell Street publishers advertised in the back pages of the guides alongside bawdy songbooks, erotic prints, and so on. For the shop-boys, clerks, and students who were these guides’ target audience, however, it is doubtful that originality mattered. What mattered was access to useful advice.

Hints to Men About Town; or, Waterfordania (c. 1841), a guide attributed to “a Sporting Surgeon,” provides such readers with three detailed chapters on the functions of the reproductive organs, the symptoms of gonorrhoea and syphilis, and how these infections can be prevented or, should efforts at prevention fail or be forgotten, treated. Most of this material appears to have been copied from Michael Ryan’s Philosophy of Marriage or his later book Prostitution in London (1839).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, the spirit in which it is presented in Hints is very different. Going even further than Night Caps, which depicts sexual desire as a healthy, normal condition in both sexes, Hints frames promiscuity in young men as natural and venereal disease as a preventable risk of living life to the fullest. At one point, it sneers at the work it excerpts:

Hints encourages readers to educate themselves about venereal disease so they can enjoy sex with many people while mitigating the consequences. More broadly, it encourages readers to look beyond language about sexual sin seared into many medical works on the topic to get to useful advice, an against-the-grain mode of reading that framing works like Onania as arousing also encouraged. Notably, Holywell Street publishers also encouraged this mode of reading by other means, such as creating in-jokes by retaining content that railed against vice in their renovated works. Horne’s Marriage, for example, retains a rant quoted in Ryan’s Philosophy of Marriage against the “open exhibition of disgustingly indecent books and pictures” in London. Having purchased Horne’s Marriage from one of the “miscreants” who, the author complains, “insult females by exhibiting and selling, with absolute impunity, horrible and indecent representations,” readers knew that they were not to read moralizing passages straight.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Holywell Street publishers’ trade in cheap medical works made good business sense. It supported a robust trade in condoms and occasionally other medical products and services. More broadly, marketing medical works not just as racy reading material but also as useful companions to sexual entertainment enabled Holywell Street publishers to source content quickly and cheaply, and encouraged readers to purchase multiple products in ways that a narrower trade in erotic fiction or images would not. Indeed, they actively fostered this kind of consumer behaviour by habitually cross-advertising medical, bawdy, and pornographic publications. In addition to advertising them in the same catalogues and newspaper advertisements, as the back cover of Secrets of Nature suggests, they often inserted advertisements for pornographic and bawdy productions into their medical works, and vice versa. With these resources, customers could choose from various genres according to their needs again and again: first a night guide or a flash paper, then a manual on venereal disease and a packet of French letters, then a pornographic novel or an erotic plate – or the other way around. Holywell Street publishers’ shops were destinations for sexual discovery that were accessible to middle- and probably some working-class readers across the nation by the early 1850s. The price of entry could be as low as a day-old newspaper, an envelope, and a penny stamp.

Some scholars have characterized the Holywell Street trade as a sorry departure from its roots in revolutionary politics: “too hollow and fantastic, too parasitic on the genres it tried to burlesque, too commercially expedient, to be a subversive cultural force,” Iain McCalman memorably concludes.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Holywell Street publishers clearly aspired to profit from public appetite for sexual information and entertainment. Yet, as the next chapter emphasizes, this was a period in which desire was frequently presented in cheap print as virtually absent in women and as a weakness in men. In this context, they performed a kind of radical work through their noisy, bawdy affirmation of Victorian men’s and women’s sexual curiosity, appetites for pleasure, and desire to take control of their reproductive lives. The ways Holywell Street publishers transformed different elements of medical and radical print cultures into a glittering commercial enterprise that promoted sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy laughed at medical authority, embarrassed more conservative social reformers, and, as we will see, dragged medical works into obscenity trials in the 1850s. However, the emergent pornography trade’s traffic in medical works escaped significant opposition for a long time, partly because it was eclipsed by businesses that presented different and more direct challenges to medical authority. Such businesses are the subject of the next chapter.