Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860–c. 1900

Abstract

My conjectures as to the character of the contents of-'s cabinet were correct! For, my dear, I have found, secured, and appropriated that key. The long sought for, long talked of, is mine at last! And the cabinet has been explored! Oh, it is fearful. I didn't dream there were such books in the world.. .. You haven't any idea how perfectly awful they are. Why, it's enough to make the very paper they're on blush.. .. What would the handsome and unsuspecting-say, if only he knew of a certain young lady's discoveries, and the liberties taken with his treasures? He is still abroad, perhaps getting new rarities for his collection. 1

More than a case of mistaken identity: Adult entertainment and the making of early sexology

“…In Britain the erotic book trade’s relationship with writing about sexual health began at the cusp of the trade’s emergence as a distinct sector of the print market at the beginning of the 19th century. In the 1820s and 1830s, a number of London publisher-booksellers began to renovate existing medical texts to complement the erotic poetry, novels, and illustrations that they sold behind the counters of city shops and through mail-order catalogues (Bull, 2017: 719–22). Works that warned readers about the dangers of masturbation and extramarital sex were cut and pasted into guides to London’s bawdy houses, where their information was repurposed as advice on how to have safer sex with prostitutes.…”

“…Ellis followed some of these bibliographers in considering explicit sexual representations useful sources of insight into human sexual behaviour, and publicly opposed arguments that they were dangerous to society (Bull, 2017: 232–4, 237–42). In his 1922 essay, ‘The Revaluation of Obscenity’, Ellis called on legislators and moralists to redefine, and revalue, ‘obscene’ material: Although obscenity was often defined as that which had the tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ vulnerable readers, he argued, most texts and objects labelled as such simply expressed ‘the naturalistic aspect of sexual [or excremental] processes’ conventionally ‘left off the scene, and not openly shewn on the stage of life’ (Ellis, 1931: 3–4).…”

The sexual life of our time: Medical censorship in early-20th-century England.

“…Recent studies reevaluating late-19th-century histories of sex, sexuality, censorship, and pornography (see Bull, 2014, 2017; O’Hearn, 2018) have paid little attention to those medical and psychomedical texts that dealt explicitly, and sometimes even graphically, with what Krafft-Ebing (1894) called “the psychology of the sexual life” (p. 1). Although the “historical alliance of psychoanalysis with sexology” (Sulloway, 1992, p. 277) has tended to dominate the history and historiography of the psychology of sex, this hiatus in scholarship is surprising given that late-19th-century physicians were already interested in “the relation of sexual function to psychic processes” (Sullivan, 1901, p. 196) and were exploring the possible relationships between “sexual suffering” and “the pathogenesis of psychoses” (de Leon, 1899, p. 213).…”