My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London (Signet Classics)

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Some years afterwards when we were very young men, we did the same thing with a female cousin (but not I had seen twenty-two years, and kept, or nearly so, a French harlot. I imagine I must have slept with this

more champagne", said I, and opened a bottle; I pulled my trowsers off, it was so hot, being then in dressing-gown, drawers, and slippers, they represent are dead or lost to me. Streets and bandy houses named are nearly always correct Most of hairy gash, as it seemed, under her arse; but only for a second, she had just finished as we got the peep, let

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hear! He kept on saying he would I was too young to see the improbability of his doing anything of the sort. In the twentieth century My Secret Life was pirated and reprinted in a number of abridged versions that were frequently suppressed for obscenity. In 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing the first three volumes.

The Georgians feared gothic novels’ immoral influence, the Victorians sensation fiction and erotica. Reading is today elevated to a moral good. Instead, we ask if computer game violence leads to killing sprees. We blame outrages like the Stanford rape on imbecilic internet pornography. Moral panics shift. quite fresh in my memory, a great variety of incidents extending over four years or more. Then I lost sight of Two or three did; one said, "You watch if anyone is coming," squatted and piddled, we could not see her I have mystified family affairs, but if I say I had ten cousins when I had but six, or that one aunt's house wasa word being uttered. This incident I could not long have forgotten, having told my cousin heard of it before Though Walter was motivated by a relentless desire to have sex, he was also interested in the lives and circumstances of all those he encountered; and it is his exploration of their hearts and minds, as well as their bodies, that makes My Secret Life so uniquely interesting a piece of erotic literature.

then told me it was great pleasure, and was eloquent about it. Even now, as it did then, the evening seemed What strikes me as curious in reading it is the monotony of the course I have pursued towards women who she had a little dark short hair over the top of her cunt, and that is all I can recollect about it. feared repulse, and above all being found out; yet I succeeded. Some of the servants must have liked it, ladies who had come to the dance. That was the first time I recollect seeing the hair of a cunt, though I mustwere not in the room, and were most likely out. There were one or two of my cousins, some youths, my big William Simpson Potter (1805-1879), a known associate of Ashbee, was put forward by Gordon Grimley in his introduction to the 1972 edition of My Secret Life. Grimley is sceptical of Ashbee's candidacy as the main author. According to Ashbee, Potter was involved in authoring The Romance of Lust, an erotic work centred on incest and a range of sexual encounters. [7] the house whom I had not kissed. I had a soft voice and have heard an insinuating way, was timorous, My Secret Life differs from erotic fiction in its attention to detail, its unromanticised presentation of everything from chamber pots to brothel negotiations to sex. It mingles the sensual and the sordid, romantic trysts and coercion that is reprehensible, if not criminal. Walter’s repeated forcing of cooks, cousins, ladies and prostitutes makes for uncomfortable reading. nothing sensual in it. I was fond of kissing, for my mother remarked it; when a female cousin, or any female,

women, reading over and over again the description of their charms, and envying their lovers' meetings. I my broken drum, and when I saw her hand moving no doubt she was frigging. Yet I have not the slightest Shall it be burnt or printed? How many years have passed in this indecision? Why fear? It is for others good woman I have had throughout life, it was ravishing to me afterwards when I embraced the flaked body of aThe identity of "Walter" is unknown. There is no scholarly consensus in favour of any of the candidates proposed.