Throughout the eighteenth century writers had to worry about the twin prongs of libel and obscenity, both of which were used to curb artistic and literary freedoms during the Georgian period. Obscene books, poetry and prints had started to become widespread after the Restoration, often with material copied from the French. A popular example was L’Escole des Filles, copied into English as The School of Venus (1655). The diarist Samuel Pepys admits to reading a copy in 1668 describing it as a ‘mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’. Read it he did – and promptly threw it on the fire in case his wife saw it. The plot involves a discussion between a sexually experienced woman and an innocent young maid, and details the pleasures to be enjoyed. The underlying viewpoint is that ‘women are gagging for it’ and that the poor man has very little choice but to rise to the occasion and do his duty.
In 1668 prosecutions were brought against Joseph Streater and Benjamin Crayle for selling ‘several obscene and lascivious books’ (of which The School of Venus was one) and were fined forty shillings and twenty shillings respectively. Nevertheless, versions of the book remained in print, and records show it was still being sold, to men and women alike and by both male and female booksellers, well into the middle of the eighteenth century.
One famous writer of obscene verse was the Earl of Rochester, the man who said of his drinking companion and fellow-lecherer King Charles II:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th’other…
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
Other poems written by the Earl were altogether more explicit. Writing of a new type of dildo available from Italy, he suggests that English ladies will prefer it to their husbands, with the words ‘This signior is sound, safe, ready, and dumb; As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb.’ Poems such as a Ramble in St James Park are almost unprintable but an idea of his crudity can be seen from Regime d’viver
I Rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two
I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her Lap.
After the whore has robbed him and departed, the poem continues:
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my Whore, I bugger my Page
Then crop-sick, all Morning, I rail at my Men
And in Bed I lye Yawning, till Eleven again.
By the reign of Queen Anne there was a strong anti-Catholic satirical tone to much of the earlier lascivious and titillating texts – titles such as A Full and True Account of a Dreaded Fire that Lately Broke Out in the Pope’s Breeches (1713) emphasised the hypocrisy of priests who paid lip-service to chastity while having their wicked way with their female parishioners at every opportunity. It is hardly surprising that Roman Catholics were often portrayed as debauched sex-maniacs – it was simply part and parcel of the anti-papist groundswell which was to put George I on the throne as the first of the Hanoverians.
Into this scene stepped the unloved and unlovely Edmund Curll. In 1707 he had published The Works of the Right Honourable the late Earl of Rochester and then moved on to publish a variety of pirated and unauthorised works, specialising in ‘biographies’ of famous people who had just died. There was no attempt to be truthful or accurate – the only consideration was getting the biography out on to the street as soon as possible. Gradually he built up a reputation not just as a huckster but as a peddler of indecent literature – ‘curllecisms’ as they were called. In 1725 he brought out a book called A Treatise on Flogging (about the joys of using whips in the bedroom) and Venus in the Cloister about a nun who seduces a young initiate. Curll was dragged before the courts, but the problem was that it was unclear what offence he had committed. Obscenity in itself was not a crime. In the end the judges invented the new offence of ‘publishing an obscene libel’, fined him £100, and sentenced him to a spell in the pillory. He got off lightly – he made sure a pamphlet was circulated to those attending his time in the pillory, in which he claimed that he was being punished for defending the memory of the much-loved late Queen Anne (rather than for printing and distributing obscene material). The crowd refrained from pelting him, and when his time was up, carried him shoulder high to a local hostelry.
Curll was embroiled in a long-running dispute with Alexander Pope, largely because he kept publishing works by Pope (both fake and genuine) without permission. Pope’s The Dunciad contained many attacks on Curll, who responded with The Popiad and used the publicity to promote his catalogue of works. From 1741 onwards Curll published a number of erotic books under the umbrella title of Merryland – a euphemistic reference to topographical features while actually describing the female anatomy in salacious detail.
In 1735 Kick him Jenny had been published – a rollicking tale of a man called Roger who is in the middle of making love to Jenny the maid, behind a locked door, when her Mistress spies what is going on through the keyhole:
Sir John, the householder, is altogether more encouraging of the young swain and offers conflicting advice:
Erotic writing received a huge boost in November 1748 when Part One of John Cleland’s Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure came out in print. The second part was published three months later. The book is more generally known as Fanny Hill, and was a sensation. For the first time ever, a book was written in the style of a novel, but incorporating pornographic descriptions as part of a believable story. The tale is about an innocent young maid arriving in London and, as in Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, the young girl is lured into a brothel. The procuress is a Madam by the name of Mrs Brown. Fanny is led down the path of sexual experimentation by her new friend Phoebe and has all manner of sexual encounters, including lesbianism, flagellation and orgies, and discovers that sex, with or without being in love, can be great fun. She attends drag balls; she gets pregnant and has a miscarriage; she beds a number of extremely well-endowed lovers both young and old; and finally meets up with the one true love from whom she was separated for several years, confesses all, and gets married to him.
The Church was horrified: this was no Hogarthian moral tale which said ‘live a wild and promiscuous life and you will end up impoverished, diseased and dead’ – instead it was an explicit, highly salacious, story which said that you can eat your cake and still have it. You can have a great sex life, have a lot of fun along the way, find true love as a result of your sexual adventures between the sheets, get married and live happily ever after.
For nearly a year the authorities took no action but in November 1749 charged Cleland with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects.’ Faced with a spell in prison and a heavy fine, Cleland renounced the novel and it was officially withdrawn, but immediately pirated editions appeared. For over 200 years no official unexpurgated version was printed, but that is not to say that it disappeared – it simply went underground. When William Wilberforce helped found the Proclamation Society in 1787 it had as its aim the suppression of ‘all loose and licentious Prints, Books, and Publications, dispersing Poison to the Minds of the Young and Unwary, and to punish the Publishers and Vendors thereof ’ and a number of booksellers and publishers were prosecuted. In 1788 Londoner John Morgan was charged with having published a book called The Battle of Venus – described in court as ‘a certain nasty filthy Bawdy and obscene Libel’. The court sentenced him to a year in prison and a spell in the pillory for having attempted to ‘corrupt the morals of all the youths of this kingdom and to bring them into a state of wickedness lewdness debauchery and brutality’. A year later a James Hodges was hauled before the Kings Bench to answer charges that he had published Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure, in an edition which featured a number of sexually explicit engravings showing ‘Men and Women not only in the Act of Carnal copulation in various attitudes and
position but also with their private parts exposed in various other lewd and indecent attitudes and Postures’. Those explicit illustrations set a bench-mark for subsequent caricaturists – such as Thomas Rowlandson., and helped set the stage for highly scatological engravings by satirists like James Gillray and Richard Newton.
Pressure from moral reforming groups led to a number of obscenity prosecutions in the second half of George III’s reign, but the methods used by the prosecution were highly questionable, often using blatant entrapment. Public disquiet at these methods came to a head after the Society for the Suppression of Vice charged an itinerant Italian printseller by the name of Baptista Bertazzi with distributing obscene prints. An undercover agent, paid by the Society, had persuaded Bertazzi to obtain obscene material on the pretence of wanting to re-sell the material to a third party. Bertazzi obtained the prints, was promptly arrested, and in his subsequent trial in 1802 details of the fraudulent and immoral tactics used by the Society came to light. Moral crusaders such as William Wilberforce distanced themselves from the methods used, and public support for further prosecutions quickly faded. Nevertheless, in its annual report in 1825 the Society for the Suppression of Vice was able to assert that it had prosecuted fourteen authors for ‘infidel and blasphemous’ material in the previous seven years.
Freedom of the Press had long been considered a cornerstone of ‘Britishness’ – it helped distinguish the country from its continental neighbours. There had been a number of attempts by the government to curb this freedom, but whenever Parliament debated the topic there were fierce arguments in favour of the right to free speech (even where what was being said or depicted was clearly libellous). As the playwright and Member of Parliament Richard Brinsley Sheridan said in 1798:
The press should be unfettered, that its freedom should be, as indeed it was, commensurate with the freedom of the people and the well-being of a virtuous State; on that account even one hundred libels had better be ushered into the world than one prosecution be instituted which might endanger the liberty of the press of this country.
Libel proceedings were, however, brought against authors and artists, but in many cases the heavy-handedness of prosecutions backfired. In its place the government of the day started to rely on bribery to try and control journalistic attacks. When The Times newspaper first made an appearance, under the guise of The Daily Universal Register in 1785, it was little more than a scandal sheet but the proprietor John Walters quickly realised that he could make money – £300 a year – in return for agreeing to publish stories favourable to the government. However, Walters was no fawning lackey and he also published scandalous stories about famous public figures such as the Prince of Wales – and was rewarded for his efforts with a £50 fine and a two-year spell in prison.
The heavy-handed approach was exemplified by the prosecution of John Wilkes. In 1752 Wilkes had befriended Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Potter was more than your run-of-the-mill debauched rake, since his private life included acts of bestiality, and he had started to pen a satire on Pope’s An Essay on Man.
When Potter died in 1759 Wilkes inherited the manuscript and modified it to become An Essay on Woman. Pope had started his ‘Essay’ with the words:
Awake, my St John! Leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.
Let us (since Life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
The parody version used this as its opening stanza:
Awake, my Fanny! Leave all meaner things;
This morn shall prove what rapture swiving* brings!
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just a few good fucks, and then we die)
At the time, many regarded it as the filthiest poem ever written. In 1763 Wilkes had a dozen copies printed off for the amusement of his friends in the Hellfire Club. There is no evidence that he intended it for wider, public, consumption but Wilkes was already in trouble with the authorities because of an article he had written for the North Briton – a blatant attack on the government of Lord Bute. Bute was from Scotland (the North Briton referred to in the title) and edition 45 of the North Briton directly attacked Lord Bute and, by association, George III for his speech to the opening of Parliament. Wilkes contended that Bute and the King had betrayed the best interests of Great Britain in agreeing the terms of peace with France in the treaty of Paris, but his outspoken criticism led to him being seized and charged with seditious libel. He was one of a large group of people charged, but Wilkes was able to argue successfully that his case was covered by parliamentary privilege, on account of the fact that he was MP for Aylesbury. He then tried to sue the government for breaching his civil rights.
Infuriated at being wrong-footed, the government were determined to bring Wilkes down. As it happened, one of the members of the Hellfire Club was Lord Sandwich, a notorious whore-monger and libertine. He was the Secretary of State at the time and in that capacity had bribed or bullied the printer of the poem to hand over a copy for inspection. Quite possibly the poem was then modified by government hacks in order to make it even more blasphemous and obscene. Sandwich felt particularly incensed by the poem An Essay on Woman because Wilkes had been a long-term thorn in his side and had played an infamous practical joke on him at the Hellfire Club. Furthermore, Wilkes had cheekily dedicated the poem to the courtesan Fanny Murray, one of Lord Sandwich’s many lovers. Sandwich offered to drop proceedings against Wilkes if Wilkes would drop his case against the government. Wilkes refused and, on 15 September 1763, Sandwich read out the entire poem before the peers assembled in the House of Lords, one of whom commented that he ‘never before heard the devil preach a sermon against sin’. The charge before their Lordships was that the poem libelled the Bishop of Gloucester. All of their Lordships would have known full well that the poem was in part written by Potter, at a time when he was bedding the Bishop of Gloucester’s wife. To be cuckolded by Potter was one thing; to have that fact broadcast before your colleagues in the House of Lords must have been totally humiliating. But the House was horrified at the blasphemous final lines – probably not written by either Potter or Wilkes, and more likely to have been inserted in order to gain maximum opposition to the poem. Swept up by the carnival nature of the occasion, Parliament found Wilkes guilty of libel and expelled him from the House.
Horace Walpole felt that the plot:
… so hopefully laid to blow up Wilkes was so gross and scandalous, so revengeful and so totally unconnected with the political conduct of Wilkes, and the instruments so despicable, odious, or in whom any pretentions to decency, sanctimony or faith were so preposterous that, losing all sight of the scandal contained in the poem, the whole world almost united in crying out against the informers.
Wilkes fled the country in December 1763 in order to avoid punishment for his ‘crime’ and remained in exile in France until his triumphant return in 1768. He was elected as MP for Middlesex, and was promptly thrown into prison for having evaded justice by going into exile. Enraged at finding their hero in prison, the supporters of Wilkes rioted and in the ensuing fracas seven people were killed and fifteen injured in what was known as the St George’s Fields Massacre. Wilkes remained in prison until 1773, and on his release was appointed a sheriff of London, being made up to Lord Mayor the following year. In time he abandoned most of his radical connections and ended up as a supporter of William Pitt the Younger.
The whole story of the proceedings based on An Essay on Woman merely showed the futility of legislating against lewd, satirical and libellous publications. Perhaps it explains in part why those in power generally took no action against the owners of print shops selling scurrilous prints, which mushroomed in London from 1770 onwards. Put simply: bribery was a more effective weapon than prosecution. It cost less, kept the offensive material off the streets, and did not lead to public disorder or offend public ideas of decency and morality.
Nevertheless, a charge of seditious libel – in other words a libel calculated or likely to cause public disorder and undermine the government – was a draconian measure used by the Crown on several occasions, and it was a serious threat to the much vaunted freedom of speech enjoyed by the British Press. Sedition had always been a crime at Common Law, and charges were brought in 1792 against Thomas Paine for his work The Rights of Man¸ in which he set forth the idea that the public have a right to overthrow the government of the day if it ceases to act in the public interest. Given what was happening in France at the time of the French Revolution, this was incendiary stuff, and Paine was found guilty, fleeing to France to escape punishment. His printer William Holland was not so lucky, and ended up spending a year in Newgate, leaving the young caricaturist Richard Newton to run the print-shop for him and to publish his drawings. The Sedition Trials were followed by the 1794 Treason Trials, in which some thirty radicals were rounded up, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and faced trials where the penalty was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Thanks in part to the brilliance of the lawyer Thomas Erskine, the first three radicals (Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall) were acquitted and the remaining treason charges were dropped, to great public acclaim.
In Bed with the Georgians Page 10
