The Pornographic Book Trade During the Mid to Late Victorian Era (probably SFW)

For this post, I decided to combine two loves of mine, history and books. My bibliophile adventures began many years ago, soon it became a magnificent obsession.

Some of the diverse books in my collection include; Old Medical texts, Historical Fiction, Vintage, newer non-fiction, Mystical, Spiritual, Paperback Pulp Fiction and Author publisher pre-releases. There are probably several hundred books in my collections and it’s been thinned down.

While researching a colorful book purchased years ago, titled “The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline”, I Inadvertently stumbled across some information on the pornographic book trade in 19th century London.

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The location for this Victorian era debauchery was Holywell Street in London. It was hardly a hidden world, Holywell Street and obscenity were synonymous.

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Holywell Street in the 1860s. The sign for 'H. Smith, Bookseller' on the right-hand side may possibly be that of William Dugdale, one of the most prolific erotica publishers of the time who often used the pseudonym 'H. Smith' on his publications.
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Subversive books and pamphlets were being published in large quantities having been flamed by the French Revolution. Holywell street became a gathering place for societies radicals, spies, informers and wanna be publishers who regularly were charged with acts of sedition, blasphemy and obscenity.

It’s believed that by 1834 there were an 57 porn shops on Holywell Street. Selling novels, prints, etchings, catalogs on available prostitute services, guides for homosexuals and BDSM connoisseurs.

Author Lydia states 'The obscenities of Holywell Street' grew out of a radical past. In the first decades the street was occupied by radical pressmen: freethinkers, who published tracts on politics, religion and sexuality and who, in the decades following the Revolution in France, were spied on by police informers and prosecuted for sedition, blasphemy and obscenity. This was the home of the literature of radicailsm and of a type of bawdy publishing dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy and immorality of the ruling classes. Holywell Street bore the traces of this political radicalism through the nineteenth century, as its activities shifted from freethinking to pornography.'

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A very short list of available titles back in the day on Holywell Street.

The Autobiography of A Flea
The story is narrated by a flea who tells the tale of a beautiful young girl named Bella whose burgeoning sexuality is taken advantage of by her young lover Charlie, the local priest Father Ambrose, two of his colleagues in holy orders and her own uncle. Bella is then employed to procure her best friend, Julia for the sexual enjoyment of both the priests and of her own father.
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The Autobiography of a Flea was originally printed in ca 1888 from the 1901 reprint.

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A 19th-century “French postcard” from the personal collection of the German-Austrian psychiatrist and early sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing.
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Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877) by Henry Spencer Ashbee (collector of vast amounts of porn) under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi.

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The Story of a Dildoe! (1880), Title page to the 1891 edition

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Randiana, or Excitable Tales; Being the Experiences of an Erotic Philosopher (1884)

An Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker

The Horn Book, or A Girl’s Guide to the Knowledge of Good and Evil (1899)

The Delights of Love

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881)

My Secret Life 1888

The porn trade of London pornography didn’t disappear with the destruction of the Holywell Street bookshops; they moved to Charing Cross Road which became the new epicenter for erotic books. Then onto Soho where sex bookshops can still be found to this day.
Excepted from

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Holywell Street leveled in 1902
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