Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Great Social Evil’ – Representing the Victorian Prostitute
- 1 White-Washed Sepulchres and Wives of Englishmen: William Acton's Representation of English Prostitutes
- 2 From ‘Masses of Rottenness’ to the ‘Queen's Women’: The Report of the Royal Commission (1871)
- 3 Mothers, Sisters and Shameless Women: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Prostitute
- 4 Mercy and Grace: Wilkie Collins and The New Magdalen
- 5 My Secret Life and the Pornographic Representation of Prostitution
- Conclusion: Countering the Myth
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Women are all bought in the market – from the whore to the princess. The price alone is different, and the highest price in money or rank obtains the woman.
‘Walter’ – the anonymous author of this statement – spoke from experience. His erotic memoir, My Secret Life (c. 1890), stands out amid the discursive context of Victorian English pornography in terms of uniqueness, complexity and sheer size. As a catalogue – fictitious or not – of a lifetime of sexual exploits by its author, it has been largely disregarded or marginalized as a valid historical resource. However, pornography has come into its own as an area of study in recent years, not least because it reveals much about the social, cultural and historical contexts in which it is produced. My Secret Life is a valuable text in many ways. It is part of a genre with its own cultural history, but it can also be used as a text with which to enter the cultural world of its production – even if that world is the ‘Victorian erotic imagination’. As an eleven-volume text which recounts a lifetime of sexual exploits by its upper-class author, it provides a mine of information on Victorian sexual practices, attitudes and ideologies. The fact that most of the women in the text were paid for their role in the various sexual encounters makes My Secret Life indispensable for the study of prostitution. But it is more complex than this.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Prostitute's BodyRewriting Prostitution in Victorian Britain, pp. 125 - 144Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014