‘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.