Claudine Van Hensbergen, an Oxford Don, has disinterred some early Georgian smut from a 1714 edition of The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon. The poems, found in a sub-section titled ‘The Cabinet of Love’, were added by the publisher, Edmund Curll, and are definitely not by John Wilmot, although I imagine he would have cackled along to the bawdy rhymes. Van Hensbergen told the Times (£):
“To my surprise, The Cabinet turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include Dildoides, a poem attributed to Samuel Batler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, The Delights of Venus, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and The Discovery, a poem about a man hiding in a woman’s room to watch her masturbate in bed.”
Curll was running from the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, we merely answer to public decency. Having already published pictures of the diaphanously-clad Sally Bercow, sensitive newspapers have decided that one blaze of immodesty will suffice.
Curll’s subterfuge was common, the chosen means for libertines to outwit the censors. Innocuous covers concealed filthy secrets. The most infamous book of the period was L’Ecole des Filles; a manual in depravity masquerading as a book of manners. It was immortalised by naughty Samuel Pepys. On 18 January 1668, Pepys wrote:
‘The French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called ‘L’Escolles des Filles’, but when I came to look into it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw.’
The agonising Pepys took time to decide the fate of this ‘lewd book’. On 9th February, he wrote:
‘Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office, doing business and also reading a little of ‘L’Escolles des Filles’, which is 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. And in the evening, I to my chamber, where I did read through ‘L’Escolles des Filles’, a lewd book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake and after I had I done it, I burned it, that it might not be among books to shame; and so at night to supper and then to bed.’
And so was it ever thus: nothing like informing oneself of the villainy of the world.
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