My Secret Life and the Victorian Era
The flower language played an important role during the Victorian Era
The Victorian era was an era of rapid change as the rural society turned into a urban society, it was also a time of contraditions.. A class system that permitted exploitation gave rise to a plethora of social movements, and phenomena such as child labour existed side by side with the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and high morals.
Few people have a correct view of the morals of the Victorian viewers and even fewer do as an example know that Queen Victoria collected nude drawings of men while at the same time communication between lovers was so proscrived that courting couples communicated in clandestine ways such as by using the flower language. The Victorian era was also a period when scientists studied and published articles on the female orgasm, and numerous erotic letters from the period has survived into our time. During this era a lot of written erotica were available, and this is believed to partly be due to increased literacy within the UK and one of the most famous example of Victorian erotica is the famous memoir “My Secret Life” using the penname Walter and “The Pearl, A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading”, this was a montly magazine that survived for a mere 18 months from 1879-1880.
My Secret Life is supposed to be a memoir wherein a Victorian gentleman truthfully describes his sexual development and his sexual experinces. How much of it that is actually the true experiences of the writer (or of any other Victorian gentleman) and not simply erotic fantasy will probably never be fully resolved, but the story does lack the overabundance of fundamentally improbable circumstances that were a common feature in fictional Victorian erotica. The author of the book is not afraid to include less than flattering details about himself and the book include a lot of mundane details.
My Secret Life was first published as a private edition of eleven volumes which gradually appeared over the course of seven years, from 1888 and onward. The eleven volumes spans more than 4000 pages. The first edition is believed to have been very small, perhaps consisting of no more than 20 copies. Sections of My Secret Life was publsihed during the 1900s but censorship was a large problem for anyone trying to publish the work. A New York publisher was for instance arrested in 1932 after reprinting the first three volumes, and it would take until 1966 before My Secret Life was finally published without censure in the USA. It was published by Grove press which is famous for having published D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover ” and the first edition of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer“, they are also well know for publishing the works of controverial political icons such as Malcolm X and R©gis Debray.
The British weren’t as liberal as the Yankees and when British printer Arthur Dobson published a UK reprint of My Secret Life he was sentenced to two years in prison in 1969. The complet work was not openly publsihed in the UK without repercussions untill 1995. The publisher was Arrow Books.
The writer of my secret life is still unknown but many people believe that Henry Spencer Ashbee, a book collector, bibliographer and writer is the writer or at the very least the compiler of the book collecting material from his own life and the lives of his friends to compile it.
