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Mr Slang recalls his work searching for citations in the notorious work of Victorian erotica My Secret Life. WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS VERY STRONG LANGUAGE AND EXTREME NAUGHTINESS…

The index, as explained to Dabblers by Julia Keay, is a thing of beauty, one that may possibly transcend, for all the labours it demands, the contents whereof it lists. To that end, let me offer a candidate for indicatorial glory. And let me start at the beginning.

If lexicography qualifies as an art, let it never be said that your correspondent is immune from suffering for it. Once upon a time, in pursuit of citations I undertook a labour rarely assumed and more rarely still concluded. Why did I do it: because, of course, it was there. I should explain. And, though such adjurations cut my libertarian soul to the quick, let me also warn. As stated in the catalogue of William Dugdale, a pornographer – perhaps the pornographer – of 19^th century London, ‘every stretch of voluptuous imagination is here fully depicted, rogering, ramming, one unbounded scene of lust, lechery and licentiousness.’ Dugdale was puffing a list that included The Lustful Turk, Flossie, a Venus of Fifteen, The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon and Nunnery Tales. I am talking of My Secret Life.

Between the years of 1888-94 ‘a gentleman’ (as ever: those seeking anonymity do not, unsurprisingly, categorize themselves as ‘a guttersnipe’) summoned regularly from Amsterdam to his residence in London a printer well-versed in the publication of pornographic literature. To this individual he entrusted the manuscript of his erotic memoirs, garnered from some thirty years of sexual adventuring. This memoir, entitled My Secret Life, runs to some eleven books, as near one million words as makes no difference. No author was ever declared, although the writer appears, from conversations he recounts, to be called ‘Walter’. Popular belief, based on the scholarship of the late Gershon Legman, unrivalled analyst of erotic folklore, and more recently on Ian Gibson’s The Erotomaniac, ascribes it to Henry Spencer Ashbee. Ashbee’s day job was respectable commerce; his ‘hobby’, writing as the coarsely punning ‘Pisanus Fraxi’, was the compilation of three massive bibliographies of erotic literature. It was based on a personal collection of ‘facetiae’ and ‘curiosa’ which would form (after the prurient philistines of Great Russell Street had done their castratory worst to the thousands of volumes left them in his will) the core of the British Library’s Private Case.

For ten seemingly endless days I battled the brute, tamed the monster, mounted and rode the juggernaut. I read it from start to end. And my verdict – as we chaps piously intone: honest, really, size doesn’t matter. I am aware that ‘Walter’s’  definitely mag. op. is an ‘erotic’ memoir and not some tacky stroke book; but I’m sorry, vast it may be but erotic it ain’t. Repetitive, definitely; act follows act, partner upon partner, physical variation upon variation, but erotic . . . gertcha! I don’t know how many couplings our hero enjoys, how often his engine / pego / cunt-rammer / doodle / cucumber / stretcher / gristle pokes / shoves / bastes / rogers / bullocks / mounts / whops his partner’s grummet / machine / article / sperm-sucker / pin-cushion / pleasure place / pouter. A couple of thousand perhaps. I do know that for whatever reason (he suggests discretion, claiming therefore to have omitted but for a very few instances his equally numerous experiences with supposedly respectable bourgeoises) he prefers servants and whores (the former reluctant then, invariably, enthusiastic; the latter merely enthusiastic, albeit mercenary) plus the odd teen virgin. He is admirably cosmopolitan – Europe provides as a happy a hunting ground as does the UK – and despite being a Victorian (with all the clichés that we have learned to attribute to that confused and often paradoxical century) remarkably libertarian. He’s no feminist – we can’t have everything – but for all that he treats servants as one might expect, he assumes no special superiority for the crested above the cloven. His synonymity is equally impartial. My Secret Life offers 49 variations for the penis; the vagina gains an equal number. As for what not merely the Victorians, but their 21^st century descendants might condemn as sexually ‘abnormal’, ‘Walter’ has no time. If he condemns any practice as ‘aberrant’, e.g. his occasionally consummated desire for homosexual fellatio (given and gotten both) or his intermittent obsessions with either brand of ‘scat’, then it is never the acts, but simply his own reluctance to perform them that is found wanting. No modern libertarian could fault him on his omnivorous appetites. However, weak and/or squeamish, we might not always wish to follow him all the way on his voyage of sexual self-discovery. Let us pass, for instance, the chapter which finds our hero crouched at a glory hole, gazing rapturously upon the women within.

All good stuff  but as far as erotic goes – thanks but no thanks. Nary a frisson for mind nor body. But, and here I promise is the point, what I do like – and yes, everything you ever  believed (if you even gave us thought) about lexicography is true – what I really like is the Index. It may be discursive at times, and even mis-paginated, but bugger me, it’s unique. Some entries are (and I omit the page refs.) self-explanatory; checking the text almost takes away the fun. ‘Virginities, women want to piddle after defloration’; ‘Sodomites, put pestles up arseholes’; ‘Thrusts of prick, number given when fucking’ (average 45 thrusts/min. apparently); ‘Fucking, with another man present and sucking man’s prick whilst’; ‘Farting, one left in a closet by self’; ‘Cunts, felt in church by me and frigged’; ‘Anus, toothbrush up a man’s while he’s gamahuched’. Others, however, have a mystery all of their own and the mind struggles, after 2300 pages of in, out and equally often round-and-about, to recall the specifics of ‘Apprentice dress-makers, three in a cab’; ‘Barn-loft, page frigging himself in’; ‘Champagne and sperm, singular letch’; ‘Bloody nose and broken pisspot’; ‘Kid gloves and cold cream frigging’; ‘Postage stamp, a woman got by gift of’ and ‘Double-cunted harlot’. The Index also points up another of Walter’s pleasures: philosophy: ‘Prick, is an emblem of the Deity’; ‘Fucking, is obedience to the Divine command “increase and multiply”’ (that said, Walter procures as many abortions as he fathers bastards); ‘Gamahuching, man is superior to the beasts therein’; and ‘Cunts, are divine and not obscene organs.’ Even De Sade, philosophizing in his boudoir, would surely have been impressed.

In a way the forty odd folio columns that make it up are the biggest tease of all. Promising so much and, as I have tried to suggest, delivering all too little. For all the charm of the entries, once accessed the relevant anecdote lends itself too regularly to the same old thing. But then as Walter himself affirms, intercourse itself is repetition, it is but the preliminaries and the posture that differentiate one copulation from another. Elaborate if innately empty form has to offer up a garnish to predictable content.

There were but six printed copies of the mighty tome and but three, apparently, survive. Grove press printed a facsimile in 1966 and I have little doubt that www.bookfinder.com will track one down one if you so desire. Or maybe give it all a miss. Had professional duty not called, that’s what I would have done. In the event it wasn’t even a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.