Erotic Books of the Regency

Joanna here, taking about dirty books available in the Regency because some of you have gray weather outside and you may need cheering up.

What it is ... I’m going to argue that our rakish heroes would have read erotic books. It’s human. It’s manly. It would help make them good lovers.

A hero reading

 

I think some of my favorite Regency heroines did the reading, too.

Perhaps not my own characters, who seem to have tough childhoods for some reason,
but those dashing, brave and wise women who live on my Keeper Shelf. I think they read erotic books.

I see a heroine at ten or twelve, creeping into the library and sneaking a peek at the Song of Songs. They’ve heard about it . . . Maybe it’s the heroine and a few choice friends. Maybe they’re giggling. Maybe just puzzled.

I picture them reading,

“I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me.
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field;
let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards;
let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth:
there will I give thee my love.”

The heroine looks over at Sukey the maid and Jenny who lives in the house next door and says plaintively, “But what does that mean?”

“It’s symbolic,” Jenny says.

“Oh.”

 

What did the heroes and heroines read when they got a bit older and still had questions?

Did they read the ancient stuff? Sexy, erotic, and downright obscene literature was all over the ancient world.
You got yer Sappho, yer Catullus, yer Ovid ... 

Sappho

Silence breaks my tongue and subtle
fire streams beneath my skin,
I can’t see with my eyes, or hear
through buzzing ears.

Sweat runs down, a shiver shakes
Me deep — I feel as pale as grass:
As close to death as that, and green,
Is how I seem.

     Sappho

 

This is tame stuff compared to what you can find on any supermarket shelf in 2018, but it might be startling in 1800.

Could the hero and heroine have read Sappho?
Well, maybe not Sappho.

English translation of a few of Sappho’s poems would have been available in scholarly journals and books in the Regency, which is to say, not available to the hero or heroine unless they were frightfully scholarly themselves. Few Regency folks learned Greek in school. Think of Keats being so blown away by Chapman's translation of Homer.
Interestingly, Sappho’s work was deliberately translated as heteroerotic till the Twentieth Century.

 

But there were plenty of bawdy Latin writers.

And, when scholars wanted to say something indelicate in their serious works, they left it in (or put it into) Latin. Gibbons in his hefty Decline and Fall, (as the King put it, "Another damned fat book, Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?"), left the explicit parts in Latin.

I'm sure English schoolboys swotted up on their Latin to get to the dirty parts.

Those boys, our hero among them, would have read Ovid’s poems in the original Latin. Even the more explicit poems would have been available in English translation, hidden among Ovid's large body of more respectable work. 

attrib MaryHarrsch

 

 

There is no shame to take off your tunic
And put your thigh upon a man’s thigh.
Bury your tongue between crimson lips.
Passion comes from love in a thousand ways,
Do not let your pleasant words cease.
Let the bed shake with licentious movement!

      Ovid

  

Anyone could have bought Ovid’s Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris in a bookstore. Our hero and heroine could lean back in a comfy chair by the fire with a pot of tea and read that story of an old, old extramarital affair in English or Latin.

Translation of some other Latin poetry would have been a tad more difficult. Take Catullus.

Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,

I will not provide a translation because this is a family blog, but it’s here if you’re curious. It's fairly rude.

Schoolboy Latinists shouted these insults at each other on the playing fields of Eton, but Catullus in this mood wouldn’t have been available in published English translation till the Twentieth Century.

 

What about native bawdy English poems and novels?
This is a more thickly populated landscape than you might think, actually.

Fanny Hill and Moll Flanders would be the best-known major works, available in broad-minded bookstores. (Though the explicit male/male sex scene of Fanny Hill was cut from most editions until the late Twentieth Century.) Maybe even, discreetly, in an ordinary lending library. Possibly our heroine sent a long-suffering male friend to ask for it.

A vast array of transient and minor explicit works existed. Our hero or heroine might run across some of them, passed around in the secrecy of the girls’ dormitory at night, exchanged with a laugh at White’s or Boodles. Here’s a lovely list of minor Eighteenth Century works. Or see the whole texts of some bawdy C18 works on line here.

What does this mean to us as readers?
Romancelandia is a wide country with many states and principalities. In Regency Historicals we can choose characters of sophisticated knowledge or characters of great innocence. Both are true to history.

 

A heroine reading

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you see any of your favorite Regency heroes or heroines reading and enjoying bawdy books?  Does this make them more human? More interesting?

Or does it interfere with the Romance of the story?

Comments

[Anne Gracie]

I'm not responding to the question -- sorry, Joanna -- I just wanted to say that your comment on boys reading naughty stuff in the original Latin and Greek, reminded me of the stuffy suitor on Heyer's "Venetia" -- forgotten his name -- who scolded Venetia's scholarly young brother Aubrey for "sullying his sister's ears" and telling her "warm stories" because she knew about Medea (or someone like that.) Aubrey's indignation that he could call classical literature "warm stories" always made me chuckle.

[Joanne Bourne]

Yes! Aubrey, I think.

And this would have been true to life from Regency to Twentieth Century.

I imagine lots of women today remember a girlhood full of, "That book is for your younger brother, dear, not for you."

[Patricia Rice]

I have a scene in one of my magical Malcolm books where the h/h have a giggling good time and more after discovering their host's library of erotica. ;) And when they weren't reading, they had lots of paintings and statues to study!

Great topic for a wintry day...

[Mary T]

I can imagine all of my Regency heroes reading bawdy books. The heroines too, if they had the chance. I doubt that women had as much access to such things, but I'm sure they would be just as interested. I recall in one of Julia Quinn's Bridgerton books, one of the daughters paying one of the housemaids to clue her in to what happens in the marriage bed.

I say it is only human nature.

[Mary Jo Putney]

My goodness, Joanna, you've certainly added spice to a cold winter's day! *G* For those who thought sex was invented in the '60s, this is proves that there is nothing new under the sun, or under the covers. *G*

[Sue McCormick]

Personally, I wasn't interested in bawdy books until after I was married, so in my early reading I wouldn't have noticed whether the hero/heroine indulged or not. (Although I DID try to understand the birds and bees by following the cyclical definitions in the dictionary. AND I was told that Science Fictions wasn't for girls! — 1940s SF was pretty much as sanitary as any literature around.)

In my adult reading, I believe several characters have found foreign erotica — Jo Beverly's Rogues series, among others. I find it interesting when it's part of the story and don't miss it when it's not.

I am always fascinated by the research you Wenches do! I wouldn't have thought of this topic, but I completely enjoyed it.

[Mary M.]

What a great post, Joanna! And capped off by that wonderful Carl Sesar translation. (That poem, BTW, broke Google Translate, which had made short work of the Greek ones above it.) Great point to it, too--the poem is not the poet. Your whole post felt like the "other shoe dropping" from when as a teenager in the '50s I found my mother had burned my copy of Forever Amber (the remains were in the incinerator, alas) and I didn't even know why she did that. Rather Victorian, was my mama.

[Faith Freewoman]

I really enjoyed this post, Joanna! I keep meaning to delve into Ovid translations, but best of all are those lists, especially the bawdy C18 words. They sound like lots of fun.

Cheers, Faith

[Faith Freewoman]

Ooops! The whole texts of 18C works link isn't working...did a fast scan and can't find another likely like, either. Bummer.

Cheers, F

[Lillian Marek]

Back in the dim and distant past, when everyone still read Romeo and Juliet in freshman year of high school just as my mother had, I read a commentary that talked about the nurse as a comic character. Odd, because she didn’t seem funny to me. Then when I was in college and took a Shakespeare course, I read the play again and discovered that the version we read in high school had been expurgated. That struck me as kind of silly, since all they would have had to do was leave out the notes and none of us would have understood what she was saying.

It was sort of the same thing with Chaucer. I went scurrying to the library to find the tales that were left out of our anthology and was severely disappointed to discover that they really didn’t offer much by way of practical information—just a bunch of slapstick and bare bums.

As for the characters in romance reading erotica, well, it all depends on who they are, doesn’t it?

[Grace Burrowes]

Now I know why my dear, scholarly sister found it so easy to study Latin for decades. I'm guessing the average Regency university grad would also have had a host of French titles available for his erotic education as well, and for the ambitious, Italian.
Great, fun post, as always!

[Joanne Bourne]

I merely brushed the surface of the subject, as per usual.

French presses,freed from one sort of censorship under the monarchy, plunged into another, more complicated set of restrictions under the succession of Revolutionary groups. The majority of erotica remained both illicit and widely sold, as it had always been.

Among the many disruptions of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was in the distributiion of illicit erotic books. Neither good French wine nor good French erotica was available for a while. Did they smuggle in books with the wine?

This question receives less attention than it deserves.

A bibliography for the serious student at
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0121.xml

French naughty books would have been more accessible to our Regency heroine than any Latin ones. I see her swiping them from her brother and sneaking them back to school to hide under her mattress and share.

[Joanne Bourne]

In Beauty Like the Night, my hero Raoul breaks into a library to steal jewels and comes across the owner's stash of pornography.

Become a thief; get to know humanity very well.

[Joanne Bourne]

Very human.

One reason for looking at the subject is it makes us realize the characters in 1800 had a lot in common with us.

[Joanne Bourne]

One big difference between "naughty" historical books and naughty books of 2018 is that we seem to have a lot more variety. *g*

Looking at this tells us so much about how different the Regency was ... and how similar.

[Joanne Bourne]

A writer wants to create a fully formed character. Curiosity, maybe a bit of rebellion, daring -- these are all inside the heroines who explore this subject in 1811.

We can use a little book, quickly hidden, to show a lot about the new young wife.

[Joanne Bourne]

At the link, they call Carl Sesar's translation "playful". That describes it so well. It gives the "feel" of the original.

So Catullus "broke" Google translate. That makes me smile.

[Joanne Bourne]

For some reason, the links in this posting aren't working for everyone.

I don't know why. This link may lead to a cached version.

Try copying this URL into the search box of your search engine.

http://patrickspedding.blogspot.com/2009/07/18ce-texts-online.html%20

[Joanne Bourne]

I'm always appalled and amused by American efforts to protect the purity and innocence of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.

It does indicate the innocence of the fifty-year-olds who are doing this.

[Patricia Burroughs aka Pooks]

I've read some Victorian erotica--mainly because my friend and mentor when I first started writing [romance, of course!] had a collection. I was astonished to learn from her that if you went into Barnes & Noble or any of the book chains at the time, it was easy to find--because the author was "Anonymous." Yes, you went to the As and looked for the author Anonymous and found a plethora of erotica. Jackpot!

[Kareni]

What an enjoyable post! Thank you, Joanna. My daughter majored in Latin at college, and she'd share intriguing snippets of Latin works from time to time. People haven't changed much over the past few thousand years.

[Leslie Knowles]

Fun to read this. The heroine in one of my (as yet)unpublished manuscripts discovers a "naughty book" in her host's library that shocks at the same time as it educates her... a fun scene that hints at what she learns without becoming graphic. Curiosity about erotica has been around since the first time someone hid it.

[Joanne Bourne]

*g*
So true. So true.

I see a couple of skin-clad Cro Magnon kids sneaking into some prehistorical cave niche full of fertility statues.

"Wow," says one.
"People don't really look like that," says the other.
"Impressive, anyway."

[Joanne Bourne]

And it tells us so much about the young heroine.

Obviously she will turn out to be a Force To Be Reckoned With someday.

[Joanne Bourne]

Now I picture some time-travelling Medieval troubadour, visiting the mid-Twentieth Century, looking through B&N for his collected works, puzzled by the literary company he finds himself among.

Victorian erotica is different from C18 and Regency Erotica in both content and the attitude toward it. Fascinating stuff for students of historical literature.

Well. For students of literature today, too. All part of the human condition.