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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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?