Nineteenth-Century British Pornography: Sources and Materials

This volume provides background texts for the early modern origins of pornography including its philosophic and literary foundations. By the early nineteenth-century, pornographic publications came out of the radical milieu during the global age of revolutions. In England, publishers wrote political philosophy and pornography in tandem. The age of revolutionary pornography ended in the 1860s, when William Dugdale, the doyen of them all, died in prison, sentenced to hard labour for obscenity. The volume documents radical publishers including their publications, their trade records, their arrest records, their court trials, and their political goals. It also includes materials from the Society for the Suppression of Vice and other early attempts to limit obscenity and vice.