Nineteenth-Century British Pornography: Sources and Materials

This volume focuses on the entanglement of pornography and science. Although both categories became better defined during the nineteenth century, they intersected in various ways. Documents in the volume illustrate how medical and pornographic writing were treated as companionate genres in the emerging pornography trade, which together furnished customers with what they needed to enjoy healthy, happy sex lives; how medical and scientific writing could be used as a form of entertainment, and informed sexual fantasies in pornographic fiction; and how pornography was used in the making of sexual-scientific knowledge. They also illustrate challenges that these intersections presented for state authorities and scientific fields.