University of Virginia Library

Libertine Literature

The return to the British Museum brought a sense of anti-climax. There was talk of Foxon's being given time to complete his catalogue, but it never materialized. Indeed, the next serious step towards completion was delayed until Foxon left the Museum in 1965. Nevertheless, this period saw the publication of four important articles in the Book Collector in 1963 as a result of the accidental discovery of an advertisement for The School of Venus, or the Lady's Delight in the Daily Advertiser for 25 August 1744. Foxon recognized this as a reference to L'École des Filles, a French pornographic work referred to in English literature but with no known English translation. The discovery that there had been a translation set off an enquiry into early English pornographic publications, their continental antecedents, and finally, in an article requested by John Hayward, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Fanny Hill. The essays were subsequently issued together as Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745, and then published, with an

introduction by Foxon, in the United States in 1965. This was a pioneering exercise in the scholarly history and bibliography of pornography, and one still referred to today.[21] Using legal records, advertisements, and bibliographical and literary analysis, Foxon was able to show the patterns of diffusion of the texts and estimate their potential importance as historical sources. Publication of articles on such a subject, even ones as scholarly as Foxon's, was still regarded as daring, and one distinguished bibliographer warned Foxon that it would ruin his career. But Foxon's period in psychoanalysis, and a short research visit to the Kinsey Institute during his time in the States, gave him confidence to pursue these intellectual puzzles like any others encountered in his work, and Hayward, who was the editor of Rochester, encouraged him. Publication was timely, for it coincided with the new freedom in sexuality recorded wistfully by Philip Larkin in his `Annus Mirabilis':

Although Foxon had no programme of liberation in mind, he was bibliography's representative in this historical shift, and the measured tone of his writing goes alongside a conviction that old hypocrisies must be blown away and new moral judgements made.

In Libertine Literature Foxon interprets the advertisement for The School of Venus as a clue to a hidden vein of English culture. It had been assumed there had been no pornography in the seventeenth century, except for Rochester, and that the first legal proceedings had been against Curll in 1727. Foxon argues that, on the contrary, there had been rapid importation of French pornography and a willingness to risk prosecution. The first chapter is informed by his visits to the Public Record Office during his lunch hours and lists government actions against pornography from 1660 to 1745. He paints a lively picture of the trade in pornography by printers, publishers, and hawkers, with a particularly telling glimpse of the Brett family, who sent out their children to buy `The Complete Set of the Charts of Merryland' and The School of Venus for selling on to customers, and of George Spavan, who made a guinea a week from sales of The School of Venus alone. The

account of gentleman purchasers includes Pepys, Wycherley, Learnerd, and Ravenscroft, but perhaps the most amusing episode is the attempt of the gentlemen of All Souls to print Aretine's Postures at the University Press. Sadly for the young gentlemen, Dean Fell turned up unexpectedly and confiscated the prints and plates; about sixty prints had already been distributed `but Mr. Dean hath made them call them in again and commit them to the fire' (1964 edn., 7).

from Aretine onwards, while the third, on Satyra Sotadica and Vénus dans le cloitre, examines a series of translations of the former, including a `sucker-trap' from that most respectable of booksellers, Jacob Tonson. In the final chapter, on Fanny Hill, Foxon tells the story of its prosecution, printing a letter from its author Cleland for the first time, and then, partly on the basis of ornament evidence, clarifies the bibliography of the early editions. He shows that the version with the sodomitical episode is the first, and it was on this understanding of the textual history that Peter Sabor was later to base his edition for Oxford University Press in 1985. The proposal in the late sixties that Foxon should himself edit the text for the Oxford Novels series was turned down on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe.