The Erotomaniac: 'Illustrating the kinship between capitalism and perversion'

Lucy Cavendish reviews for Photoicon:

They may have appeared uptight and respectable, but beneath the starched collars and long rustling crinolines, the Victorians were obsessed with sex. In fact, if Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac, the biography of Henry Spencer Ashbee, is anything to go by, what typified the era was an explosion of exploratory erotic writing in all its manifestations.

In 1900 an unusual offer was made to the trustees of the British Museum in London. A recently deceased rich Englishman had bequeathed his collection of books and illustrations of Don Quixote to the nation, but with a condition: that the museum also take and preserve for posterity his vast library of erotic books in numerous languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, even Latin.

When the importance of the Cervantes material became apparent to the museum trustees, they accepted the bequest, but kept quiet about the erotica. However, what was called the "Private Case," containing many outstanding works of erotica continued to be stored in the basement without the titles ever being catalogued. For seventy years the books were barred from the eyes of researchers. But today things have changed.

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My Secret Life was impounded for decades by customs authorities in England and the United States, and was only published openly in the more liberal 1960s (by the Grove Press). If true, that Ashbee is the author, it would make him not only one of the world's most comprehensive bibliographers of erotica, while he was living one of the nineteenth century's most complex secret lives, he had, too, a remarkable and hitherto unrecognised novelistic talent.

The Erotomaniac reveals that the chief agents of subversion of the Victorian ideal were its most eminent propagators. There is nothing particularly new in this idea. Gibson's achievement, however, is to illustrate with great humour the kinship between capitalism and perversion: punctilious editing, logging of statistics, creative accounting, pedantic detail, endless repetition, obsessive dedication - Ashbee tackled his project of transforming sex into text in the same spirit as he did free trade.

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