Mighty Lewd Books: The History and Evolution of 18th Century English Pornography - Explore Rare Erotica & Cultural Impact for Collectors & Historians

Professor Julie Peakman has a substantial bibliography of major studies on the subject of erotica, pornography and one interesting looking biography of Lady Hamliton, famous mistress to Admiral, Lord Horatio Nelson.This is a relatively short work giving her analysis of the trends in British erotica. The focus of her studies is not just books with the singular purpose of arousing the reader. She will include materials that were incidentally sexual in content and other that were clearly satiric utilizing sex as topic to underline the extremes of the satire. She will also propose that the "under the counter" publications had both political significance and occasionally educational value. Her chapters will identify the relationship between the advent of new venues and imagery within major pornographic books as these same topics presented themselves to the larger public.The 18th century was notable for new systems of botanical analysis and the beginnings of the understanding of electricity. Following these new trends in public discussion, there would be new variations in the imagery in her books. The chapters mostly focus on the relationship between changes in awareness and knowledge in the public library and how they mirror in the private library. Her last chapters are exception to this model by their focus on Anti-Catholicism and how that was fed into the place and subject matter of erotica and the near unique creation of a british market for books and stories about flagellation.In general, Professor Peakman succeeds in laying out her separate topics, placing them in their historic contacts and relating them to how each topic were being handled in the larger society. She then describes how these same topics were most likely to be presented in the topically inspired pornography.Noteworthy is her analysis of topics where women were the target audience and others where women were the sexual aggressor. Such would not have been the common expectations of this century's non erotic reading public.Given that her method is largely qualitative, I would have preferred that she would have included a larger number of titles to demonstrate her succeeding discussions. In chapter after chapter we see the same titles with most getting few if any direct quotations. She will make frequent usage of terms like "most", "many" and other expression of relative frequency, yet there are no numbers or tables that might serve to validate her assertions. The point is not to convert her work into a quantitative analysis but rather to document at least some of her assertions.Professor Peakman is a scholar with a wide knowledge of the various works of this period. Most chapters refer to the same books and materials giving the work a number of unnecessary repetitious and leaving the impression that the library of English 18th erotica is small.This book is not for the general public. The readership for this book is the courious, but academically trained and the professional academic seeking more than an introduction to the seemier side of 18th Century British literature.