My Secret Life (memoir)

My Secret Life, by "Walter", is the memoir of a gentleman describing the author's sexual development and experiences in Victorian England. It was first published in a private edition of eleven volumes, at the expense of the author, including an imperfect index, which appeared over seven years beginning around 1888.

The title page of a My Secret Life reprint published in 1888

The work itself is enormous, amounting to over one million words,[1] the eleven original volumes amounting to over 4,000 pages. The text is repetitive and highly disorganised,[2] but its frank discussion of sexual matters and other hidden aspects of Victorian life make it a rare and valuable social document. According to Steven Marcus, it is virtually the only source for information on London's houses of prostitution, in which Walter spent many hours. It has been described as "one of the strangest and most obsessive books ever written".[3]

Publishing and bans

The first edition was probably printed by Auguste Brancart,[4][5] in an impression of only 25 copies.[1]

In the twentieth century My Secret Life was pirated and reprinted in a number of abridged versions that were frequently suppressed for obscenity. In 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing the first three volumes.

In the USA it was finally published without censorship in 1966 by Grove Press, but in 1969 a British printer, Arthur Dobson, was sentenced to two years' prison for producing a UK reprint. It was not until 1995 that the work in its entirety was published openly in the UK, by Arrow Books.

Authorship

The identity of "Walter" is unknown. There is no scholarly consensus in favour of any of the candidates proposed.

The most commonly suggested author is Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900). He was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer and, from the three volumes he published under his pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, the expert on erotic books in his day. Gershon Legman was the first to link "Walter" and Ashbee, in his introduction to the 1962 reprints of Ashbee's bibliographies, and the 1966 Grove Press edition of My Secret Life included an expanded version of that essay. Ashbee was also identified as Walter by a May 2000, Channel 4 documentary on British TV, Walter: The Secret Life of a Victorian Pornographer - and in 2001 Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac: the secret life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001, ISBN 0-571-19619-5) provided a detailed review of circumstantial evidence arguing that Ashbee wrote My Secret Life, presumably weaving fantasy and anecdotes from friends in with his own real-life experiences. If Ashbee was not the actual author, it is suggested that he may well have been the compiler of the work's lengthy, detailed, and very imperfect index, and have provided other editorial assistance and help in getting the book into print.[6]

On the other hand, Steven Marcus, in his influential The Other Victorians (1966), concluded that the balance of known facts was against Legman's "shrewd and ingenious guess." Also unconvinced were Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen in their detailed study of My Secret Life, Walter, the English Casanova (1967).

A number of other men have been suggested as more likely to be the author, including:

  • William Simpson Potter (1805-1879), a known associate of Ashbee, was put forward by Gordon Grimley in his introduction to the 1972 edition of My Secret Life. Grimley is sceptical of Ashbee's candidacy as the main author. According to Ashbee, Potter was involved in authoring The Romance of Lust, an erotic work centred on incest and a range of sexual encounters.[7]
  • Charles Stanley, a barrister and stockbroker, was put forward in 2000 by Vern Bullough and Gordon Stein as the most likely candidate, the known facts of whose life best coincide with the internal evidence of the work. "Walter" claimed to be a close friend of the barrister in a famous case of the time, which they identify as the case of R v Richard Clarke in 1854. That barrister, William Overend QC, was a childhood friend of Stanley.[6]
  • William Haywood (1821-1894), who was Surveyor and Engineer to the City of London Commissioners of Sewers was suggested by John Patrick Pattinson in 2002 after extensive research.[8][9]

Veracity

The question of how much the book is a record of true experiences (whether of Ashbee or another writer), and how much is fiction or erotic fantasy can probably never be fully resolved. However, the presence of much mundane detail, the writer's inclusion of incidents that do him little personal credit, and the lack of intrinsically improbable circumstances (in contrast to most Victorian erotica) lend it considerable credibility. In spite of "Walter's" obsessive womanising over a period of several decades, only a few of his partners are of his own social class. The great majority are either prostitutes, servants or working class women. This would appear to reflect the realities of his time. Internal evidence from the book suggests that "Walter" was born between 1820 and 1825. In the last volume he notes seeing the books through print, which indicates that he was still alive in the 1890s.[10]

gollark: Unfortunately this is hard.
gollark: One thing I want to do at some point is train a LLM on large amounts of message logs and interface it with one of the *several* developed ways to sort of kind of give them longer-term memory.
gollark: Paste in the article on apioforms and my latest video and such.
gollark: Just try it with few-shot prompting.
gollark: Just use the gollarious synthesizer program™.

References
  1. Sutherland, John, ed. (2009). The Longman companion to Victorian fiction. Pearson Longman. p. 515. ISBN 978-1-4082-0390-3.
  2. For an analysis of the original edition's production and Walter's methods of composition, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians.
  3. Patrick J. Kearney (1982) A History of Erotic Literature. Parragon: 127
  4. Green, Jonathon; Karolides, Nicholas J., eds. (2005). The encyclopedia of censorship. Facts on File library of world history. Infobase Publishing. p. 69. ISBN 0-8160-4464-3.
  5. Kearney, Patrick J. (1982). A history of erotic literature. Parragon. p. 126. ISBN 1-85813-198-7.
  6. Bullough, Vern L (2000). "Who wrote my secret life? An evaluation of possibilities and a tentative suggestion" (PDF). Sexuality and Culture. 4 (1): 37–60. doi:10.1007/s12119-000-1011-y. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  7. Gordon Grimley (1972) My Secret Life; Introduction. London: Granada Publishing, 1972; pp. 7-17
  8. "The Man Who Was Walter". Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge Journals Online. March 2002. Retrieved 17 August 2016.
  9. "The Man Who Was Walter" Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 19-40
  10. Steven Marcus (1969) The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books, 1964; pp. 78-88

Further reading
  • Marcus, Steven, The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966)
  • Kronhausen, Eberhard & Phyllis, Walter: The English Casanova. 512 pages. Ballantine Books, 1967
  • Gibson, Ian, The Erotomaniac: Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee. 285 pages. London: Faber and Faber, 2001
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