A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I shall only mention the most prominent among the vast number of English authoresses. Aphra Behn (1644-1689) (akin to Susanne Centlivre, her ' sister spirit in the Lord Priapus' as Johannes Scherr remarks1) was the only obscene woman writer that England produced, yet she possessed a talent by no means to be despised, and in her Oronooko pursued the same aim as, nearly two centuries later, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Miss Fanny Burney (1752-1840), who became Madame d'Arblay, achieved a high reputation in the eighteenth century, though she is known to-day mainly by Macaulay's famous essay, her novels Evelina and Cecilia being almost forgotten. Anna Radcliffe (1764-1823), on the other hand, lives yet; her thrillers are still asked for at lending libraries. The two most prominent women-writers in the nineteenth century were without doubt Felicia Hemans and George Eliot. Mrs. Hemans (1794-1835) sings of God's mercy: her beautifully shaped ' songs, filled with devotion, are sweet- scented roses in the garland of English lyrics 9 (Scherr). commissioning her maid Lucy to fetch frivolous books from different libraries and endeavouring to hide the forbidden fruit from her aunt: ' Lydia: Wait. Somebody's coming. Quick. See who it is. 'Lucy: Oh! It's my Lord and your Aunt. 'Lydia: Quick. Lucy, dear. Hide the books. Throw Tanzai under my toilet. Put Adultere Innocent behind Human Duties. Push Ovid under the pillow, and Bijoux Indiscrets into your pocket.' Crebillon, Scarron and Diderot were also popular. Hogarth, in his c Marriage a la Mode,' portrayed Crebillon's ' Sopha ' lying on the sofa of Lady Squanderfield; and Lichtenberg adds the comment that the book suits a lady's library as nicely as silver balls or sugar plums a Christmas tree. On the other hand, however, as Moritz points out, English classics were widely circulated in the eighteenth century and read by high and low. His landlady, a tailor's widow, read Milton by preference. English people, too, unlike Germans even to-day, bought the books they read. Cheap editions of the classics were owned by everybody. Cf. C. Ph. Moritz, Travels in England in 1782. Leipzig. Pp. 34-35. 1 J. Scherr, General History of Literature, ninth edition. Stuttgart, 1895. Vol. II, p. 47. [42]