Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victorian London's Hidden Porn Trade

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Holywell Street, just off London's Fleet Street, was the hidden epicentre of Victorian pornography.The Daily Telegraph described it as "the vilest street in the civilised world," so naturally, we wanted to know all of the smutty details.Joining Kate to take us into this hidden world is Dr. Matthew Green, author of Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain.What does this tell us about Victorian society as a whole? What went on upstairs in these shady bookshops? And what were some of the most popular titles of the period? Let's go Betwixt the Sheets to find out.This episode was edited by Siobhan Dale and producer by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixtus. Fancy seeing you here. Do you come here often? I do. But before anybody does any coming at all, I have to give you your fair do's warning.

Mm-hmm. Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way about a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. All right, now that we've got that out of the way, let's do this.

Come with me on a walk through Victorian London, betwixtas. A stone's throw from the centre of the respectable publishing world of Fleet Street. Down a side street lurks an underworld of shady, sinful bookshops. Welcome to Hollywell Street, Victorian London's epicentre of Smat. If you ever wanted to get your rocks off to some seriously basic literature, this was your destination. Among the 30-odd bookshops, you'll find copies of all your favourite.

The lustful Turk, the fanciful extreme of fucksters, and of course the masterpiece that is the story of a dildo. Take your time. Have a good browse. We'll meet back at a coffee house for a debrief shortly. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister.

Now, we all know that the Victorians had a reputation for a certain prudishness, a prudishness that is matched only by their absolute love of everything filthy. With the printed word exploding in popularity and photography not far behind, it was only a matter of time before, pornography found a much wider audience. And in many ways, the Victorians were the pioneers of porn. But who are the main characters who were peddling these titillating titles? What stories lurks between their pages? And how did the authorities react to this outrageous new art form? Joining us today is Matthew Green, author of Shadowlands, a journey through Britain's lost cities and vanished villages, to take us back there and to find out. I am really. ready if you are betwixters, let's do this.

Hello and welcome to betwixta sheet. It's only Matt Green. How are you doing? I'm good, thanks. Thank you for having me on. It's a topic I've never spoken about before and I'm excited to do so. I'm thrilled to talk to you about this because one of the groups of people that I study a lot is the Victorians.

And I think one of the things that fascinate me about them is that everyone thinks that they're very, fruitish and repressed and puttinged up and that they were shocked by sex. But this is not the case. Well, that's what I thought as well, until I did this research into this kind of secret street in London called Holywell Street. And it was described by one of the newspapers as a place where dirt and darkness meet and make mortal compact. Daily Telegraph described it as the vilest street in the civilized world. So I dug into it a bit more and it turned out that it was just awash with pornography. And like if you'd said, what were you doing this afternoon?

I'm going for a little trip down Holywell Street. Everyone would have known exactly what you were doing. And I started reading as many of the books that they had on sale there. And my conclusion was exactly what you just said. Part of Victorian society, at least, were far from prudish and repressed. And in fact, were quite the opposite. You couldn't say that they invented porn because we've had porn as long as people have been able to draw willies on cave walls, right?

but I think mass-produced porn on an industrial level. I think you could say that that was the Victorian. Yeah, exactly. And this street was right next to Fleet Street. It was a kind of overspill, if you like. So it was a place, you know, if you'd walked up and down, you would have heard the hammering and the squelching and the... I was going to say of the printing press, but great.

The first of many innuendos, I'm sure. And if you go mudlacking, you can find brothel tokens and phallic. from the Roman period, but yeah, on an industrial scale, I'd say this can lay a strong claim to being the first kind of street of porn. But the whole thing was, of course, officially forbidden. Wow. A street of porn. All right, all right. So we're going to focus on this street,

which was sort of like an epicentre of Victorian Britain's pawn trade. I don't want to say where did the street come from, because it'll have been there for a long time. But when did it start acquiring that reputation? Who was the first pornographer that moved him? To take those questions in turn, it was obviously, I would say, a medieval street named off the holy well. And the irony of that was not lost on commentators. It was anything but sacred and wholesome.

And it first kind of registers in the kind of moral consciousness, if you like, at the beginning of the 19th century, when in the 18th tense it had become the domain of incendiary political print. So radical newspapers, radical pamphlets, espousing all sorts of extreme political positions by their standards. And then the government cracks down on that in the 1810s. And what you begin to see is that the printers of Holy Well Street, they divert these revolutionary impulses from radical politics into hardcore pornography. So they realize that both are pretty good for sales. They can't do the politics anymore. So they shift to porn. And the first porn king, if you like, was a wonderful man called William Dugdale. And he was a man who was full of subterfuge. He was hounded by the authorities.

You know, he had to kind of change addresses and go by different fake names over and over again, because all this stuff was illegal after the obscene's publication act 1857. And whenever they suppressed one of his shops, then it would just pop up somewhere else. And he was a bit of a dodgy custom, he would rip entire chapters out of other people's books, then pass them off as his own, take a completely innocent book and then just add a kind of scandalous subtitle's subtitle to make it seem like it was pornographic when it wasn't. But normally suggestive frontispiece, suggestive titles, and in the end, they got him. And he was sentenced to hard labor in the Clarkin Hell House of Corrections, but he was incorrigible. So he died in there, one of the earliest

victims of this obscene publications act. But we're good, this whole trend, you know, for other porn kings to spring up and replace them. So they were never quite able to suppress it. No, because one of the problems you get when you try and suppress anything is that, first of all, it's very difficult to do. But you get into slightly difficult territory around, well, like, what is considered porn and what is considered art? And what is the middle ground between the two? Is that something that you came up with in your research? Or did they just go, no, no, no, it's porn. It's definitely porn. There is nothing artistic about this.

Well, I think if you read some of the books that were on sale, just to give you an idea for some of the titles, The Lustful Turk, Captain Strokel's Pocket Book, The Story of a Dildo, that's one for 1890s, that was very popular, the autobiography of a flea, an experimental lecture on flagellation by Colonel Spanker. They're not really works of art. I mean, you could argue that they are works of art because they go so strongly against the grain of Victorian attempted suppression, but they're basically just present you with a world of sexual abundance. And women in particular can just have endless sex. And whatever they see, whatever they cover, they can just get almost instantly. The prevailing medical opinions would have said, well, you know, that's going to lead

to these sort of terrible diseases and you're going blind and become an outcome. But nothing bad ever happens to them. And likewise, the men, they've written in this sort of pickeresque, sort of faintly comic style, just everything about it exudes harmlessness, but they're just having, you know, ecclesiastical orgies, the one about the experimental lecture by Colonel Spanker. It tries to identify the main sex positions that are popular in Victoria in London, 1860. And it comes up with no less than 67, all of which, yeah, like vividly illustrated. And some of them, I don't even know what they possibly could have been. There's ones that are the sack of corn backwards, dog fashion flying. You probably imagine what that is.

horse, the elastic cunt. They're not really worked a lot. It's got some great pillow talk in it. I should like my angel to crush my whole being into your sweet body in your velvet mouth, your pretty rose pink cunt, your delicious chocolate bombhole. And I would squirt there in countless jets of thick, rich seed. Maybe it's art.

I think it was more just something that... A flourish. A flourish. Yeah. Abundance. That's the word I'd keep coming back. A super abundance. And that's why people like Dogdell had to be killed

because this presented another world. where nothing bad was going to happen to you. Unless you catch an STD, that was the one thing that they were a little bit worried about because they didn't really have effective ways of curing it. So suppression was strong. Lots of people were sentenced to the workhouse and people, you know, were arrested and had their livelihoods destroyed. So they took that seriously and I didn't really think of it as art. I don't think so. I think that you can actually read a lot of these works that are still online now. You can actually buy them in Waterstones and other reputable bookshops, which is kind of crazy when you consider where they come from. And you can also

buy classic collections of Victorian erotica now. But I think like the idea that no one actually gets hurt in them is quite an interesting one because it can be quite brutal, actually. And a lot of things that you, you sort of get a sense what the Victorians were into. And there's a lot of sexual assaults and playing around with rape. And there is child abuse in there. Think things like my secret life. Like, it's not even like a borderline case of assault. No. No.

Just full on. Sensory that it was behaviour. That this was bad behaviour. But it wasn't necessarily something that defined you as sexuality would become, particularly queer sexualities of later on in the 20th century. It's not so much that people weren't harmed in the encounters which are detailed and sort of titillating detail. But it's more the people perpetrating what we would call assault. So there's one written experiment.

experimental lecture. This is a young girl is sort of whipped, really without mercy for the Mayfair flagellation society. So I don't know if that's still exists or not. They're saying the lecture was the pleasures to be derived from crushing and humiliating the spirit of a beautiful and modest young lady. But it's never really clear how into it she is. And I'm not sure she's actually particularly into it at all to put it mildly in. And it does tread a thin line between masochistic sex and outright assaults. I think the flagellation is, again, this really surprised me, but it wasn't just a street where you could go and buy dusty porn, but it was full of brothels as well, Uwell Street,

Wick Street as well, which squirreled off the other way. They were full of flagellation brothels where you were sort of meant to go and relieve yourself, having your snouts buried in these books, you could go and sort of work it off. But I think the fact that it's flagellation is interesting because it's suggestive, you know, people so flagrantly breaching the moral codes of society,

but it sort of crops up again and again. Have you been to Holy Well Street? Because everyone's like, well, where is that? How do I find it? And I tell people, just go and look for the statue of Gladstone of all people in front of the church of St. Clementeanes. You know, he's standing there all clenched fists and he looks kind of solemn and stately, but also mildly disapproving. And his eye line goes straight down what was once Holy Well Street. Never noticed that. Yeah, I don't know if it's deliberate, but it's something that I've, you know, like in a psychedogographical way, it's become deliberate.

even if it wasn't to begin with, if that makes sense. And it goes all the way down to the church of St. Mary in the Strand, St. Mary Dubot. And that's where this highway of SMART was. And that's how you find it. Nothing left, of course. No trace whatsoever, actually in the physicality of the streets. But it's quite a bland concourse. But if you know what was once there.

And there's amazing photographs of it. These men seemingly risk up their top hats, furtively peeping, as one paper put it, into sin-crammed shop windows, every so often disappearing. in and coming out with a little smile in the corner of their mouth. Just an unknown pocket of London. That's so true. You wouldn't ever have known what was actually there. And I would love to have known. I would love to have seen it. But what was it? What was it like? Like when? Because obviously, I don't know, maybe they had like a mailing system where they could send stuff. You didn't actually have to go to the shop. But obviously, you'd still have to go there physically, in person. And everybody knows what that street is.

and everybody knows what those books are, and everybody knows that you are not going in there for the articles. That is a really interesting dynamic of, like, who was buying this stuff? Yeah, well, you did have to go there, because having it mailed to you would have been a really risky strategy. Yes. Because the police are kind of still pretty new at this stage, and there's a vigour to them,

and they relentlessly pursued anyone that was stupid enough to leave their address and would have raided their house. So, from what I can gather, it's obviously just the middle class, the literate middle classes. I think actually these would work quite well for people that couldn't read because a lot of them take the form of dialogues and they seem like they're designed to be put out to an audience. So literacy need not have been that much of a barrier.

But I imagine, you know, it's just a kind of bank clerk or a lawyer who just wanted a bit of colour to leaven the grind of the working day. But fantastically successful. This wasn't just a minor output of activity. It was either there's this pornographic bibliography that gets published every year. the index Librarum prehabitorum by Henry Ashby Spencer. And this lists all the books you can get

there, which are privately printed or for private consumption. And there's an awful lot of them. And you get a little kind of pracey or a write-up of them. And they often kind of feigned disapproval, like such scandalous fronts to my more never did I see. But then it goes into so much detail. It's actually like you can just sit down and enjoy probably the most enjoyable bibliography that anyone would ever read. And they'd say women were very interested in going in well. And this is actually what scandalises the press the most, the idea that the weaker sex, as they were described in one article, were being actively corrupted and economy. And they're saying that the weaker sex are, you know, what must this be doing to their morals? So throughout the

century, the authority is desperate to destroy the street, but they're not quite sure how to do it until the end. I love that. Like our little lady brains just couldn't cope with it. So early on in the 19th century, the print industry booms. And that must have fuelled this. So you get all of this erotic literature that's being, it's still expensive, but it's being more cheaply produced than ever. What about photography? Because I don't know the exact details on this, but I would love to have seen how quickly, after the first daguerre type was printed, that somebody went, oh, hang on a minute. Yeah. So basically, when you went into Holy Welles Street, you asked what it looked like, is an interesting question. It's very old fashions. It had sort of

lurching timber-framed houses with gables. A lot of them looked like they were sort of anomalous and slightly kind of seedy, almost, these sort of grimy Tudor-style houses. And it still had some old shop signs surviving from beautiful sulky crescent moon, which is still in the Museum of London. You'd go in, ground floor was printed erotica. And then from about the 1870, I'd say the mid-1870s, but getting into its stride in the 1880s, you could go upstairs.

and you'd have to have a bit of a conversation with the owner so he could be sure you're not an undercover police or anything like that. And then upstairs you'd get these incredible slides, the stereoscopic slides, at a great sense of depth. And that's where you would just have projected in front of you, you know, whatever they had. Softcore porn, not as extreme as some of the things

that go on in the printed literature. You don't really see those extremely graphic acts being depicted in the photographic porn. But it's a bit more tasteful, but it is nonetheless, like nudity. And then whatever tickled your fancy, you could buy prints, or even sometimes actually the slides themselves, if you had a means of projecting them in a sort of magic lantern or something.

So 1870s, 1880s, and always on the top floor. Is there a reason why the photographs in Hollywood Street weren't hardcore porn? Because I don't want anyone to think that the Victorians weren't producing hardcore porn. They very, very much were. But that's interesting that you said it was slightly softer in these shops. Yeah, I think it could be, that what was written about in things like Randiano and Captain's Pickle's Pocket and Story of Adilda. So much of it's often a flight of fancy. Fantasy. You can't always tell. There's an

amazing book called The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, which is the first extended gay erotica novel. And that takes the form of the sort of confessions of a epileptic rent boy called Jack Sol. Exactly. Yeah. It's been the name of Marianne as well, I think. Mary Ann. He's a Mary Ann. That's it. And there is some, you probably know a lot more about this than me, but there's some debate about how genuine that is, because there was actually a person, but they changed some details, maybe they had to. So there is a line, but so much of what you read in the other ones, it's obviously just a flight of fantasy. So actually to get people depicting, you know, like an ecclesiastical orgy with people

dressed up as a... That would take quite a lot of production. I see. I see what you mean. And also, you'd be scared out of their mind that, like, they're going to be identified. And, you know, it's not like when you watch porn, people often masked, you know, It would have been kind of problematic and more real the fact that it was palpable and just the impact of photography must have had and broadening the horizons of reality. And maybe it was just a bit too intense in that way. But they did get more pornographic as time went on. But less kind of absurdist sexual scenarios, I would say, just impossible. You wouldn't survive it.

That's very true. They're not actual depictions of what's going on in the literature. But I love looking at Victorian porn. That sounds like it's such a weird thing to say. But you get a real sense because the photography is so new. And it's like there's this idea now that you can photograph people having sex. But that's so new that nobody's got a real sense of what is going on yet or what looks sexy. Like they're just there and everybody is standing around trying to work out how they're going to make this look erotic.

And then somebody decides that they're just going to bring in a taxidermy dog for no reason. It's a very strange witness. Yeah. It reminds me a bit of the... there was a big market for blind fiddlers. Really? A little bit before the Highly Wall Street really erupted. But blind fiddlers were in great demand around Covent Garden,

those sorts of rakish areas, because they could score orgies, and they wouldn't be able to see the reputable politician or who the sort of nobleman wore, or even, you know, which director of the bank firm. It was, I guess, a taxidermy dog. It's not going to speak. That's very true.

That's not going to be your secrets. That's not. That's very true. It is odd. It's like there's a real sense that nobody has quite worked out what looks sexy yet. So we're going to do some really weird background setting and like I just love looking at it because everybody's got pubic hair and everyone's got their little tummies and we haven't got that stylised pawn that we have today. It sounds weird but it's quite sweet in a way. Yeah. So they're trying to make it stylised have an atmosphere with a taxi. So maybe they are trying to portray it as art more than in print of literature. I think of the mechanics of being photographed in the sort of late Victorian period. You have to sit still for quite a long time because it would have taken a while just to do one kind of pose and then you could move on to the next one. They seem quite self-contained than these kind of sprawling narratives that you get in the novels. I'll be back with Matthew after this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and are not just the Tudors from History Hit.

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I mean, it's obviously like Harley Well Street is its own little destination. But there must have been pockets of this stuff all around London, even before the 19th century. And I know that you've done a bit of research, the jelly houses, which I love and I'm endlessly fascinated by. For anyone listening going, well, I like jelly, tell us what a jelly house is. Oh, well, I was very much hoping this would come up. Jelly house is the sort of thing that once I tell people, they never really believe me. They, is that true? And I said, well, you know, I'm a historian. Everything I say is true.

Jelly houses are maybe not what your listeners are thinking. They were places that were especially popular around Covent Garden, parts of the strand after the strand became a bit seedier and elsewhere as well. They were places simply where men would go in, naked pretty much from the waist up. They'd be tied to chairs, live violin music would pipe up. Then prostitutes would appear with enormous, exotically shaped and coloured wobbling jellies, which they were just wobble on silver platters around the man, purely for his titillation. Like nothing, he didn't touch the prostitute. nothing sexual transacted, but it was just to kind of arouse these male patrons through the infallible power of jelly. Where did you read about this? What sources are you using? I'm aware that in the 18th century

jelly houses were places that sold jelly. There were places that sex workers would meet their clients and they were definitely seedy and had a naughtiness about them. But where are you reading about by the time you get to the 19th century, it's time for a jelly orgy? Most of my source of for that are from the 18th century. In particular, there's a diary of a 23-year-old law student called Dudley Ryder who wrote, it was in shorthand. He didn't want anyone deciphering it. And only a third of it's ever been published, but he writes about the jelly houses. They also, I believe, appear in the press of the time. And I think perhaps in Boswell as well, but as I was going through some newspaper reports, I was writing my time traveller's guide to London, newspapers one of the best ways

of bringing it to life. And there were still references to the jelly houses by the Victorian. It It is earlier. It's like early 19th century rather than later on, but they definitely still existed. And we actually tried to recreate one on one of these theatrical walking tours. And we just stupidly did it in the middle of rush hour in alleyway. So there's this man and this woman playing wobbling the ch-and people were just like, what on earth are you doing? Did you just do that in the street? Did you set that up in a shop? It was a surprise for the people on the tour. Huge crowd of people. Almost more popular than the sort of tacky performances you get. And people were just astonished that this used to be an erased part of the culture.

Maybe it will come back one day. It is tough to see that one making a comeback, isn't it? It's also just bonkers how erotic jelly actually is. However, now I say that, I'm immediately reminded of Beyonce, who famously sang, You Aren't Ready for This Jelly. So maybe we still think about Jelly as being weirdly sexy. It was an art form. Jelly was sometimes cast in the shape of Notre Dame,

more like St. Paul's Cathedral or the face of politicians. And it was not something that we really have anymore. We just think of it as this sugary treat. And I like the idea, you know, the printed word stimulates people on Holywood and then they can go to their flagellation broth or the jellyhouse or church just to repent. It's all there. And when you sort of look at what sort of surgeons said about male sexuality and how you had to tread a line, you had to kind of conserve your finite resources and not spend too much.

Otherwise, you succumb to this rather horrible-sounding, spermaria and then, you know, you go blind, your teeth fall out, you lose your sanity. And yet, in the books, here is the world of sexual abundance where you can, until your heart's content, you can feast in various unpleasant ways. And nothing bad happens to you. So that's why people like Dougdale had to be destroyed. It was exposing sort of mainstream views about sex and sexuality in a way that they found really sort of threatening, I think. So I want to talk about Dougdale a bit more in a minute. But before, Before we get there, just while I'm thinking about what was really popular at the time,

you have touched on flagellation. And when I started looking at Victorian porn, that was something that definitely surprised me, is just how much of that there is. Now, obviously, slap and tickle, spanking BDSM has always been very popular. But the Victorians seem to have absolutely loved it. It was a real thing for them. Yes, I was completely surprised by just things like the Mayfair Fagulation Society, was real. I thought that this would have just been made up, but I looked into it and

there were references to it. There were lots of flagellation societies. I think in some ways there must have been a kind of kitsch appeal because they're obsessed, weren't they with the Gothic and that harking back to. And so there would have been like the way they built so many kind of neo-gothic buildings. And, you know, if you look at something like the Royal Courts of Justice or some pancreas station. So there would have been that, but then also this idea of kind of self-punishment and purging what society had told them were impure thoughts, what the kind of thoughts that society found to be problematic and corrosive. I think all these things were probably going on,

but what a flageation broth actually looked like? I've got no idea because it could have just been a very functional route, or they could have really sort of camped it up and, you know, they had pictures of sort of monks whipping themselves and the face with kind of flagellation literature kind of on the table. I haven't actually found any sources that allow us to re-revelling. create that vividly. So I have to leave that for the instance of historical fiction. It comes up again, not just in

books that are devoted to Fledgly, but it comes into all the other ones as well, which was a real treat. It was known abroad as the English vice in the 19th century. That's how much we liked it. Right. I didn't know that. I guess it sort goes in and out of fashion. What other, were the other English vices or was that? That was the big one. It was spanking, whipping, flagellation, having your bottom spanked. Honestly, the English were known for it. Right.

And I don't know why. But I like what you said about maybe it's like a punishment thing because the Victorians, well, they were very repressed. They were a very repressed group of people, but they were also filthy. That must have created a state of like maybe that's what was coming out. And they were like, okay then, well, I'm naughty. Just spank me.

Yeah. There's that sort of double vision. And I like that because it's almost like a virtuous circle. But then the punishment itself is a rat. And so that feeds back into the sexual desire. So what was meant to? rob them of these scandalous thought actually ends up fueling it yet further. Holy World Street, the whole thing is testament to suppression as well.

It's not just, as you were just saying, it's not like, oh, there shows they weren't repressed. It's a reaction. You know, when you try to forcibly suppress something often, there is like the other side of the coin, and that's what you see in such detail. And it's not just one or two porn shot. It's when you look at photographs of this, it's all the way up and down the street. There's as many as 30. and they're peppered with secondhand shops and genuine book shops.

But catering to a huge and seemingly irrepressible demand. And the authorities in the end, the police, the press, the clergy certainly, begin to scheme to find ways of sowing the downfall of Holy Wellstreet. And they begin presenting these proposals to say, well, actually this is really bad for traffic. Because if you think about it, it was squeezed in behind the strand. And they said that this was leading to lots of congestion. We think it might be a good idea to demolish the whole thing and widen the strand. And no doubt some people did think that, but the presence there of all the pornographic shop,

that was the real target. It gave apequency to the proposals. And eventually, that's what happens. Brought down by parking restrictions. Right, exactly. And it must have been like a sort of cathartic release for the authorities in like 901. The whole thing is just reduced to a pile of rubble. And, you know, all these buildings that had flattened it was by 19.

2002 and gone to make way for that rather soulless kind of Oldwich development, which is, you know, like a sort of terrible traffic fumes today. But of course it wasn't the end because just as the original princes had spilled westwards from Fleet Street, the same thing happens again. And the pornographic printers go further west and establish bases in Charing Cross Road. And it's only a master of time before they get to Soho, which still to this day, to some extent, is the seven. of erotica and corn. So it's interesting that it went on a journey from Fleet Street all the way to Soho wear it. Although, of course, Soho these days, they're trying to pasteurise it and get entrified. Not so much about traffic, is it? It's more about, yes. It's facilitation brussels. It was traditionally a hunting ground. And Soho was the hunter's grown. And the hunter's still on, but for a different kind of game, you can still feel that. That's not my, I got that from Acroid. That's just a very late before I passed that off as my own. You do still feel that, you know, how a certain energy lingers in the air.

It's almost irrepressible. And you can feel it on Fleet Street. You can feel it's someone at Compton. But you definitely can in Soho. Even as these attempts to shut down these much-loved, kind of quite boredy institution, you could never quite erase it, or at least it's memory. Tell me a bit more about, was it William Dougdale, the first pawn baron of Holy Wellst Street.

Where did he come from? What was his story? And yeah, just tell us about him because he sounds fascinating. Well, Dougdale proved that you could actually make a lot of money from the pornographic book trade. So he's like a kind of microcosm for the whole story of the street. So he began cutting his teeth with radical prints and publishing things that were proposing universal suffrage and other kind of progressive causes. But then he sort of adapted and saw which way the tide was turning after in the 1810s, this is sort of clamping. down upon. He just decided, let's plow all this energy into kind of pornographic books and see how it

goes. And initially, it was less risky because the obscene publications act wasn't until 1857. So there was this sort of hinterland where the sorts of books I've been mentioning were published and they probably did violate some sort of laws, but essentially they weren't the kind of things that could get you locked up. So he starts up a shop, I forget whereabouts. I think it was near that silky crescent moon somewhere in Holywell Street. And he's delighted to find that there's a huge market for them. And there was some protocol in the shop. You could go in and he went and said the right password to him or, you know, I'm looking for something a bit spicier. He'd know exactly what you meant. Might be greeted with suspicion. But then he'd take you, you know, round the corner to

another shelf and you'd see what you really wanted. Unfortunately, his shops kept on being raided by the police. Many of these people were undercover. Detectives went in as well. He also, he also, he also You send pornographic literature to Eaton, of all places, in art studies. But it said, like, if undelivered, please return to. So the idea was that the kind of young public school boys would then think, okay, let's go and he did. So he was full of those incredible tricks of the trade. And he also liked to write what, he wrote his own pornographic books and stories and I believe

poems as well. And what I most like about chivalryvanity of the man, he write his own advertising copy, praising the brilliance of the works that he itself had written. And something he would just take other people's works and pretend to have written them himself. There was a very different attitude towards like these. These are just ripping bits of other books and say,

well, this is my book. No one really would be held to account in quite the same way. You know, if you were, I just took another historian in a chapter and said, oh, we wrote that. he ended up using four fake names from several different addresses, and he was wily evading custodial sentences. He actually, on one occasion, it looked like he was going to be sent down, but he threatened the jury with a knife, and it worked,

which is, you know, an idea if we ever find ourselves a while. But eventually, his lock ran out, as one's lock always does in the end, and he was finally convicted to hard labour in the clock and ounce of corrections. And that need not, on its own terms, have proved fatal. But I think at his age, it was. It was often a death sentence because the conditions were so brutal that you wouldn't survive it. Or your health would be so badly damaged that you wouldn't survive long after it. That's right. Yeah.

And they must have known that when they were passing down the sentence. They would have like, we've got to get rid of this guy once and for all. But, you know, as I said, he was killed off. but then it was only a matter of time before news maestros of the port industry arose. And the sheer number of titles as extraordinary, just catering, very different type of taste. I went back and looked at the sins of the city and the plain just to find out how, you know, by our standards, how erotic it was. Because you'd think if it was a sort of homosexual novel, it might not be, that's what I first thought. Then I thought, well, actually, why would that be the case?

because if it's clandestine and it's like printed illegally and passed around almost from hand to hand, a bit like an illuminated manuscript. There's no reason really why it would be tame and it certainly wasn't. So I got it up on Project Gutenberg and just searched for cock. That you'd have been there a while. Search for fuck. This is how sophisticated is my research technically. But I only had about an hour.

There is a lot of cock in that book. There is. And it's got, I found actually, like, since I might as well read it. There's a bit where he gets exposed, this young rent boy and the man who's looking after him, it's like, see, boys, what a fine prick the little fellow has got. He fucked my ass all night and had his first spend. He said, lifting my shirt and exposing my affair, which was already as stiff as a poker in the idea of another go, like the previous night.

So the second half of that sentence is a bit, so hammy and what we would imagine is quintessentially. but the first bit, very explicit, and it's just, it's full of things like that. And again, you know, a sense that that in and of itself, these transactions are not a sort of a signifier of a sort of completely corrupted soul within, you know, in the sense that you might expect. So just fascinating stuff and endless amount of material. What I love about when you, when you read Victorian porn is once you got past the, well, it's actually quite hardcore this stuff. And there's a lot of crazy. stuff going on. It's the turn of phrase that they're using because obviously it's all written in

19th century grammar and syntax and expression. And to the modern ear, it sounds like Jane Austen doing porn. It's like it's so florid and it's so, the descriptions that they use for, you know, really like mad stuff. And I love it. I love it. It is so funny. Very nice way of putting it. Yeah, it's like Jane Austen doing porn. It's sort of very like proper, formal, quite long sentence. Flora descriptor, and then suddenly you get words, like I've just been saying, which suddenly sort of yank you into the modern day. I mean, it's a bit like sort of Jacob Rees-Mogg doing porn or something like this. Well, don't say that.

You'll ruin it. But yeah, if Jacob Rees-Mogg looked at porn, he would look at Victorian porn without a shadow of a doubt. He would. Because he wrote his book about Victoria, didn't he? Well, you can have him on next week and read him the pornographic. But I know what you mean? I find the style fascinating. I think it actually makes it more interesting in many ways than reading, like, erotic literature today.

But because of this diffusion of this, this very formal, loquacious style, it was criticised at the time for being badly written. Oh, yeah. See these very pompous, you know, vilifications in the press. They sort of say they were looking at engravings and sentences as, you know, as vilely formed as vile as the subject matter as what they're trying to express. So the sort of style and execution were both seen as particularly objectionable and feeding in to one another. But it's the pace that impressed me more than anything.

It's like you're reading sort of Condide or something. It's almost like, from the 80s, just it's relentless pace, just encounter after encounter after encounter. Oh, God, yeah. The other thing that always gets me is that the men can get hard on again as soon as they've ejaculated. That seems to happen all the time in Victorian porn. It's just like, boom, and they're ready to go again instantly. That's a trope, yeah. And there's that passage in my secret life where he deals with impotent.

And it's like the one time that doesn't happen. And he has this huge sort of meltdown. He was like, well, this has never happened before. This must be an emblem of mortality. But yeah, it's automatic sort of clockwork. Oh, Matt, you have been so much fun to talk to. And my final question is, do you have a favourite Victorian erotic text? Is there one that you've kind of got a bit of a soft spot for?

Or a hard spot in this case? Is there one when you were like, well, I quite like that. That is my favourite. I would say it probably would be an experimental lecture by Colonel Spanker, 1878, because I was just surprised by almost like how, we're not quite academic, but it's sort of like, we're now going to, it's divided up into sections, and it's like, we're now going to look at some of the main sex, and then it proceeds to list, kind of like over 60. So it's got that sort of codification, that rigid fetishization of classification, which is so much of an intrinsic feature of Victorian culture, but also just

what is being described is at times so sort of debauched and quite out of odds with this almost like mathematical layout. So that's a really good one. The other one I think what warrants mentions is that the story of a dildo. Have you read that one? And it's just got the most incredible frontist, but very classy. You just did the story of a dildo, a tale and five tablo. I think it's interesting when they swivel around the narrative perspective. and do it from the gutaputche, Dilder in that case, and also the one, the autobiography of a flea, all done from a flea's perspective. It's a very clever little kind of narrative devices.

But I would say the Captain Spanker one is a good one to start with. And they're enjoyable. That's the thing. That it's not like you don't feel like you've been sent to study some weird esoteric branch of literature. It is actually, you get quite into it. And then you think, well, I've been quite like a trip to Holywell Street and visit a jellyhouse, just to see how weird it would have been

to actually have breathed that world. Matt, you have been absolutely fascinating to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So I'm Dr Matthew Green. My first book was like a time traveller's guide to London called London A Travel Guide Through Time. That's how I know about all this,

because each chapter is set in a particular year. You're parachuted in, you explore it in the present tense and the second person. You are going into the flagellation brothel. that you feel, you know, this and that. And I just did a book called Shadowlands, which was a journey through Lost Britain. And my new book is a queer history of Britain from the Stone Age to the present day. Yeah, I'd love to, if you'll have me back. And I would have quite a lot of quotations from that one as well. And it's like all my book, it's a mixture of history, travel, and memoir. Do you have a social media

that people can follow you at? I do. It's Instagram, just Dr. Matthew Green, and X, I guess, as we have to call it now, it's the same, just Dr. Matthew Green. So, and if anyone wants to come on a walking tour with these strange actors and musicians leaping out, then the organisation is called Unreal City Audio. We run them every week, but they're not audio tours, they're live tours led by me, so I can show you the statue of Gladstone and where Holy Wellstreet was, etc. Amazing. Matt, thank you so much. You have been. an absolute treat. Thank you. You too. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to Matt for joining me.

And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you'd just fancy dropping by to say hi, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from senior sex to scandals at Hampton Court, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Chavonne Dale and produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets of the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.