106
STEVEN MARCUS
creation of new works by a process that may be called progressive
mutilation. The trick consists of re-translating a work exclusively
from its last immediate translation, so that, say, by the time a work
originally entitled
The Romance of Lust,
published first in English
in 1879, appears in a new English version, published in Paris within
the last fifteen years, it has a new title and new characters and has
gone through the following additional metamorphoses. This new English
translation was made from a French translation published at around
the tum of the century, which had in tum been translated from
a German rendering, which was itself a translation from an earlier
French translation of the original and now as good as unrecognizable
English. There was also a steady trickle of new works of fiction, the
demand for new material being essentially constant and stable in what
is always a seller's market. Periodical publications of different degrees
of openness and addressed to differing sexual preferences and different
social classes were also to be had, some with illustrations and some
without.
In
1832 Louis Daguerre announced the discovery of his process
to the French Academy of Science; shortly thereafter a lively business
in
photographs of a sexual nature got under way.4 Pornography supplied
an invention of its own; in 1828 a machine "to flog gentlemen upon"
was manufactured for Mrs. Theresa Berkeley, a prostitute who specialized
in flagellation and who was, according to Ashbee, "the queen of her
profession." Ashbee reproduces an engraving of this contraption; it re–
sembles a large football blocking-dummy and may be thought of
as
perversity's contribution to the Industrial Revolution. The single modern
convenience of which the Victorians were deprived was moving pictures.
We find then that in this area of culture, as in so many others, the
Victorian period is essentially continuous with our own.
Among the chief adornments of this subculture were the book-
4 Ashbee tells us of an English photographer named Henry Hayler, "whose
photographic studies from life enjoy an European reputation ." In 1874 th e police
descended on two London houses in which Hayler conducted his operations, and
"no less than 130,248 obscene photographs, and 5,000 slides were seized and de–
stroyed. Hayler himself absconded, and thereby escaped punishment ; he went to
Berlin, but has not been heard of publicly since." Ashbee goes on to quote a
newspaper report which stated that "in the more offensive pictures were dis–
cernible the portraits of the owner of the house, his wife, and two sons." To this
it may be added that by the end of the century a new convention had become part
of the stock-in-trade of pornographic fiction; novels now occasionally contained
within them a scene describing some part of the workings of the pornographic
industry itself. And by today several pornographic novels whose excuse for a
subject is the pornography business-that is to say, pornographic novels about
pornography-have been published.
