...Simon Stern This essay discusses John Cleland’s novel The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49), better known as Fanny Hill ), in the context of eighteenth-century obscenity law and the law of search and seizure. To explain why obscenity could have been treated as a criminal offense at all...

... was “the year.” It was the year of Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act and the same year that Madame Bovary went on trial in Paris. As years go, it was more prominent than most, its events significant enough to allow historians of pornography a place from which to look back at Edmund Curll...

... the centuries, during which he has been labeled everything from a genius and philosophical writer to the author of a profane and obscene poetry that should be struck from the literary record.2 Yet despite this fascinat- ing reception history, surprisingly little research has been carried out...

... of a Wicked and Depraved Mind and Disposition and most unlawfully wickedly and Impi- ously devising Contriving and Intending to Disperse Publish and Propa- gate most Wicked Lewd and Obscene Notions and Principles and by that means (as far as in him the said John Purser lay) to Vitiate and Corrupt...

..., one need look no further than Rousseau (1712 – 78), who in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences lists Ovid among the authors whose rise to prominence marked the irrevocable decline of ancient Roman valor. “Mais après les Ovide, les Catulle, les Martial, et cette foule d’auteurs obscènes...

... to the prosecutorial decision not to allow it to sink undisturbed into oblivion. In the summer of 2003, while working on a new edition of Cleland’s second novel, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, I decided to see if other traces could be found of Cannon’s text or his prosecution on obscenity charges. Judging...

... was from Obscenity to Poli- tics, and from Politics to Obscenity. (p. 65) At first these remarks can be puzzling, given that the narrative mentions that Savage allegedly influenced elections by appearing at the head of a Tory mob and, as we...

... and 1694) and quite rightly observes Locke’s speculative and skeptical views concerning how consciousness and the atoms that make up material sub- stance are related to each other (96). Citing several of Rochester’s obscene poems in the following chapter, Kramnick examines the libertine’s...

...- urrection.” This is a case of the portrait painter appropriating the possessions he has been commissioned to paint. Zoffany treats the human figures within The Tribuna in the same way, playing jokes by juxtaposing them with statues and each other, producing puns and double entendres and obscene...

... it prolonged the puzzle and put harder stresses on end-rhymes. From this nudging suggestiveness, it is still some distance to the open obscenity of “Shocky and Towzer” (ca. 1730). This poem starts off conven- tionally enough with an amorous encounter in pastoral surroundings: A Nymph...

..., and although a surpris- ing number of his works were brought back into print over the course of the eighteenth century, by 1800 his reputation was essentially dead.5 The few nineteenth-­century writers who read Ward’s works were put off by his bluntness, obscenity, and lack of gentlemanly polish. Even...

.... ISBN 0-7083-1695-6 De Jean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: Chicago Univ., 2002). Pp. 224. $18. ISBN 0-226-14141-1 Dieterle, Bernard, & Manfred Engel, eds. The Dream and the Enlightenment. International Eighteenth-Century Studies...

... with his reviewers. In her examination of four editions of The Monk , Havens argues that Lewis's post-publication revisions were made to appease those who found his text obscene and blasphemous. While Lewis removed some “explicit sexual details” and problematic language regarding sexual violence...

... of the work were also evi- dent to Sterne’s contemporaries as were potential political implications. Some readers considered the book nonsense; some found it, objectionably or delight- 146 Eighteenth-Century Life fully, obscene; some found in it the beauty of life’s sentiments; others treated...

...- shire, at ruined Medmenham Abbey, and as the Order of the Knights of St. Francis, after founder Sir Francis Dashwood, the owner of West Wycombe House. A leading Medmenhamite was the Aylesbury MP and future Lord Mayor of London, John Wilkes. An Essay on Woman, an obscene poem to which Wilkes...

... the House of Commons. In November 1763, the publication the North Briton, 45 had been voted a seditious libel against George III in the Commons, and the House of Lords had simultaneously voted that Wilkes’s parody “An Essay on Woman” was blasphemous and obscene...

... with his independence and self-­assertion, but remain uncomfortable with his obscenity and rudeness. Even Diderot, it seems, wishes to evade these indecorous aspects of the philosopher, until he writes Rameau’s Nephew (1762), which represents the con- frontation of the values of the ancient...

... the breathing Bread: What else is this but to devour our Guests, And barb’rously renew Cyclopean Feasts! We, by destroying Life, our Life sustain; And gorge th’ ungodly Maw with Meats obscene. (125 – 36)53 Not only is this reprehensible behavior opposed to “Nature’s Laws” (Dryden’s addition...

...). Pp. 207. $42.50. ISBN 0-8018-6687-1 DeJean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago, 2002). Pp. 204. $18. ISBN 0-226-14141-1 De Staël...

... with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs.” In The Hind and the Panther (1687), Dryden refers to the bloody Popish Plot as that “painted Harlot” who could “awhile bewitch” England but after the Rye House Plot could be seen as “the Hag uncas’d, and all obscene...