...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...

.... The novel is set at the time of the American Revolution, but clearly responds to the growing likelihood of war with France after the seizure of the French Barbauld and Smith on War and Acquiescence 1 2 9 King and the Brunswick invasion. Setting the events of the novel at a slightly earlier period allowed...

... to issue (as he recorded in his journal) “a warrant for searching and securing all idle and disorderly persons and all concealed arms in the Ward of Farringdon Without,” refl ects the contra- dictions both within this odd fi gure, and within the wider political issues that he embodied.50 A result...

... after the recovery of his health and spirits,” that is, post 1807, when he allegedly became fearful of having a paralytic seizure (1:xvi). Frances notes that, at this point, he was eighty-­one years old; what she does not note is that she herself, as she works on his papers some decades later...