1964 John Cleland – the first recorded author of a work indicted as ‘obscene’ – described his pioneer work as: ‘A Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot.’ No novel has been less so than Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
Cleland (1709–89) was well born. His father, a former army officer of distinguished Scottish lineage, later a civil servant, was a friend of Alexander Pope’s. His mother’s family were wealthy anglicised Dutch Jewish merchants, and well in with high literary and political circles.
Young John spent two years at Westminster School before being expelled. Offence unknown; delinquency suspected. There may well have been some disgrace. Aged 21 he was packed off to India to serve for twelve years as a soldier, and later an administrator, in the East India Company. He returned to London in 1741, as his father was dying. In 1748 he was arrested for debts of almost £1,000, and spent a year in the Fleet Prison.
Debt drives the pen. In jail he wrote Fanny Hill. The first volume was published in November 1748, the second in February 1749. The author was paid £20 for the copyright. Legend has it that the publisher, Fenton, gained as much as £10,000 by the bargain. Who enabled Cleland’s release from prison is not known.
The composition of Fanny Hill behind bars, as a kind of extended masturbation fantasy by a man denied his doxies, is a pretty anecdote. It may be prettier than true. Twenty years later, Cleland boasted to James Boswell that he had actually written the work in Bombay, in his twenties, as a wager to prove that one could write erotica without ever using a single item of foul language.
In late 1749 Cleland was arrested along with his publisher and charged with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects’ with his novel. In court, Cleland, ‘from my soul’ wished the work ‘buried and forgot’. He got off.
According to his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Cleland was awarded a pension of £100 a year from the public purse, on condition that he write no more corrupting works. This is unlikely – although he may well have received financial assistance from his friends in high places.
Cleland was, for the remainder of his life, a productive, unpornographic, and consistently unsuccessful Grub Street author. Cleland grew quarrelsome in later life, falling out with friends. He lived by himself, never married, and had the reputation of being a ‘Sodomite’.
Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, as published in 1748–9, takes the form of a confessional letter describing the heroine’s ‘progress’, and was clearly designed to contradict the joyless moralism of Hogarth’s ‘The Harlot’s Progress’ (1732) and to show up the timidly parsimonious reference to sex in Defoe’s ‘whore’s autobiography’ Moll Flanders (1722), both of which aims Fanny Hill achieves triumphantly. The name is a somewhat laboured pun on ‘Veneris mons’ – Venus’s hill. It is not clear whether ‘fanny’ was, then as now, street slang for ‘quim’.
Following the acquittal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the paperback publisher, Mayflower, announced an above-ground edition of Fanny Hill in November 1963. Copies were seized from a London retailer (a joke shop in Tottenham Court Road) on 15 December. It went on trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in February 1964. Cannily, it was the West End retailer – not the publisher (as in the Lady Chatterley case) – who was hauled into the dock. The book was deemed (locally) offensive and the seized stock ordered destroyed.
Oddly, no successful defence of Fanny Hill has ever been mounted. It crept back into print, and now has a learnedly annotated existence as one of the Oxford World’s Classics. A BBC TV version, adapted by Andrew Davies in 2007, attracted an audience of seven million. It remains, technically, a banned book: at least, in Tottenham Court Road and environs.