ErotoManiac - Henry Spencer Ashbee 1901

 In an extra rude episode, meet 19th-century England's most prolific and energetic smut collector.
Henry Spencer Ashbee.
Listener discretion is advised - Those Victorians could be spicy!

•  Just how much X-rated material could one gentleman collect?
• Who were his famous friends?
• Did he go blind?
• Was he the mysterious author of erotic classic "My Secret Life"?
• Was Victorian morality really so 'moral'?

It's a furtive delve beneath the crinolines of Victorian society featuring erotic literature, erotic art, general erotica and lots of very rare books. 

For open minded bibliophiles everywhere

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Transcript

Rogues Gallery Uncovered

Bad behaviour in period costume 

A non-judgmental thrust into the scandalous lives of history’s greatest libertines’ lotharios and complete bastards  

This podcast contains very, very adult themes and a considerable amount of colourful language – it’s the rudest episode yet so listen responsibly.

Church services, board meetings and children's birthday parties are not advised.

EROTO- MANIAC

More sex than the British Museum can hold with Victorian England's most vigorous smut enthusiast, 

Henry, Spencer Ashbee

I’ve got some big news to announce and I want to get to this episode’s tale without too much delay so I will start by giving a very hearty roguish shout out to a couple of reprobates who have got in touch and said nice things about the podcast. 

Ethan Stepney who said hello via the website rouguesgalleryonline.com 

And Dottie Hubbard who got in touch via email simon@rougesgalleryonline.com 

Also Ray Sauinier on facebook and all the new folowers on X and youtube. 

Your support is much appreciated.

And that is what the announcement is about.

Ill go into more detail after the tale but in short, if you enjoy my work and would like to support the podcast, I’ve set up a membership scheme on the redesigned rogues gallery website where, for the modest commitment of £4.99 a month ( about 6 dollars) – the price of a cup of coffee or a quart of gut rot gin from a bawdy house – you can help the podcast keep doing the roguish things it's doing, grow and spread its mischievous wings while getting stuck into some exclusive benefits.

Such as 

Video representations of your favourite tales – using historically contemporary images. 

This includes a special video critique of Hogarth’s legendary painting A Rakes Progress that will never appear as a podcast episode. 

A members-only gallery – containing some disgraceful historical imagery. 

A virtual bookshop where you can buy the reference materials, I use in the making of the podcast. 

An exclusive forum where you can chat to me and fellow bad-behaviour fans. 

And discounts for exclusive merch including the soon-to-be fashion icon “I'm a lovable rogue” T Shirt. 

So put down that glass of claret and Visit rougusegalleryonline.com to sign up – the address is in the show notes

Ill be honest I feel a bit uncomfortable doing any kind of sales pitch but I really want to do more roguish stuff and this is the best way to help the project grow, keep it ad-free ( I hate ads)  and make sure that it’s survival doesn't depend on the whims of some over censorious big tech company. 

( don’t get me started about that ) 

I hope you understand, and I really appreciate any support you can offer.

Right, before I get too over emotional, 

As you will appreciate from what follows this next bit is really important, particularly if you are a new listener. 

The following tale is written in the present tense of the period in which its set…. and as such, may contain attitudes and opinions of the protagonists and their times which would today be considered unacceptable. 

As I’m NOT a pathologically sex-obsessed Victorian gentleman with some very questionable attitudes towards women, those attitudes and opinions – which I think might have been a bit extreme even 150 years ago – are most emphatically NOT mine.

ENGLAND 1901

Of an evening, there is nothing I like better than adjourning to my study, bolting the door securely, relaxing before a roaring fire in my favourite armchair, opening a well-thumbed copy of erotic masterpiece “My Secret Life” and vigorously masturbating until my fingers cramp and I can’t even hold a teacup.

We live in a sadly puritanical age during which aficionados of “Le Monde Sensuel” are few and often shun the public eye for fear of moral censure and possible imprisonment. 

These men (women who enjoy the sexual act, invariably being sluts, harlots and nymphomaniacs) are erotic explorers, pushing back the boundaries of pleasure, like an engorged Galileo.

Unique among these fine fellows was (until his recent demise) a man whose single-minded dedication to quim led to him amassing the world’s largest pornographic library and who many, suspect of being “My Secret Life’s” eponymous hero, Walter.

If my trousers weren’t round my ankles and my right hand wasn’t locked into the shape of a claw, I would stand this very moment and raise a heartfelt toast …. “To Henry Spencer Ashbee!”

Of course, to society at large, Ashbee was a respectable married man with a thriving textile business. 

A keen traveller and member of many honourable clubs and societies, he was well known as an avid book collector and a world-renowned expert on the work of Miguel Cervantes .

However, there are only so many copies of Don Quixote one can own, so he used his frequent excursions to Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels to fill his valise with as much pornography as he could carry.

But how did such an eroto-maniacal fascination begin?

Very little is known about Ashbee’s childhood apart from the usual time spent at boarding school, which often stimulates sexual curiosity and an appreciation of corporal punishment. 

  When he left school and joined a firm of textile merchants as an apprentice a clearer picture begins to emerge. 

He wrote in his diary – which I have had the singular honour of perusing- that his first excursion to foreign shores moved him greatly and may have awoken in him an appreciation for the female form and the act of love that it often inspires.

He was on a business visit to Belgium in 54 with several other apprentices and, as young men will, tried his upmost to combine honest work with carefree relaxation.  

While bathing on the beach one afternoon, his attention was drawn to some young men and women nearby, frolicking together in the surf. 

They were behaving in a particularly lively and abandoned way – splashing, wrestling, laughing and the like - which would have been frowned upon had it taken place on British sand. 

One young lady, retiring to her bathing machine  allowed a fellow to towel her hair while she sat in a state of virtual undress. 

The chap - who I suspect was not her fiancé - had been patiently waiting outside for ten minutes, smoking a cigar.

He also noticed how even the older ladies would quite happily leave the doors of their machines wide open while they dried themselves, so any passing gallant – or tumescent English apprentice - could glimpse their brazen Walloon nudity.

The strength of his feelings was surprising enough for him to record it for posterity.

Later, Ashbee and a friend were told by their local guide, of a respectable location where they could enjoy some “Tableaux vivant.,” 

Excited by the prospect of witnessing historical scenes interpreted by half naked girls – who wouldn’t be? – they demanded that he take them there, immediately.

While the location was indeed of the highest standard, as they sat cradling their wine glasses in anticipation of the display, they found themselves surrounded by a score of giggling strumpets all eagerly trying to entice them to an upstairs room.

With typical Belgian insolence, their guide had actually taken them to a well-appointed brothel as a joke.

Laughing heartily at his immodest prank, the young men availed themselves of the house’s hospitality, although Ashbee was at pains to stress that he did not spend the entire evening under its roof.

Back in London, Ashbee reflected on his experiences and found himself so moved by the memory, that on several occasions, while out walking he was compelled to find some secluded spot where he could surreptitiously pleasure himself. 

His diary records him succumbing once along Green Lane and again in the shadows beneath a convenient viaduct. 

Appreciating just how much travel can broaden one’s horizons, Ashbee seems to have spent much of his visit to Paris the following year – learning French he claimed - rutting himself into a stupor at Closerie des Lilas .

It became clear to him that by embracing his lustful nature abroad rather than in England, he could indulge in all manner of delightfully lewd behaviour without his family, polite society or his work colleagues ever being any the wiser.

He was particularly taken with the Spanish dancing girls he saw perform in Cadiz, agreeing wholeheartedly with Byron’s appreciation of their charms . He would later write “I think that more pretty women can be seen here in a week than in other towns in a month.”

The hot climate, perfusion of pretty girls and the constant dancing inflamed Ashbee so much that he once again could not contain his emotions and – if his diary is to be correctly understood- spent much of his time in Andalucía engaged in helpless and spontaneous self-pollution.

Ashbee was also however a confirmed bibliophile – a lover of books and reading. 

He was an obsessive and determined collector and it’s no surprise that as his sexual curiosity grew so did his appreciation of the “Forbidden Books” that featured such activities.

As the cloying morality of what would become known as “The Victorian Age” began to tighten its grip, the laws of censorship regarding what could and could not be published grew ever more stringent. 

No other a man as than Charles Dickens found this great country’s decent into prudery a national calamity and Ashbee shared his misgivings.

As the 50s became the 60s Ashbee found that with his business thriving, he now had the financial wherewithal to purchase as much Kruptadia – an ancient Greek word meaning erotica -    as he wanted, rapidly establishing connections with booksellers, publishers and authors throughout Europe. – where censorship laws were much more relaxed. 

Ashbee became the premier supplier of erotic material to London’s artistic and social elite who turned to him for ever more assorted and stimulating diversions.

When his vast collection became too great to be stored at the family home, an increasingly wealthy Ashbee simply bought it, its own set of rooms.

It goes without saying of course that his wife, Elizabeth, knew nothing of her husband’s erotic peccadillos and would, no doubt, have required medical assistance had she stumbled across even the mildest examples of his miscellany.

Ashbee stored his pornography in rooms at 4 Greys Inn Square, about three-quarters of a mile away from his family residence. 

In the convivial privacy of these chambers- referred to by all as “The Inn”- he would regularly meet other like-minded gentlemen and together they would pore over erotic texts in several languages, discuss salacious woodcuts, and engage in manly discourse.

The company- who met every Tuesday - included, pioneering expert on the subject of sexuality, John Davenport. 

The 80-year-old author of “Aphrodisiacs and Anti Aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Power of Reproduction; with some account of the Judicial “Congress” as Practiced in France during the Seventeenth Century” was in poor health and Ashbee was much moved by his condition.

Also present were poet and staunch opponent of the “Obscene Publications Act 1857,” Richard Monckton Milnes - whose erotica filled house was nicknamed “Aphrodisiopolis ”. 

He often sat alongside fellow versifier, Algernon Charles Swinburne, infamous for his poems about lesbianism and necrophilia .  

There was also James Campbell Reddie, author and contributor to risqué newspaper “The Exquisite,”, aging satirical – and often bawdy – illustrator George Cruikshank and an ex-guardsman named Frederick Hankey, a sadomasochistic obsessive who Ashbee described as being “A second de Sade but without the intellect.”

A dedicated core of bibliophiles, they were joined at times by Pre-Raphaelite notaries such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and William Morris along with visiting American James McNeill Whistler.

Around this time (1873) Ashbee began to make anonymous contributions to the esteemed journal, Notes and Queries . 

Many of these he signed simply H.S.A but for others he used the sobriquets Fraxinus (Latin for “Ash”) or Apis (Latin for “bee”) ….. “Ash – Bee”

Emboldened by the publication of his opinions, it wasn’t long before Ashbee was compiling the first of his great literary works –the exhaustive (and frankly unputdownable) bibliography of world erotica he entitled Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Books Worthy of being Prohibited) 

Putting his name to such a publication would undoubtedly have meant social ruin and a possible prison sentence, so to avoid this Ashbee adopted the nom de plume “Pisanus Fraxi.”

This not only cleverly combined his two “Notes and Queries” identities, but the surname also sounded rather like “Piss-anus” if one wished to say it in such a manner.

Most of the talented intellectuals who visited Ashbee’s rooms for wine, billiards and erotica held a particular fascination for whips and spanking.

His main source of information about the current state of Flagellation in England came from the aforementioned Frederick Hankey. 

Fifty years of age and living In Paris, Hankey was as dissolute a man as it was possible to find, who, since retiring from the army, had devoted himself to a life of extreme debauchery.

Even Ashbee was shocked by his excesses.

“He has given himself up, body and soul to the erotic mania, thinks of nothing else, cares for nothing else, lives for noting else. 

Nothing is bawdy enough for him, whether in expression thought or design. Besides his books, all of which are erotic he has two of the most charming erotic statues which exist and is further surrounded with ceintures de chastete, dildos and every other obscene object possible to be procured.”

Sir Richard Burton, the great explorer and fellow “Sensual Enthusiast” had meetings with Hankey and found his love of pain and suffering for sexual gratification almost inexhaustible – but only, it seemed, when applied to humans.

Hankey, he said, found the killing of animals for food “wicked” and although he would have no compunction in using skin flayed from the buttocks of a young girl to bind his copy of de Sade’s “Justine ” he “Could not BURTON NOTED “be persuaded to try the sensation of fucking a Muscovy duck while its head was cut off.” 

While ostensibly writing conventional travel journals, Ashbee journeyed farther afield in his pursuit of erotic knowledge. 

Visiting India in the 1880s he studied in detail the gymnastic sexual contortions displayed on many of the ancient temple carvings.  

In public, he professed outrage that the rajah of Mysore had mounted on his walls “tawdry French engravings and native ones of the most indecent character” but in private he was boxing up as much as he could find and sending it back to London on the first steamer.

In Java and Bangkok, he wrote with amazed delight at how woman unashamedly displayed their bosoms and in Japan the lack of female undergarments moved him considerably.

All of this research enabled him to write two more volumes of erotic biblio –studies Centuria Librorum Abscond itorum (One Hundred Books Worthy of Being Hidden Away) and the Catena Librorum TaTcH en dorum (‘String of Books Worthy of Being Silenced’) 

But the question which most occupies the minds of “Aesthetic Onanists” such as myself involves the authorship of the eleven-volume, 4200-page erotic odyssey known as “My Secret Life.”

Of its over 1000,000 words , 5357 of them are “Cunt” 4032 of them are “Fuck,” 3756 of them are “Prick,” and 1299 of them are “Frig,” and I should know because I’ve bloody well counted.

It’s a wrist numbing journey through 40 years of sexual escapades wherein our hero (Walter) copiously spends into the accommodating orifices of whores, maids, shop girls, sailors and landladies.

The book purports to be Walter’s memoirs which he has drawn from extraordinarily detailed diaries made between the late 1840s and the early 1880s.

It begins:

“I had from youth an excellent memory, but about sexual matters a wonderful one. 

Women were the pleasure of my life. I loved cunt, but also who had it, I like the woman I fucked and not simply the cunt I fucked, and therein is a great difference. 

I recollect even now in a degree which astonishes me, the face, colour, stature, thighs, backside, and cunt of well-nigh every woman I have had, who was not a mere casual, and even of some who were. I recollect also largely what we said and did, and generally our baudy amusements.

When I have named the number of times, I have fucked a woman in my youth, I may occasionally be in error, it is difficult to be quite accurate on such points after a lapse of time. 

But as before said, in many cases, the incidents were written down a few weeks and often within a few days after they occurred.

But my doings with man and woman are as true as gospel.

 If I say that I saw, or did, that with a cousin male, or female, it was with a cousin and no mere acquaintance; if with a servant, it was with a servant; if with a casual acquaintance, it is equally true. 

Nor if I say I had that woman, and did this or that with her, or felt or did aught else with a man, is there a word of untruth excepting as to the place at which the incidents occurred. But even those are mostly correctly given, this is intended to be a true history, and not a lie.”

If it is indeed the recollections of Henry Spenser Ashbee, then it beggar’s belief that the man had time, energy and fluids for anything else except copulation.

A modern Casanova, Walter’s remarkable rate of success with women, rests not upon charm or physical appearance - although he was particularly proud of his “smooth white skin” – but rather a combination of three very powerful forces.

The first is the overwhelming hunger for congress of the human sexual organ. 

Disconnected from the moral loadstone of the brain, Walter maintains that cock and cunt are in a constant state of need, “Swelling, throbbing, flooding and seething” with a passion that nature demands be sated. 

For a seducer like Walter this meant that regardless of who he met or where, the battle was already half won.

The second is the penis. Walter maintains that however much a woman may demure at a fellow’s advances, once he has shown her his proud and erect member – or better still wrapped her fingers around it – she will surrender to her body’s most primal needs – “Nothing” he writes “persuades a woman like a stiff-stander” 

To that end he is forever exposing himself to women in woodland, train carriages and public spaces – with, inevitably agreeable results.

The final motivator is coin. 

As a wealthy man, Walter (like Ashbee) has easy access to a supply of funds, far out of the reach of the shop girls, servants and prostitutes who make up many of his conquests. He writes not without a sense of pride, “I’m an old stager – money will open every females’ legs.”

In fact, one of his first gambits on meeting a new female – Even before showing her his prick – is to show her a handful of sovereigns, or offer to buy her a fancy dress.

These are, of course, not his only strategies to achieve carnal satisfaction. 

During the course of the book, Walter also resorts to plying women with alcohol, threatening them – in the case of servant girls - with dismissal, blackmailing them and pretending to be a doctor.

Whether My Secret Life is fact or fiction is a matter of mass debate , but whatever the truth, one cannot deny that it’s “a rattling good yarn.”

As to who wrote it, that is also something of a mystery, although there are so many similarities between “Walter” and Ashbee that it would be a rash fellow who bets his purse that the book loving sensualist is not the author.

For example;

Walter and Ashbee both have connections to West London, both are gentlemen and Anglican, neither attended university, both travelled extensively and were particularly fond of dancing. Both also spoke several languages and admitted to re-reading their own diaries for the purpose of sexual gratification.

Both were good sailors and categorized facts obsessively; they liked playing billiards but disliked red headed women. 

They both claimed that they looked younger than they really were, used Latin phrases to make a point, and enjoyed voyeurism. 

I may not be Conan Doyle’s famous detective  but I can see the evidence for Ashbee’s authorship of Walter’s adventures building into quite the convincing case.

Ashbee however was no irresponsible pornographer; he was adamant that erotic martial should not be shown or fall into the hands of those too young to understand it.

In his opinion, if writing was good or brushwork skilled the subject of a piece of art was immaterial - the quality overrode any moral concerns. He simply didn’t recognise the concept of “Obscenity”, regarding it as a moral constraint that imposed upon the individual and played no part in a modern world of reason. 

That the writing of My Secret Life, while robust, is far from remarkable shows that perhaps he never regarded it as art (whether he wrote it or not) but rather as a necessarily comprehensive cataloguing of the sexual act. 

When Ashbee’s Pisanus Fraxi identity was finally revealed, his public justification for sharing erotic knowledge with the world was that if decent people knew more about the filthy books, of which he was writing then they could more easily avoid them.

This contrasted vividly to his private joy in exposing to wider appreciation what he often considered artistic and educational masterpiece’s, kept hidden by a society that had no respect for individual freedoms.

Sounds a bit like an anarchist to me.    

As he grew older, Ashbee’s libertarian ways grew more conservative, ironically as the views of his family became more liberal. 

He despaired of his wife’s support for the suffragette movement, was irritated by the “Excessive education” of his daughters, and became estranged from his homosexual son - who once wore a straw boater and flannels to the office….to the office!!!

Despite this, he still recorded every written depiction of perversion and vice with an obsessive attention to detail.

After a lifetime cataloguing fucking and flogging, Ashbee passed away last year, leaving his unique Cervantes collection to the British Museum on the condition that they also preserved his volumes of pornography.  

With barely concealed distaste, the museum agreed and it is now eternally preserved for the nation……God Save The Queen!

Ashbee’s real legacy will probably lie dusty and forgotten in some obscure basement but I propose that it could be put to much better use by people who actually appreciate it.

I wish I had a bigger bookcase.

I’ve read My Secret Life and if you ignore the sex scenes – which become exhausting and tedious after about number 300 there are, squeezed in between, some fascinating glimpses into the Victorian world. 

But bloody hell it’s a slog.

It’s a bit like some 1970s sex comedy, that has dated very poorly, but the main character Walter – far from being a lovable jack the lad is portrayed as a remorseless sex pest who thinks he’s doing all the women he accosts a favour.

There will be an episode devoted entirely to Walter at some point in the future. 

Ashbee however – who may have written the novel or he may not – is a much more sympathetic real-life character. 

He certainly arranged My Secret Life’s publication, thanks to his dodgy contacts on the continent and without him we probably wouldn’t have been able to study this smutty but historically revealing epic. 

It's easy to view him as a grubby pornographer – and many do – but in Ashbees mind he was a responsible curator of artistic and socially important material.   

This surprisingly upright moral compass didn’t prevent his wife from eventually leaving him.

Im not sure whether this was because she eventually found out about his X-rated hobby or that as he got older his once free and easy outlook had become so reactionary that she could no longer live with him.

All of his children sided with her in the divorce, so he disinherited the lot of them. 

There have been suggestions that he had a long-term lover in Paris, so wasn’t too upset about this development but that has yet to be confirmed. 

There is so much more to write about the psychological motivations of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the historical value of his erotica collection and the socio-political contradictions inherent in the Victorian attitude to sex and sensuality – but this isn’t that kind of podcast.

Rogues Gallery Uncovered is more “PHWOOOORR” than Freud. 

I suggest digging out a copy of a fantastic book called The Other Victorians – a study of Sexuality and pornography in 19th Century England by Steven Marcus. 

Ashbee’s in it a lot . 

One final thing - the urban myth that Victorians were so prudish that they covered up table legs in case it got men all hot and bothered is I'm afraid a load of old bollocks. 

So if you’ve ever had an erection in furniture shop you only have yourself to blame. 

Next time on Rogues Gallery Uncovered 

He spends your cash on looking Flash. 

Robbing from the rich to spend on himself, meet 1670s original dandy highwayman 

CLAUDE DUVAL

I hope you enjoyed this episode it was a lot of fun to write and produce, even if anyone overhearing me recording it may have had some concerns.

“My hand is in the shape of a claw.”

As I said at the outset, if you appreciate this kind of risqué historical tomfoolery and can spare a fiver a month, then becoming a member on roguesgalleryonline.com would really support the podcast and you would gain access to some exclusive features – im particularly proud of the in depth study of Hogarth’s A Rakes Progress. 

If you like it I may do more art studies.

Visit roguesgalleryonline.com, Click join on the landing page, provide your email address to become a member, set up the payment and you are good to go – all the members only pages are on the main menu and your merch discount code will be on the confirmation you receive when you sign up.

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If you do join let me know what you think of the new website and the features and feel free to make suggestions either on the forum or direct to me at simon@roguesgalleryonline.com.

All the links and addresses you need are in the show notes. 

Tempting as it is to say I'm off to my leather upholstered masturbation annex to knock off a couple of chapters.   I wont

The builders aren’t due in until next Thursday.

I will say enjoy the next fortnight, if you become a member, have fun, above all else stay roguish and ill see you yesterday.