Beneath the velvet of decorum, the Victorian high society was full of gluttony and lechery and behind puritan businessman Mr. Ashbee was depraved "Pisanus Fraxi", the author of erotica bibliographies Britain's leading authority on pornography.
But it was for the anonymous autobiography and sex marathon, My Secret Life, that last month, the cultural magazine Time Out elected him as the rudest London writer of all times.
The book describes the sex-life of a character called Walter with mind-numbing detail. The facts and periods match those of Ahsbee’s private diary and that is why biographer Ian Gibson claims that Walter was just another of Henry’s pseudonymous.
The 11 volumes of My Secret Life were first printed in Amsterdam between 1888 and 1894 and were effectively banned for the next 100 years for being pornographic.
The 4200 pages erotic extravaganza was made to deserve the title. The word c*** was used 5357 times, while f*** appeared 4032 times and prick 3756 times.
A life of depravity
Mr. Ashbee is claimed to have copulated with some 2.000 women, mainly prostitutes and servant girls from almost all the countries in Europe during a period of 40 years.
According to the celebrated contemporary erotica writer, Sarah Waters, he “was a brilliant storyteller who was prepared to go anywhere for a f***”.
He compiled a monumental library of erotica and privately printed three bibliographies to fed the loose fraternity of sex-obsessed Victorian gentlemen, which included the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and Richard Francis Burton, the Orientalist writer-explorer who first translated the Kama Sutra into English.
When Ashbee died in 1990, he left around 1600 volumes of erotic literature to the BritishMuseum, whose officials were rather nonplussed by the bequest.
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An erotic extravaganza
“I began it for amusement”, Ashbee wrote in the preface of My Secret Life.
“Some ten years after I met a woman with whom, with those she helped me to, I did, said, saw, and heard well nigh everything a man and a woman could do with genitals, and began narrate those events.”
Amusing or not, the work of Henry Ashbee caught the eye of Victorian depraved gentleman and became a myth of erotica literature.
The original 20 sets were sold at £60, an enormous sum for the times, equivalent to over £4000 at today’s prices.
For the critic Maya Mirsky, one of the book’s “most disturbing” features is how Ashbee’s story addresses the sexual fantasies of contemporary audiences.
Ashbee was convinced that although he was having sex for money he could make his prostitutes “want it”. For the British Casanova, a ‘no’ could always turn into a ‘oh’.
Besides his self-deception, the fantasies depicted on Ashbee’s erotica account are the ones available on any newsstand today – virgins, watching lesbian sex, voyeurism and sadomasochism, to name a few.
The book was hailed for being blunt and going against puritan morals.
For Maya Mirsky “the main thing to be learned from My Secret Life is that people are people, no matter how many layers of clothing they wear”.
