Henry Spencer Ashbee seemed a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman. But his well-upholstered chambers in Gray's Inn concealed a shocking secret: a vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong.
The Erotomaniac is a fascinating account of Victorian curiosity, repression and subverted desire. Acclaimed biographer Ian Gibson has created an engrossing portrait of Ashbee, which examines the evidence that Ashbee himself may have been the author of the most famous work of Victorian erotica, My Secret Life.
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This is a peculiar sort of biographical production, an unusual addition to Gibson's otherwise excellent list of books. It is certainly written and researched with care, and constitutes a genuine scholarly contribution to this little-studied aspect of Victorian life. But it is also oddly dispiriting to read--not because of Gibson's immaculate writing, but because of Ashbee's monomaniacal proclivities. Pornography, at the very least, should be sexually exciting; but only a very particular sort of individual will find much stimulation in the depressing array of flagellation and violence that crops up all through this material. As Gibson concedes at the end of his book, Ashbee is "sad--in, we assume, the traditional as well as the modern sense of the word: nobody with a reasonably happy affective life is going to spend years writing and collecting this sort of 'obsessive, reiterative' material". --Adam Roberts
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