My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London (Signet Classics)

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Walter’s anecdotes place Little Emily’s ruination in a wider context; they make Collins’ eccentric matrimonials seem commonplace, and Lady Audley’s secret less shameful. She resisted after the manner of women, but so feebly, that I easily held her close, and repeated my kiss. Like all women of her class she refused it at first, was nervous, said she could not eat before gentlefolks, and was most uncomfortable, but it gradually wore off as the food warmed and the wine cheered her.

I sent for champagne, we all stripped naked, the two women sat on my knees, then laid on the bed side by side, and then knelt on it with rumps outwards, whilst I investigated their genitals; but my prick would not stand, and though I tried to fuck the stranger who used every blandishment, I could not do it. Anything which brings man and woman to think of the genitals of the opposite sex has a stirring lewed effect! By turns adventurous, demeaning, affectionate and disgusting, My Secret Life describes rich and poor, servants and employers, business transactions and passionate affairs. Suddenly this girl was dismissed, and I was re-quested to dismiss my man, who had lived with us before I had left England, indeed had been in my service nearly two years.The two were now pretty screwed, and up to anything, and I now believe amused each other this way when by themselves, though I did not then even fully realize that tribadism was more than a sham. I disliked the idea of minette, yet now I had consummated in the lady's mouth, and actually enjoyed it; had set women flat-fucking, and enjoyed seeing that. The winter sun shot a brilliant ray right on to her cunt as she lay — it was that which seduced me into the lingual incitement. Having put chemise and shirt on, and made up the fire (for it was cold), in an hour or so Gabrielle said it was her turn to be fucked, and began, unasked, her favorite move of stiffening me by a delicate application of her tongue to the naked tip of my penis, and very shortly my lust was rampant again. I sat reflecting on all this with an aching head the next morning, and wondering how many times I had spent.

Perhaps one of the most infamous texts to be published in the Victorian era, My Secret Life is still valued for its explicit discussions of sexual matters and other subjects considered obscene for public discussion. Then as my prick came out, Gabrielle, with a cry of pleasure, rub-bed her cunt lubricated with my sperm against the cunt of her friend, and they rubbed, and wriggled, and screeched, and spent in voluptuous frenzy. Yet despite the often lurid content of his erotic panegyric, the redolent scent of a lost era serves to ameliorate the subject matter, and the historical context offers a sense of perspective on what it might actually have been like to be alive in the nineteenth Century.I was on her, and my prick had touched her cunt when, my fin-gers feeling its moisture, the idea of her not having washed the Frenchman's sperm out of her seized me, and my prick began to dwindle. This perusal brings prominently before me all my acts, deeds, and thoughts for full twenty years, and I perceive clearly, that altho I had done most things which were sexually possible once, and almost out of curiosity, or else on sudden impulse (up to about this period), yet that my habits with women in my lust were for the most part simple, commonplace, and unintellectual; and that I had not sought for out of the way lascivious postures and varied complex delights in copulation or its preliminaries, which a fervid, voluptuous, poetical imagination has since gradually devised for my gratification. William Simpson Potter (1805-1879), a known associate of Ashbee, was put forward by Gordon Grimley in his introduction to the 1972 edition of My Secret Life. Resounding plaudits to the remarkable Dr Kate Lister who took the trip down from Leeds Trinity University to engage, amuse and astonish us with her learning, perspicacity and nuanced views. Then to Turin I went, and sledged over Mount Cenis, and afterwards by diligence much of the way, and the rest by rail, reached Paris with a few adventures, and the first, strange to say, again with (I believe) a married woman.