In 1900 an unusual offer was made to the trustees of the British Museum in London. A recently deceased rich Englishman had bequeathed his collection of books and illustrations of Don Quixote to the nation, but with a condition: that the museum also take and preserve for posterity his vast library of erotic books in numerous languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, even Latin.
When the importance of the Cervantes material became apparent to the museum trustees, they accepted the bequest, but kept quiet about the erotica. However, what was called the "Private Case," containing many outstanding works of erotica continued to be stored in the basement without the titles ever being catalogued. For seventy years the books were barred from the eyes of researchers. But today things have changed.
The donator of this extraordinary archive was Henry Spencer Ashbee, a (1834-1900), textile millionaire, traveller, hispanist and bibliophile who married a Hamburg heiress and was a friend of such eminent men as Sir Richard Burton, the Oriental scholar and translator of The Thousand and One Nights.
As well as compiling three astonishing volumes of erotic literature, Ashbee privately printed under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi a book about Tunisia; endless pieces in Notes and Queries and other journals in France and Britain. More significantly, he is considered by many as the author of My Secret Life, the 4,200-page erotic journal that narrates, in endlessly explicit detail, the sexual adventures of a Victorian gentleman.
My Secret Life was impounded for decades by customs authorities in England and the United States, and was only published openly in the more liberal 1960s (by the Grove Press). If true, that Ashbee is the author, it would make him not only one of the world's most comprehensive bibliographers of erotica, while he was living one of the nineteenth century's most complex secret lives, he had, too, a remarkable and hitherto unrecognised novelistic talent.
The Erotomaniac reveals that the chief agents of subversion of the Victorian ideal were its most eminent propagators. There is nothing particularly new in this idea. Gibson's achievement, however, is to illustrate with great humour the kinship between capitalism and perversion: punctilious editing, logging of statistics, creative accounting, pedantic detail, endless repetition, obsessive dedication - Ashbee tackled his project of transforming sex into text in the same spirit as he did free trade.
The Victorian patriarchs, Gibson suggests, approached their sexual culture as Commerce: with enthusiastic entrepreneurial spirit, energetic productivity, the unflagging desire to extract maximum surplus from all resources and extreme exploitation of women, children and other races. Most striking is the fact that in the great age of prohibition this compulsive erotic bibliographer, translator, diarist, polemicist, and, almost certainly, novelist was never once subject to any real state censorship.
