Henry Spencer Ashbee
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Henry Spencer Ashbee (21 April 1834-29 July 1900) was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer notable for his particular focus on sexuality.
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[edit] Life
Ashbee was born in Southwark, London, and was married in Hamburg, Germany in 1862. He was by occupation a textile trader. He travelled extensively during his life, including Europe, Japan, and San Francisco, collaborating with Alexander Graham on Travels in Tunisia, published in 1887. He was an avid book collector, with perhaps the world's most extensive collections of Cervantes and erotica.
Ashbee was a part of a loose intellectual fraternity of English gentlemen who discussed sexual matters with a freedom that was at odds with Victorian mores; this fraternity included Richard Francis Burton, Richard Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne, and others. He also amassed thousands of volumes of pornography in several languages. He wrote on sex under the pseudonyms "Fraxinus" (Ash) and "Apis" (Bee), and sometimes combined them as "Pisanus Fraxi".
Ashbee's will left his entire collection to the British Museum, with the condition that the erotic works had to be accepted along with the conventional items. Because the trustees wanted the materials related to Cervantes, they decided to accept the bequest. The trustees exploited a loophole to destroy some of the erotica, although some of the works are in the British Library, including a work by William Simpson Potter.
His family life grew unhappier as he aged. As he became more conservative, his family moved with the times and became more progressive. "The 'excessive education' of his daughters irritated him, his Jewish wife's pro-suffragism infuriated him, and he became tragically estranged from his socialist, homosexual son, Charles" [1] (the designer Charles Robert Ashbee).
[edit] Books
Ashbee's most famous works were his three bibliographies of erotic works:
- Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1877. (The name is a reference to the Catholic Church's list of banned books "Index Librorum Prohibitorum").
- Centuria Librorum Absconditorum: being Notes Bio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1879.
- Catena Librorum Tacendorum: being Notes Bio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1885
[edit] My Secret Life
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Ashbee is also suspected by some to be "Walter", the author of My Secret Life, a lengthy sexual memoir of a Victorian gentleman; or, if not the author, perhaps at least the compiler of the book's index, the provider of some editorial assistance, and/or the person who saw the text into print. My Secret Life was first printed in a private edition of eleven volumes, beginning around 1888. Later attempts to publish the work commercially resulted in its being repeatedly banned: in 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing three volumes. It was finally issued successfully by Grove Press in New York in 1966. It wasn't until 1994/1995 that the work in its entirety was published in the UK by Arrow Books a division of Random House UK.
Gershon Legman was the first to link "Walter" and Ashbee in Legman's introduction to the 1962 reprints of Ashbee's bibliographies; the 1966 Grove Press edition of My Secret Life included an expanded version of that essay. Many, however, were unconvinced; and in particular, Steven Marcus's influential The Other Victorians (1966) argued that, based on "Walter"'s personality and biographical details, he clearly could not be Ashbee. Also unconvinced were Drs. Phyllis & Eberhard Kronhausen in their detailed study of "My Secret Life" - "Walter the English Casanova" (1967). More recently, however, Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001, ISBN 0-571-19619-5) provides a detailed review of circumstantial evidence arguing that Ashbee wrote My Secret Life, presumably weaving fantasy and anecdotes from friends in with his own real-life experiences. Just prior to this, in May 2000, Channel 4 UK broadcast a documentary, Walter - The Secret Life of a Victorian Pornographer, which also claimed that Ashbee was Walter.
The question of whether the book reflects actual experiences (whether of Ashbee or another writer) or is simply erotic fiction, has been much disputed. The question can now probably never be fully resolved but the presence of much mundane detail, the writer's inclusion of incidents that do him little personal credit and the lack of intrinsically improbable circumstances (by contrast with most Victorian erotica) would tend to substantiate its validity. In spite of "Walter's" obsessive womanising over a period of several decades, only a few of his partners are of his own social class. The great majority are either prostitutes, servants or working class women. This would appear to reflect the realities of his era.
[edit] Influences
A character based on him is central to Sarah Waters's award-winning novel Fingersmith: a man obsessively collecting and indexing pornography and works about human sexuality, in an atmosphere of oppressive Victorian hypocrisy.
[edit] References
- ^ [1] "Sexual intercourse began in 1863..." a review of Gibson's biography by Rachel Holmes, 25 February 2001, The Observer
- The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee by Ian Gibson, London: Faber and Faber, 2001 (ISBN 0-571-19619-5)
- Henry Spencer Ashbee, also known as "Pisanus Fraxi", Index of Forbidden Books (written 1880s as Index Librorum Prohibitorum), London: Sphere, 1969.
- Text of My Secret Life
