The Erotomaniac : The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee

Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secret—one so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dalí, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashbee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cataloguing such risqué titles as Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes. And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life —the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible.

The life and times of a Victorian gentleman of irrepressible curiosity-and shockingly repressed desire.

New Yorker

In The Erotomaniac (Da Capo), Ian Gibson investigates the life of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a respectable Victorian merchant who collected thousands of volumes of pornography spanning several centuries and languages. Gibson believes that Ashbee was also the author of My Secret Life, a notorious piece of Victorian pornography, reasoning, rather unflatteringly, that "it is a tale by someone who has not found erotic fulfillment, by someone for whom sex exists almost entirely in the head."

Of course, if we're to believe Freud, the impulse to collect is largely sexual anyway. Alfred Kinsey, before he embarked on his sex research, was a zoologist, and he collected millions of gall wasps in an attempt to log every variation in the species. Later, he switched to erotica; the editors of Sex and Humor: Selections from the Kinsey Institute (Indiana) gather some of the more lighthearted items from the collection -- kooky pinups, dirty postcards, and comics -- to illuminate their thesis that social taboos have forced people to "use humor to speak about sex."

There is no shortage of humor in the erotic art of Tomi Ungerer, whose wild imaginings include "Fornicon," a set of contraptions that look like a pornographic remake of "Metropolis." In Erotoscope (Taschen), a selection from four decades of drawings, Ungerer claims that he comes from a repressive Protestant background. This doesn't seem to have limited the amount of lewdness he can pack into a few swooping lines. Curiously, his artistic tastes seem to have dictated his sexual ones, rather than the other way around. His S & M kink reflects his love of shapes: tie a woman up, he explains, and "she becomes more fluid, and the pencil that draws her flows more easily across the paper." (Leo Carey)

Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secret—one so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dalí, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashbee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cataloguing such risqué titles as __Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes.__ And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious __My Secret Life__ —the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible. "To all intents and purposes, Henry Spencer Ashbee was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman. But his well-upholstered chambers in Gray's Inn concealed a shocking secret: Ashbee's vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong." "Acclaimed biographer Ian Gibson has created an engrossing portrait of Ashbee, a man who happily supported his unsuspecting wife and four children, but spent his spare time methodically cataloguing such risque titles as The Story of a Dildoe and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes." "With exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and to his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life - the 'true' autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman who 'enjoys many females, and narrates in the most painstaking manner their habits, customs and modes of sexual pleasure'. In The Erotomaniac Ian Gibson explores Ashbee's own secret life. The result is a fascinating portrait of a Victorian who seems to typify his age in all its curiousity, repression and subverted desire."--Jacket Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Introduction PART I 1 The Making of an Erotomaniac (1834-77) 2 The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877) 3 From the Centuria to the Catena (1877-85) 4 The Last Years (1886-1900) PART II 5 Ashbee and My Secret Life APPENDIX Henry Spencer Ashbee’s Will References Bibliography Acknowledgements Index Ashbee was a wealthy and respectable Victorian gentleman. But his smart chambers in Gray's Inn concealed a shocking secret: a collection of erotica and pornography. Acclaimed biographer Ian Gibson has created a marvellous portrait of Ashbee Henry Spencer Ashbee was born on 21 April 1834 in Blackfriars Road, Southwark, London, and baptized on 1 June following at Boughton under Blean, in Kent.