Date: 29 Nov 2009 Comments: 0

The language of flowers was developed in the Victorian Era

The Victorian era was a time when a farmer society developed into an urban society and as such it was also a time of contradictons. During the Victorian era child labour existed side by side with cultivation, dignity and higher morality, it was a time of a lot of different social movements..

Few people have a correct view of the morals of the Victorian viewers and even fewer do as an example know that Queen Victoria collected nude drawings of men while at the same time communication between lovers was so proscrived that courting couples communicated in clandestine ways such as by using the flower language. The Victorian era was also a period when scientists studied and published articles on the female orgasm, and numerous erotic letters from the period has survived into our time. Written explicit erotica flourished, partly thanks to an increasing literacy rate within the United Kingdom, and there is for instance the famous memoir “My Secret Life” by the pseudonym Walter and “The Pearl, A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading”, a monthly magazine issued for 18 months in 1879-1880.

My Secret Life is presented as being a truthful memoir of a Victorian gentleman’s sexual development and experiences. How much of it that is actually the true experiences of the writer (or of any other Victorian gentleman) and not simply erotic fantasy will probably never be fully resolved, but the story does lack the overabundance of fundamentally improbable circumstances that were a common feature in fictional Victorian erotica. The book contains plenty of mundane detail and the writer isn’t shy of including incidents that do him little personal credit.

The first edition of My Secret Life was published as a private edition and divided into 11 volumes that was published during seven year with the first volume being published 1888. The eleven volumes spans more than 4000 pages. The first edition was likely very small and some source say that it might have contained as few as 20 copies. During the 1900s, My Secret Life was reprinted in abridged versions but had a hard time escaping censorship. A New York publisher was for instance arrested in 1932 after reprinting the first three volumes, and it would take until 1966 before My Secret Life was finally published without censure in the USA. It was published by Grove press which is famous for having published D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover ” and for being the first publisher to publish Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer“, as well as the words of radical political thinkers likes Malcolm X and R©gis Debray.

British printer Arthur Dobson published a UK reprint of Me Secret Life and found that the British weren’t as liberal as the Americans and found himself convict to two years in prison in 1969. The first time this entire work was openly published without repercussions in the UK was 1995. The publisher was Arrow Books.

The writer of my secret life is still unknown but many people believe that Henry Spencer Ashbee, a book collector, bibliographer and writer is the writer or at the very least the compiler of the book collecting material from his own life and the lives of his friends to compile it.