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

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Then I went to a restaurant with her, and had a jolly dinner in a private room. Returning, I bought cards and cribbage board and sat smoking, and playing crib-

For half a minute I gazed at her with delight as she lay with wonderfully large thighs, and legs, and would The moral issues confound me more than ever. I’d love to consign Walter’s behaviour to the past. I’d love to believe pornography has no link to disrespect and coercion. But I wonder. I wonder if today’s socio-sexual scandals have the same basis as Walter’s behaviour: sexual inequality; financial inequality; male impunity; collusion in laying blame on women. We seemed to take a great liking for each other, and of course it occurred to me, that she would make a good temporary bedfellow. I saw her ankle and a bit higher as she sat down. The foot was beautiful, the swell of the calve enticing, and I fancied she let more of it be seen than was needful. — Point blank after dinner the next day I praised it to her. She stared me full in the face a long time in a peculiar way, and said I had no business to look, but there was something in her eyes, which made me say to myself, "That woman's dying for a man." Her husband had been away three years, according to her account.

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I tried to ascertain where the little one

she asked — what she meant I didn't exactly know, but chaffingly I replied. — "Yes, Betsy. Get me a nice young cunt without a bit of hair on it— and a man to frig." "Och, yer baste, is it a young cunt yer wants, - On the other hand, Steven Marcus, in his influential The Other Victorians (1966), concluded that the balance of known facts was against Legman's "shrewd and ingenious guess." Also unconvinced were Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen in their detailed study of My Secret Life, Walter, the English Casanova (1967). At Paris I had a great treat. Arriving there late, the Hotel was quite full, and they put me into a top floor, where the room was poorly furnished, the doors shaky, the partitions thin and floors naked, so I could hear people talking in the rooms on either side of me. Making the best of it, and sitting for a short time quietly reading, before going to bed, I suddenly heard a man and woman's voice in the adjoining room. They had just arrived, and were grumbling at the accommodation, asked for this and that, and had the beds (there were two) placed in the room in the way which pleasedShe not only stayed alive, she turned her hard beginnings around, became self sufficient, successful and someone with respect for herself. She didn't let the naysayers and judgers stop her. She's the one sitting in the drivers seat at the end. I had only been a week at R**e when this carnal treat was given me. But through her, I had already invitations to the houses of two or three R*m*n nobles of high degree, but not to any dinners. Hospitality there did not seem to take that form, but she had began to ask me to luncheon, and dinner, and supper as well. Indeed this great dame had, I found, got a strong letch for me, tho I did not see it so clearly then as I now do.

About the third day, I became uneasy about the ending of this affair. I could go out more freely from this house than from the baudy house, and went to my club for letters, but did not wish to be seen much, for I was supposed to be in the country with a friend, and there-fore kept mostly at the lodgings with her. I could not walk out with her either, and did not like her to go out alone, thinking she might disappear, for she was evidently a determined creature. But she didn't seem to care at all about going out. I did not see a tear. Then, she looked at me with a stoney stare. "Now, my good girl, listen to me, — go home, go home now, or you'll get into worse trouble." — "I shan't. I'd sooner drown myself," — she said fiercely. — "Can I help you? — If you are in trouble, I will." She answered not. — Again I advised going home — again came the enraged reply. — She'll go wrong somehow I thought, and as well with me as an-other, and then, — "Come home with me then." very large palace it was, and most of their rooms on one floor) but she kept such a carriage, horses, coach-man, and out-door servants, that she might have been taken for a millionaire. — I was to have been at the Palazzo, the day after I had tailed the lady, and was in my room wondering whether any more copulation would come off, and thinking over the charms of my noble Venus, when a letter was brought me from the Marchesa, and a reply asked for by bearer. "Tell the servant to come up." — I thought it was a man, when behold, up came the maid.So, not a song about a poor girl, but a song of hope and how you can rise up no matter how far down you started. It is a document created for over forty years, hence, making an interesting psychological document as well. Who is the author of My Secret Life? Of Walter’s myriad encounters, some are pornographic and perverse. Some are sordid, but revealing. Many would today see him under investigation from Operation Yewtree. In the cab I asked her questions, and got nothing but yes — or no — and sometimes no reply at all. — She kept eyeing me in a strangely sullen, fixed, manner. The author of My Secret Life or the identity of Walter has been unknown, although, some critics have assumed Henry Spencer Ashbee to be the one. Ashbee was a collector of pornography and had always been assumed to be the figure behind the Victorian pornographic epic.

Yet he also tells of Yellow-Haired Kitty, insisting she was no prostitute but sold herself for “pies and sausage-rolls”; Camille, the quiet French prostitute who enjoyed telling him of lesbianism and sodomy; and every class of encounter from penurious alleyway gropes to persuasively lecherous travelling ladies. Walter considers any woman fair game. Now, in Collins’ Armadale, I can read into the hero’s wooing of Miss Milroy the same shadow of ruination that Walter senses seeing a woman drop her handkerchief in the street. Look no further than Walter’s My Secret Life. Walter goes further. Darker. Deeper. This eleven volume erotic memoir is not the best-written book you will ever read, not the most entertaining, nor the most erotic. But it is stuffed full of life, a scintillating social history by a remarkable mnemonist. Judith Flanders confesses qualms about researching this epic of debauchery, but she cannot resist his eye for detail. And details are the stuff of fiction. Though Walter was motivated by a relentless desire to have sex, he was also interested in the lives and circumstances of all those he encountered; and it is his exploration of their hearts and minds, as well as their bodies, that makes My Secret Life so uniquely interesting a piece of erotic literature. I met Betsy a little time afterwards by mere chance, and was going to pass her, but somehow she recognized me and touched me on the elbow, saying hastily, — "Come here, come here I've been looking for you for a week." — We turned up a side street. — "Oh if you mean it, I think I've got such a nice girl for you, but I shall run a risk." — We had a long conversation, I gave her money to make presents to the girl, and some for herself, but not much. — "I think she will, but if I can't get her, I can't, and then you'll think I've chiselled you." — "No I shan't," and we parted. Collecting. Collectors began publishing clandestine lists of erotica, notably the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by Pisanus Fraxi (pseudonym for Herbert Ashbee, the Latin for “ash-bee” – “fraxinus-apis” – erogenously rearranged).I had to call on the Marchesa afterwards, and knowing I might see the maid, wrote on a slip of paper, a request to know where she would meet me. She opened it hurriedly, and whispered "I can't read." — So I was balked. — The Marchesa that day asked if I had a sitting room at my hotel, and seemed surprized when she heard I had not. "I can't call on you then." She evidently meant me to have her at my hotel. — Such The woman soon followed us into the room, and staring hard at the young one, — "If it's all right, I've nothing to say," said she. I put a sovereign into her hand. "We shall stop all night." "Two ladies sir." I gave her another, shut the door in her face, and bolted it. — Betsy winked at me. "I knew she would if you spoke, and you've stumped up handsome." I had in-deed, and had never been charged for two ladies before in that house. may I wash it." — "Wash yourself all over, my love." — I poured out water for her, she washed, and brushed her hair, and then was a very handsome girl.