PISANUS FRAXI
105
wanted to demonstrate in part how a mind like Ashbee's works and
how, historically, the investigation of pornography is itself to a re–
markable degree an example of the phenomenon being investigated.
Secondly, a balance had to be redressed, since the few brief discussions
of Ashbee's works which exist in English, French, and German are
absurdly disproportionate in their uncritical praise. Such adulation,
one may add, is a disservice to Ashbee, since it tends to obscure his
actual accomplishment. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to close an
essay on him without giving the reader some further notion of that
accomplishment.
IV
The one part of Ashbee's mind in whose sense of reality we can
place unlimited confidence is that part which deals with the books
themselves-with their external. specifications, dates, titles, printing
history, and variant editions; and with their internal specifications
in the sense of an accurate account of their narrative contents. Con–
nected with this is Ashbee's extensive knowledge of the pornographic
publishing trade as it grew and flourished during the nineteenth cen–
tury. Being the chief European collector of his time, he was naturally
intimate with the workings of that industry and with the customs and
practices of the entrepreneurs who gained their livelihood in it. The
principal circumstance of that trade is its obscurity, and as we have
seen, Ashbee himself often complains of the difficulties of amassing
evidence or of finding out anything at all. Yet he has brought more
light to this darkness than anyone else.
One of the first things to be learned from a study of Ashbee's
volumes is that by the mid-Victorian period the pornographic scene
had established itself in very much the same modes, categories, and
varieties as exist today. Alongside of works which fumbled toward
giving a scientific account of sexuality were grouped volumes de–
scribing the "rites" and "practices" of certain curious sexual and
religious cults, volumes which purported to be anthropology of some
kind, volumes of folklore, and a whole range of sex and marriage
manuals of differing inflammatory intensity but uniformly equal in–
eptitude and disingenuousness. Fiction presented a familiar visage.
From the outer circles in which there floated about stories, novelettes,
and whole novels of a sentimental-witty-racy kind, known in the
trade as "galanterie," one proceeded slowly and by gradually in–
creasing degrees of openness in the use of language and description
of events to the center, the hard core. Reprinting of old favorites went
on apace, and there was a brisk trade in translations, re-translations,
and back-translations--one of the tricks of the business being the
