112
STEVEN MARCUS
John Camden Hotten managed to keep a toehold in the respect–
able world. Nothing of the kind can be said of William Dugdale
who in the back-alley society of the pornography trade was, like T. S.
Eliot's Macavity cat, "the Napoleon of crime." Born in 1800, this
regular out-and-outer was, in Ashbee's words, "one of the most pro–
lific publishers of filthy books." He carried on his business
in
a variety
of locations in the vicinity of Drury Lane, Wych Street, and Holy–
well Street, and worked under the cover of such names as Turner,
Smith, Young, and Brown. He spent a good deal of time
in
prison,
and died in 1868 in the House of Correction. There is nothing he
would not try, and some of his shifts are of a desperate ingenuity. He
was a master of the racket of reprinting. He would, for example, take
a work which was some fifty years old, alter but not entirely change
the text and title-adding something in the way of further spice to
both-and then reprint it as a new work, at two guineas a throw. He
would then take this volume, divide it in half, add a few pages of new
matter to each half, and publish it as another new work in two
volumes, this time for three guineas. He published anything he could
lay his hands on-from bawdy songsters at 6d. or 1/ to the gaudiest
volumes for as much as he could wheedle. He reprinted the porno–
graphy of other pornographic publishers, sometimes changing the title,
sometimes not bothering to; and he reprinted his own in as many
sizes, shapes, and forms as he could invent-a true pirate, he even
tried to steal from himself. He would not only reprint old works and
fob them off as new; he would do the reverse.
The New Epicurean;
or, The Delights of Sex, Facetiously and Philosophically Considered,
in Graphic Letters Addressed
too
Young Ladies .of Quality
was one of
his productions; at the bottom of the title page ran the legend "A
New Edition. London: 1740. [Reprinted 1865.]" This was in fact no
reprint but an original work, and 1865 was the date of its first publication.
Another one of his strategems for swindling was to take sections
or chapters from novels, give them a new title and print them as com–
plete works. His printing and illustrations, as Ashbee observes, were
almost uniformly of "villainous execution." He printed books purport–
ing to be translations from the French but which were actually Eng–
lish or American in origin. Frequently it is impossible to know what
language his publications were written in originally, since most of
the time, as Ashbee neatly puts it, his publications only indicate that
"a careless printer had added his blunders to those of an illiterate
author." He sometimes printed works which had teasing titles, such
as
Intrigues and Confessions .of a Ballet Girl,
which was followed by
a racy and suggestive subtitle, but which was in content altogether
