PISANUS FRAXI
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innocent. He strikes one as a person who had a mania for print com–
bined with a mania for concealment; and in a pinch he sometimes
wrote his own pornography,
The Convent School, or Early Experi–
ences of A Young Flagellant,
by
"Rosa Belinda Coote," coming from
his own free pen. He wrote his own descriptive and advertising copy,
and as a sample of his prose, here is part of his blurb for
La Rose
d'Amour,
an American pornographic novelette which he palmed off
as a translation from the French. "One of the most remarkable works
of the present day. Possessed of unbounded wealth, and of frame and
of stamina of body apparently inexhaustible . . . this hero ravishes,
seduces, and ruins all the females that come within his reach-rich
and poor, gentle and simple, rough and refined, all fall down before
his sceptre of flesh, his noble truncheon, his weapon of war. His great
passion is for maidenheads, for young and unfledged virgins. . . . He
travels the seas for new victims of his raging lust; he buys maiden–
heads by the score, he initiates them in all the mysteries of Venus,
and finally, retires to his chateau with a seraglio of beauties. . . .
Every page is a picture of sensual delight, and the book is illustrated
with Sixteen Coloured Designs equal to the text. It is in two vols, and
the price is Three guineas." One has to be possessed of a special kind
of talent to be able to achieve such abolute anonymity, such level dead–
ness of style; and it is not anticipating too much to say that in the writers
and publishers of pornography, and in pornography itself, a certain
kind of mechanical excitement of emotions through mechanical means,
which has since spread itself throughout modern culture
in
general,
is met with in an early and primitive form.
Dugdale was the publisher of the famous "Don Leon" poems,
supposedly by and about Byron. He himself apparently believed that
they were genuine, and before he committed the manuscript to print
approached a friend of Ashbee's and asked this man "to advise him
as to how he could best approach Lady Byron, from whom he ex–
pected to get a large sum to suppress the publication." This attempt at
extortion came to nothing, and Dugdale went back to his plain and
fancy buccaneering. He was also one of the chief publishers during
the Victorian period of pornographic periodicals. One of the writers
who both translated stories for his magazines and supplied him with
original material was James Campbell. And Campbell, we know, was
a close associate of Ashbee's. The organic filaments that bind this
little world or sub-culture together come into sight once again, and
we see that the Olympian Ashbee and the subterranean Dugdale are
connected by something more than a casual common interest. Yet it is
Ashbee himself who has helped us to see even this far.
