The Daughter of Fanny Hill

By XinXii

For more than 200 years, the world has loved Fanny Hill, the beautiful, bawdy courtesan whose amorous adventures in the half-world of 18th-century London have shocked and delighted tens of millions of readers.

Now Fanny is at long last vividly reincarnated in the person of her only child, an artful adventuress whose assault on the hot-blooded bucks of Merrie England is matched only by theirs upon this damsel who couldn't say no!

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781608728619

Book preview

LETTER

INTRODUCTION

Considerable speculation still surrounds the authorship of The Daughter of Fanny Hill. It is known that following the publication of Fanny Hill, and the resultant scandals and legal suits that resulted from the printing and public distribution of that now acknowledged classic, John Cleland, the author, in return for a small pension agreed never to take pen in hand again in such an endeavor.

It is well known that, fortunately for literature, John Cleland did not keep to that agreement. Several works exist that, while they do not bear his signature, are nevertheless unmistakably of his authorship.

About The Daughter of Fanny Hill, no two scholars agree. Some insist that it is in truth from the pen of John Cleland, while others just as stoutly maintain that it was turned out by some other writer in the wake of the success of its forerunner, Fanny Hill.

Certainly the work, irrespective of whether or not it is actually from the talented pen of John Cleland, can stand on its own merits as a classic, however long neglected. It is an accurate portrayal of the manners and morals of one of the most bawdy periods in England’s social history, reflecting the atmosphere of a time that permitted such infamous groups as the notorious Hell Fire Club not only to flourish more or less openly but to number among the members persons of high repute and noble birth. And the book, itself, shows the same graceful touch that marked the pages of Fanny Hill.

Up to now, for one reason or another, the circulation of The Daughter of Fanny Hill has been limited to the select and fortunate few.

This edition, the first of two volumes—for there is yet another depicting the further adventures of the talented offspring of the world’s most famous courtesan—marks its first publication in English in modern times.

FIRST LETTER

Dear Madame:

Having just been advised, and in a manner most round about and curious, of your continued existence and station in life, I am but most anxious to establish communication with you. I hesitate, however, to do this in person and without prior warning of my intentions, well knowing as I must considering the circumstances of my own up-bringing and my youthful environment, of your own background and manner of life and the achieving of such status in society as you now enjoy.

I hasten at the very beginning of these lengthy epistles, to assure you, Madame, that I bear you no bitterness in my thoughts nor malice for having deserted me at such a tender age, while still a puling infant. Much to the contrary. In fact, I was most proudful and understandably pleased when recently I was informed that beyond peradventure I was indeed the daughter of the famous and by many most envied Fanny Hill. You should know, Madame, that for long your name and reputation, the latter quite possibly exaggerated and made more colourful in the retelling, have long been held in the highest esteem in the brothels and bagnios of London, particularly in the most select establishments of those catering only to the nobility.

I have, during my own not inconsiderable, experiences since becoming a practicing whore, heard from many of high quality and position, not excluding that of the highest in the land, which exalted gentleman I encountered not once but several times at the country establishment of Lord Rochester, of your practiced arts. You have, if I may say so, Madame, without your thinking me guilty of unbecoming flattery, been a most enviable example for an ambitious daughter, and I think I may say without conceit that I am indeed ambitious to better myself in the profession in which circumstances and fate have placed me.

So much by way of an introduction. I should imagine—perchance I should say that I am most hopeful— that you are anxious to learn the circumstances of my early and formative years since you left me to the tender mercies of Kate Dugan, in her brothel in Soho at a time when fortune seemed to have deserted you. If later you sought, as I have heard, to discover my whereabouts, it is a small wonder that you met with no success, for Kate Dugan, too, came upon hard times, due largely, so I have been informed, to allowing her clients to be most shamefully robbed and exploited. This grievous state of affairs resulted from her rarely being in command of her full senses, being besotted by strong drink, and she died later a drunkard’s death and was buried in a common pauper’s grave. This addiction to strong drink, I am happy to state, is a vice to which I have never been prone, believing that drunkenness is not suitable for a lady’s proper comportment. I have always believed that the minor vices should be most carefully eschewed by those of our particular profession, and have so conducted myself. In that respect, Madame, you may be quite certain that I have done nothing to bring shame on your name.

Following Mistress Kate’s untimely demise, I was, so I am told, shunted about for a time until at last I came to a certain permanence in the brothel of Madame Berkley. It is here that my earliest recollections begin. I was most well provided for, and even coddled, though allowed no idle time for the mischief which I understand is common to most children and makes them a burden to their elders. Further, at a most tender age I was privy to the ways in which gentlemen found their pleasures with girls, so that nothing was to come as a surprise or a shock to me in later years.

As is befitting for a child who is at the same time an orphan, with her own way to later make in the world, I was set at an early age to doing needful tasks about the establishment. I was indeed fortunate to find myself in a place such as Madame Berkley’s which deserved its established reputation for superiority, not only in its appointments but in the type and variety of the doxies there employed. I might well have found myself in one of the tawdry dives peopled by drunken sluts not worthy of hire by any but the most sordid of riffraff, scum from the gutters who cared not where or how or with whom they found release for their animal passions. Madame Berkley, as doubtless you are aware, maintained one of the most elegant of brothels, many of the gentlemen who were certainly in a position to judge even claiming that it surpassed the fashionable establishment of Mrs. Charlotte Hayes.

I have heard it told often enough that in many of the brothels of London the girls were kept therein by force, or if not by force then by the most horrible of threats. This, I am most happy to say, was not true at Madame Berkley’s. She rivaled Mrs. Hayes in her treatment of the girls working for her. Each one had her own private apartment, well and tastefully furnished. Each one, too, had her own body servant, a post which I occupied during my tender years before I had matured enough to actively enter the trade. Two of the young ladies who were great favorites with Madame Berkley, as well with the gentlemen who visited the establishment with regularity, had small Negro boys whom they dressed in oriental costume as body servants.

Needless to say when times were idle there was considerable play of a most intimate nature with these small ebony attendants. I, myself, once was severely reprimanded by Madame Berkley when she apprehended me intimately investigating one of these black urchins. I explained to her that I was only curious to discover whether or not they possessed the same make of manhood as that I had so often seen displayed by the clients of the establishment when perchance, as quite often happened, I entered one of the bedrooms while it was being put to most active use.

Madame Berkley was always most forceful during those short years before I reached the tender age of 13 in impressing upon me how carefully I should guard my virginity. It was, she consistently reminded me, my one asset of tangible value in coin of the realm.

The sooner you rid yourself of your innocence, the better, she often told me. To my mind innocence is on a par with ignorance, and both are a liability to any woman with her way to make in the world. Your virginity, my child, is quite another matter. That is something tangible that can readily be detected by anyone in a position to investigate. It is of value, for today there are numerous gentlemen of wealth who will readily pay a goodly sum to be the first to possess a young virgin. So at the very start of your career, when it does begin, you will receive a most extravagant sum for an hour or so of your services. Whether or not you ever again receive a like sum for pleasuring some man will depend entirely on what talents in that direction you may develop. Some very few in our profession have gone on to wealth and high position, but far more have ended in the gutters due entirely to their own sloth and lack of ambition.

Young as I was then, I knew that much of what she was telling me was the truth. It was indeed true that there was an unprecedented demand for young virgins, and there were constant rumors of the kidnapping of tender young maidens throughout the length and breadth of England to supply this demand. According to the talk in Madame Berkley’s, young virgins from the poorer classes fetched as much as 15 or 20 pounds in the average brothel and it was said that many of these kidnappings were not in truth such but instead the work of parents overburdened with children and only too eager to exchange one for coin of the realm and at the same time rid themselves of one more mouth to feed. Girls from the better classes, more carefully and delicately reared, often fetched as much as 100 pounds. So widespread had this trade become, with the young virgins offered for sale of an increasingly tender age, that Parliament had but recently passed a law forbidding girls to become prostitutes until they had completed their 12th year.

That was why Madame Berkley was so insistent that I guard myself.

It was no easy thing to do for I began to develop at quite a tender age. My breasts began to take shape when I was only slightly past my 10th year; where once they had only been indicated by pinkish brown nipples they began to acquire a form and substance of their own. I watched them as closely as a gardener watching budding fruit, impatient for the day when they would be ripe enough to take to the market place. Like a miser pawing over gold pieces I even counted the first silken tendrils of curling hair that were to mark both my womanhood and its center of attraction.

Yet though I retained the physical aspects of my maidenhood and maidenhead, I was by no means unversed in various other forms of such pleasures as are best enjoyed in bed. Some