Fanny Hill (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By John Cleland and Jennifer C. Garlen

Fanny Hill, also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, has been a notorious novel since it first appeared in London in 1748-9. Banned for its "obscene" content, this fictional account of a young womans unconventional route to middle-class respectability is, in fact, a lively and engaging comic romp through the boudoirs and brothels of Augustan England, with a heroine whose adventures and setbacks never lessen her humanity or her determination to find real love and happiness. Fannys story offers modern readers sensuality and substance, as well as an unusually frank depiction of love and sex in the eighteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431096

John Cleland

John Cleland (1709-1789) was an English novelist. Born in Surrey, he was raised in London. His father William Cleland was a military officer and civil servant who, along with his wife Lucy, was a friend of such literary and political figures as Alexander Pope, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Horace Walpole. Cleland attended Westminster School for several years before being expelled for unknown reasons. He joined the British East India Company, traveling to Bombay in 1728 where he worked as a civil servant and lived until 1740. Upon his return to London, he was shunned by his family, and attempted to kickstart the Portuguese East India Company before being arrested for a significant unpaid debt. In Fleet Prison, Cleland wrote Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, an early pornographic novel which was published in two parts and 1748 and 1749, earning him a second arrest upon his release. Despite being barred from legal publication for over one hundred years, illegal and heavily edited copies of the book sold well during Cleland’s lifetime, earning him plenty of infamy without enabling him to profit off his work. Cleland continued to write and publish comedic and satirical works throughout his life, and is remembered today as a controversial figure whose work pushed the boundaries of taste, decency, and legality in a time of extreme conservatism.

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INTRODUCTION

JOHN Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more widely known as Fanny Hill, has been a notorious novel since it first appeared in London in 1748-9. Banned for its obscene content, this fictional account of a young woman’s unconventional route to middle-class respectability is, in fact, a lively and engaging comic romp through the boudoirs and brothels of Augustan England, with a heroine whose adventures and setbacks never lessen her humanity or her determination to find real love and happiness. Occupying a space somewhere between straightforward pornography and the mainstream domestic fiction of its day, Fanny’s story offers modern readers both sensuality and substance, as well as an unusually frank depiction of love and sex in the eighteenth century.

Although John Cleland produced numerous pamphlets, plays, and other works in his career as a London hack writer, he is only known today for his authorship of Fanny Hill. Born in Surrey in 1710, Cleland was the eldest child of a transplanted Scotsman, William Cleland, and his wife, Lucy. John Cleland turned to writing for a living after a twelve-year tenure with the East India Company in Bombay, but his finances were bad enough to land him in Fleet Prison for debt in 1748. Spurred by an urgent need of funds and aided by the abundance of free time offered by his situation, Cleland finished and revised the original manuscript of the Fanny Hill, which he had begun work on some years earlier. The subsequent obscenity lawsuits landed Cleland in serious legal trouble, but the novel’s notoriety generated demand from curious readers, and Cleland eventually authored a heavily revised, expurgated edition of the book in an effort to produce additional income while avoiding further legal actions. Although Cleland continued to write for many more years, he never enjoyed any greater success; when he died in Westminster in 1789, the event attracted little public notice.

The obscenity charges brought against Cleland, his publishers, and his printer in 1749 launched Fanny Hill into instant notoriety. Although all of the defendants were found guilty, and the novel was officially banned from publication, the verdict did not prevent the book from being quietly printed and sold throughout the remainder of the century. It continued to circulate surreptitiously for the next two hundred years, even though Victorian prudery attempted to sink the novel into general obscurity, and early twentieth-century critics typically ignored or condemned Cleland’s work, as well. Ironically, it was another obscenity suit that finally brought Fanny Hill back into the limelight. In 1963, Fanny Hill again became the subject of legal scrutiny when G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a well-known American publishing company, attempted to release a new edition of Fanny Hill in the United States. The case, brought by the City of New York, was ultimately dismissed by the New York State Supreme Court, and in 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court also cleared the novel for legal publication in the United States. Not surprisingly, the publicity and controversy surrounding Fanny Hill and its publication produced a boom in critical and popular interest; both serious academic studies and pornographic film adaptations appeared in abundance for the next several years. One of the most important scholarly productions of this period was William H. Epstein’s 1974 biography, John Cleland: Images of a Life, which continues to be the most thorough and extensive study of the author and his work. Although widespread popular interest faded over time, Fanny Hill has enjoyed more lasting attention from scholars in the field of eighteenth-century studies because it addresses so many of the period’s central issues and concerns, particularly those relating to the developing roles and functions of the novel, the construction of women’s social and sexual identities, and the period’s attitudes toward sex and personal pleasure.

The literary importance of Fanny Hill can only be fully appreciated if we know something about its cultural and historical context. It appeared almost simultaneously with many of the century’s greatest novels, and it shares several key characteristics with them. Samuel Richardson’s enormously successful Pamela was published in 1740, while Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, appeared in 1748, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was published in 1749. All three of these novels would come to be seen as tremendously important, influential texts; the course of English fiction would be molded by their influence on later writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Richardson’s two novels feature sympathetic heroines struggling against social and sexual antagonism; in Pamela, this struggle ends in a Cinderella marriage between the heroine and her former antagonist, while in Clarissa a violent rape leads to the deaths of both the title heroine and her ravisher. Fielding’s comic masterpiece follows the escapades of a roguish young hero whose love for his sweetheart does not prevent him from indulging in a series of casual encounters with women of all sorts, although he does ultimately settle down to marriage and domestic bliss. Literary critics have found a great deal to say about the relationships between these more celebrated novels and Fanny Hill; Malcolm Bradbury, for example, discusses this issue in a general sense in "Fanny Hill and the Comic Novel." More specific comparisons are provided by Ann Louise Kibbie in Sentimental Properties: ‘Pamela’ and ‘Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ and by Edward W. Copeland in Clarissa and Fanny Hill: Sisters in Distress.

Novels like Pamela, Clarissa, and Tom Jones appealed to an increasingly literate public because they adopted lower- and middle-class characters as their protagonists, and they advanced the moral, political, and social ideals that were coming to dominate English popular culture. Like Pamela and Tom Jones, Fanny Hill begins with neither wealth nor social status and eventually, through good luck, common sense and basic goodness of heart, acquires both. This kind of plot became a standard of English comic fiction; we see it repeated in other popular novels of the period like Frances Burney’s Evelina and in later works like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Lower- and middle-class readers were inspired by these tales of success; they wanted to believe that they, too, could move up the social ladder and find personal happiness in spite of the apparent obstacles. Fanny is an extreme example of this kind of success; she climbs the ladder farther than many of her fellow protagonists because she starts out so much lower. Orphaned and penniless at the opening of her tale, she hopes only to become a servant in London, which would be a step up for a poor country girl like herself. Instead, she falls down the ladder by becoming a prostitute in Mrs. Brown’s brothel; she is, quite literally, a fallen woman. According to the popular attitudes of the time, Fanny is thus at the very bottom of the social ladder, which makes her ultimate position as a wealthy middle-class matron all the more remarkable. If a girl like Fanny could make it, then her eighteenth-century readers might hope to do so, too.

The novels of Richardson and Fielding also appealed to readers because they combined their claims to serious moral instruction with generous amounts of titillation, although the authors generally avoided explicit descriptions of sexual exchanges between their characters. While Cleland’s descriptive passages are certainly both explicit and extensive, Fanny Hill also features a purportedly moral objective; in the concluding paragraphs of the novel, Fanny professes herself to be devoted to VIRTUE and excuses the sensuality of her story by saying, If I have painted vice in all its gayest colours, if I have decked it with flowers, it has been solely in order to make the worthier, the solemner, sacrifice of it to virtue. Fanny’s evocation of virtue here and throughout the novel is a pointed reference to Richardson’s Pamela, which was subtitled Virtue Rewarded, and which came under attack from critics because it seemed to imply that servant girls could induce their masters to marry them if they only played hard to get. This idea is directly invoked by Cleland when, early in the novel, one of Fanny’s friends tells her how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin forever, that by preserving their VIRTUE, some had taken so with their masters that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand, and happy, and some, mayhap, came to be duchesses. Since playing hard to get is not a game to Fanny’s taste, Cleland’s novel operates as a parody of Richardson’s story, with Fanny’s equally successful ending flying in the face of Richardson’s warning to young women to preserve their virginity at all costs if they want to be happy. Cleland was by no means the only writer to take issue with Richardson’s view of virtue. Parodying Pamela was such a popular employment at this time that a whole group of novels, known as anti-Pamelas, appeared for public consumption, including Henry Fielding’s Shamela, which was successful enough to spawn its own sequel, Joseph Andrews.

Fanny, however, is temperamentally more similar to Fielding’s Tom Jones than she is to Pamela, and this may be one reason why Fanny Hill was officially banned while other novels were not. In the eighteenth century, men’s sexual impulses were considered perfectly natural, and their indiscretions were winked at or accepted; gentlemen might keep their mistresses and acknowledge their illegitimate offspring without concern for their reputations. Tom Jones, himself illegitimate, can move from one lover to another without really damaging his credibility as a sympathetic character or his chance at a good marriage. Women, however, were strongly encouraged to remain virgins until marriage, and they faced serious consequences if they strayed and were discovered. In real life, women could and often did manage a good degree of sexual liberty without repercussions, but novels of the period tended to enforce a higher standard of conduct and a stricter sense of poetic justice. Most of the respectable women in eighteenth-century novels seem to have no sexual desires whatever; they accept sex only as an obligation to their husbands. Fictional women who allow themselves to be seduced or even raped, like Clarissa, almost always die as a result. We see some of this double standard at work in the Fanny Hill; Fanny’s keeper, Mr. H—, thinks nothing of seducing Fanny’s maid, but he immediately ends his relationship with Fanny when she retaliates by taking another lover herself. For the most part, however, Fanny’s story opposes the double standard by showing a woman’s comic sexual adventures. Fanny is not merely an object of desire, but also the owner of desire, and she acts upon her urges with the casual abandon usually reserved for men. Her brief interlude with the sailor after a frustrating meeting with her impotent keeper serves as a particularly striking example of Fanny’s cavalier attitude toward sex.

Fanny’s libertine notions about sex do, however, have their limits, thus reflecting some of the deeply held sexual attitudes of her time. Fanny is initially taken aback by the sight of a couple in the nude; her reaction might strike modern readers as comically naïve, but most English people at that time thought that shifts and shirts were necessary for both modesty and good health. Being naked was, therefore, particularly exotic and daring, and Fanny and the other women typically remain at least partially clothed during their encounters. More significantly, Fanny is later shocked and disgusted by the spectacle of homosexual intercourse, and both she and other characters in the novel condemn homosexuality as perverse. After all of the other episodes that Fanny reports with either pleasure or acceptance, especially the lesbian interludes with Phoebe and the country dance at Mrs. Cole’s house, her strong negative reaction to homosexuality might seem surprising, but sodomy was a serious criminal act in eighteenth-century England, and homosexuals were frequently singled out for public censure. The importance of this scene in relation to the rest of the novel and to eighteenth-century culture has been argued at length by a number of scholars, including Peter Sabor in From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading ‘Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The modern reader may or may not share Fanny’s reactions to some of the acts described in Fanny Hill, but he or she is almost certain to be struck by the language that Cleland employs for those descriptions. Given the fact that Cleland never uses any profanity or coarse language in the novel, even in the most explicit passages, readers today might consider Fanny Hill to be pretty tame. We are, after all, accustomed to the graphic images and four letter words that have spilled out into our mainstream media over the last decade or so, and modern pornography must cross ever-broadening boundaries to retain its shock value. Some might even find the novel to be unintentionally comic because of its euphemisms and metaphors, but Cleland’s theme in the novel is pleasure, not crudity, and his work is meant to be erotic rather than strictly pornographic. Cleland associates pleasure with beauty, grace, and youth, and his language attempts to describe sexual pleasure in graceful terms; both he and his characters abhor the vulgar language that degrades the sexual act and those who enjoy it. Indeed, Cleland was himself aware of the difficulty his readers might have with the novel’s descriptive language; he has Fanny remark on this very problem to the recipient of her account. Fanny laments the extreme difficulty of continuing so long in one strain, in a mean tempered with taste, between the revoltingness of gross, rank, and vulgar expressions, and the ridicule of mincing metaphors and affected circumlocutions. If Cleland fails to achieve this perfect balance, at least he attempts it, and his polite descriptions may at least offer the modern reader a respite from our own era’s cruder versions of eroticism.

Fanny Hill is, ultimately, a book that many might call a guilty pleasure, but it offers more than mere titillation and amusement. We can see in Cleland’s novel many of the same themes and ideals of the era’s greatest works, and we are allowed an unusual glimpse of the most private aspects of eighteenth-century life. We are fortunate that we, as modern readers, have the opportunity to enjoy this important and engaging text, which more than two centuries of scandal and censorship could not repress.

Jennifer C. Garlen received her doctoral degree from Auburn University and teaches English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She specializes in the study of the British novel in the eighteenth century.

LETTER THE FIRST

MADAM,

I sit down to give you an undeniable proof of my considering your desires as indispensable orders. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life, out of which I emerg’d, at length, to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health, and fortune to bestow; whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding, naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tost in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who looking on all thought or reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy.

Hating, as I mortally do, all long unnecessary preface, I shall give you good quarter in this, and use no farther apology, than to prepare you for seeing the loose part of my life, wrote with the same liberty that I led it.

Truth! stark, naked truth, is the word; and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies as ours; and you have too much sense, too much knowledge of the ORIGINALS themselves, to sniff prudishly and out of character at the PICTURES of them. The greatest men, those of the first and most leading taste, will not scruple adorning their private closets with nudities, though, in compliance with vulgar prejudices, they may not think them decent decorations of the staircase, or salon.

This, and enough, premised, I go souse into my personal history. My maiden name was Frances Hill. I was born at a small village near Liverpool, in Lancashire, of parents extremely poor, and, I piously believe, extremely honest.

My father, who had received a maim on his limbs that disabled him from following the more laborious branches of country-drudgery, got, by making of nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarg’d by my mother’s keeping a little day-school for the girls in her neighbourhood. They had had several children; but none lived to any age except myself, who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy.

My education, till past fourteen, was no better than very vulgar; reading, or rather spelling, an illegible scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work composed the whole system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity general to our sex, in the tender stage of life when objects alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expence of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.

My poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she had spared very little of it to my instruction, having, from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of guarding me against any.

I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the worst of ills befell me in the loss of my tender fond parents, who were both carried off by the small-pox, within a few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby hastening the death of my mother; so that I was now left an unhappy friendless orphan (for my father’s coming to settle there was accidental, he being originally a Kentishman). That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms, that I was presently out of danger, and, what I then did not know the value of, was entirely unmark’d. I skip over here an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt on this melancholy occasion. A little time, and the giddiness of that age dissipated, too soon, my reflections on that irreparable loss; but nothing contributed more to reconcile me to it, than the notions that were immediately put into my head, of going to London, and looking out for a service, in which I was promised all assistance and advice from one Esther Davis, a young woman that had been down to see her friends, and who, after the stay of a few days, was to return to her place.

As I had now nobody left alive in the village who had concern enough about what should become of me to start any objections to this scheme, and the woman who took care of me after my parents’ death rather encouraged me to pursue it, I soon came to a resolution of making this launch into the wide world, by repairing to London, in order to SEEK MY FORTUNE, a phrase which, by the bye, has ruined more adventurers of both sexes, from the country, than ever it made or advanced.

Nor did Esther Davis a little comfort and inspirit me to venture with her, by piquing my childish curiosity with the fine sights that were to be seen in London: the Tombs, the Lions, the King, the Royal Family, the fine Plays and Operas, and, in short, all the diversions which fell within her sphere of life to come at; the detail of all which perfectly turn’d the little head of me.

Nor can I remember, without laughing, the innocent admiration, not without a spice of envy, with which we poor girls, whose church-going clothes did not rise above dowlass shifts and stuff gowns, beheld Esther’s scowered satin gowns, caps border’d with an inch of lace, taudry ribbons, and shoes belaced with silver: all which we imagined grew in London, and entered for a great deal into my determination of trying to come in for my share of them.

The idea however of having the company of a towns-woman with her, was the trivial, and all the motives that engaged Esther to take charge of me during my journey to town, where she told me, after her manner and style, as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kin for ever: that by preserving their VIRTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, mayhap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not I, as well as another?; with other almanacs to this purpose, which set me a tip-toe to begin this promising journey, and to leave a place which, though my native one, contained no relations that I had reason to regret, and was grown insupportable to me, from the change of the tenderest usage into a cold air of charity, with which I was entertain’d even at the only friend’s house that I had the least expectation of care and protection from. She was, however, so just to me, as to manage the turning into money of the little matters that remained to me after the debts and burial charges were accounted for, and, at my departure, put my whole fortune into my hands; which consisted of a very slender wardrobe, pack’d up in a very portable box, and eight guineas, with seventeen shillings in silver; stowed up in a spring-pouch, which was a greater treasure than ever I had yet seen together, and which I could not conceive there was a possibility of running out; and indeed, I was so entirely taken up with the joy of seeing myself mistress of such an immense sum, that I gave very little attention to a world of good advice which was given me with it.

Places, then, being taken for Esther and me in the London waggon, I pass over a very immaterial scene of leavetaking, at which I dropt a few tears betwixt grief and joy; and, for the same reasons of insignificance, skip over all that happened to me on the road, such as the waggoner’s looking liquorish on me, the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers, which were defeated by the vigilance of my guardian Esther; who, to do her justice, took a motherly care of me, at the same time that she taxed me for her protection by making me bear all travelling charges, which I defrayed with the utmost cheerfulness, and thought myself much obliged to her into the bargain.

She took indeed great care that we were not overrated, or imposed on, as well as of managing as frugally as possible; expensiveness was not her vice.

It was pretty late in a summer evening when we reached London-town, in our slow conveyance, though drawn by six at length. As we passed through the greatest streets that led to our inn, the noise of the coaches, the hurry, the crowds of foot passengers, in short, the new scenery of the shops and houses, at once pleased and amazed me.

But guess at my mortification and surprize when we came to the inn, and our things were landed and deliver’d to us, when my fellow traveller and protectress, Esther Davis, who had used me with the utmost tenderness during the journey, and prepared me by no preceding signs for the stunning blow I was to receive, when I say, my only dependence and friend, in this strange place, all of a sudden assumed a strange and cool air towards me, as if she dreaded my becoming a burden to her.

Instead, then, of proffering me the continuance of her assistance and good offices, which I relied upon, and never more wanted, she thought herself, it seems, abundantly acquitted of her engagements to me, by having brought me safe to my journey’s end; and seeing nothing in her procedure towards me but what was natural and in order, began to embrace me by way of taking leave, whilst I was so confounded, so struck, that I had not spirit or sense enough so much as to mention my hopes or expectations from her experience, and knowledge of the place she had brought me to.

Whilst I stood thus stupid and mute, which she doubtless attributed to nothing more than a concern at parting, this idea procured me perhaps a slight alleviation of it, in the following harangue: That now we were got safe to London, and that she was obliged to go to her place, she advised me by all means to get into one as soon as possible; that I need not fear getting one; there were more places than parish-churches; that she advised me to go to an intelligence office; that if she heard of any thing stirring, she would find me out and let me know; that in the meantime, I should take a private lodging, and acquaint her where to send to me; that she wish’d me good luck, and hoped I should always have the grace to keep myself honest, and not bring a disgrace on my parentage. With this, she took her leave of me, and left me, as it were, on my own hands, full as lightly as I had been put into hers.

Left thus alone, absolutely destitute and friendless, I began then to feel most bitterly the severity of this separation, the scene of which had passed in a little room in the inn; and no sooner was her back turned, but the affliction I felt at my helpless strange circumstances burst out into a flood of tears, which infinitely relieved the