Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

By Sylvia Hunt and John Cleland

First published in 1749 in London, John Cleland's novel remained banned until 1963 in the US and until 1970 in the UK. Ever since the ban was lifted, it has been the object of academic study and one of the most frequently read novels of the eighteenth century. This volume includes two editions in one: the original text from 1749; and a version in which spelling and punctuation have been improved according to the standards of 18th-century English. Each version is accompanied by 138 explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781988963440

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Introduction

When sexual appetite and erotic practice are discussed, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is usually at the fore of the conversation. De Sade’s writings are justifiably associated with horrific acts of sexual violence committed against unwilling innocents, and the term sadism implies extreme freedom in sexual gratification unrestrained by morality or law. In short, de Sade represents an intemperate version of the libertine philosophy and lifestyle associated with eighteenth-century aristocrats. In his novel The 120 Days of Sodom: or the School of Libertinism (1785), de Sade states that if it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be (8). In England, followers of this French libertine philosophy enjoyed a brief period of hedonism before Republican, puritanical influences regained some control over British morality and culture. In 1660, Charles II returned from exile and with him came a group of young aristocrats who had joined him during his years on the continent. Charles was, according to Macaulay, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence (145) and he became the amoral leader to this group, setting the standard by which they lived their lives of dissipation. Literature produced during this period reflects this erotic depravity; John Wilmot, George Villiers, William Wycherley all produced poetry and plays which described and celebrated their sexual exploits and debasement of women.[1] The language was wittily crude and the action, violently humorous.

The libertine and his literature quickly lost acceptance with England’s puritanical middle class; the growing bourgeois ranks wanted a literature that reflected their morality and presented an English version of the sexualized male. The libertine was a continental import, reflecting the decadence and immorality of French court life; the sexually potent English male must combine his masculine virility with feminine morality. It is this combination that finds articulation in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), England’s first pornographic novel. The standard view of Cleland’s novel is that it objectifies women; Fanny and her sisters in sex are the objects of desire by both the male characters and (predominantly) male readers. The novel, however, is actually a celebration of female sexuality where women embrace their libido as natural and revel in their power over male desire. In short, the prostitutes are not passive in the sexual relationships, but in control of both male desire and male money. The novel portrays a group of women who are actively involved in the market economy, participating in the exchange of services and cash. This being said, however, one must not assume that the novel is entirely liberal in its portrayal of all sexual proclivities. While it appears to have a liberal attitude towards sex and endorses almost all types of sexual behaviour, the novel is actually a conservative sanction of heterosexual sexual practices and bourgeois marriage.

John Cleland (1709-1789) is best remembered as the author of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or what is now more commonly called Fanny Hill. He wrote other novels, plays, poetry, medical treatises, linguistic studies and political tracts, all of which are now entirely forgotten, and which in his day received only mediocre reviews. What keeps his name alive today is this early piece of pornography, a work he regretted and which he only produced in order to secure himself liberty from debtor’s prison. It brought him shame and little money and, in later years, he described it as a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot (Foxon 54).

Pornography’s principal purpose is to arouse the reader and this was certainly Cleland’s objective when writing Memoirs. Trumbach states that the novel’s purpose does not seem, in any marked way, to have been political (253); however, the endorsement of middle-class values is heavily emphasized in the text. Cleland’s novel situates sex in a domestic, bourgeois ideology. While the prostitutes are not highly differentiated individuals, all being young, country-born, and lower-class, the men who use their services are individualized, largely by their penis size, but also by their social class. The sexual episodes are descriptions of sexual practices in order to praise or to denigrate men as a reflection of their social status (Weed 1). The erotic picaresque is a cover for a political and social comment on English national identity; male social class is connected with sexual practice. Memoirs does not reject pleasure and its pursuit; however, the misuse and overuse of pleasure are seen as aristocratic, continental libertinism. Cleland transforms libertinism into an acceptable bourgeois male custom which finds a pleasurable middle ground between masculine violence and effeminate weakness.

The eighteenth century was not as prudish as the periods before and after it. The word pornography, a term applied to erotic literature of all periods, actually dates from the Victorian period and means ‘whore writing’ or ‘writing by or about whores (Kendrik 14). Cleland’s text is a product of Restoration literature, particularly drama which David Loth describes as the most licentious in the language, or in almost any language (80). Congreve, Otway, Wycherley, and Dryden were mainstays of Restoration theatre and, though popular in their day, are rarely performed today without some expurgation. John Wilmot introduced one of his own plays, which are rarely read or studied due to their extreme vulgarity, with the claim that it is the most debauch’d heroic piece/that e’er was wrote (4). Compared with the sexual expression of these writers, Cleland appears almost demure in his metaphoric descriptions of heterosexual coupling. His novel is replete with metaphors which borrow from chivalric and pastoral literature in order to place sex and desire in a utopic (or pornutopic) world.

Memoirs was Cleland’s reaction to two things; the first was the coarseness of libertine literature as just described. Cleland felt he could produce a work that was equally as erotic as that produced by the Restoration libertines, but far more refined in language. In short, he felt that erotica could and should present sexual pleasure without the offensive language as characterized by novels like L’École des Filles by Michel Millot (1655). Cleland was also reacting against what he felt to be the hypocrisy of Samuel Richardson’s highly influential novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) which took London by storm. Henry Fielding and Cleland were among the cynics who rejected what they saw to be the sanctimonious preaching of Richardson and responded with Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742) and Memoirs. Thus a debate about female sexuality was opened – are women saint-like virgins like Pamela, scheming whores like Shamela, or women who willingly pursue sexual pleasure like Fanny? Memoirs offers, in Cleland’s own words, stark naked truth that is not afraid of violating those laws of decency that earlier erotica did (quoted in Kendrik 153). In fact, Cleland initially viewed his novel and its new form of erotic description as a type of reform to the genre.

Cleland’s novel is a cornucopia of sexual practices; orgies, rape, voyeurism, flagellation, daisy chains, and lesbian encounters are all presented for the titillation of the reader. In fact, Fanny’s initial seduction is at the hands of her sexual tutor Phoebe, and Fanny describes her pleasure as transported, confused, and out of myself. However, this delight is only transitory and Fanny soon longs for heterosexual encounters; as John Beynon states, there is an ultimately unsatisfactory nature of such [Sapphic] pleasures, which pale next to those induced by heterosexual sex (3). After Fanny encounters an erect penis, that wonderful machine, and enjoys its delights, she moves beyond this lesbian phase and enters a heterosexual pornutopia.[2] This is a world in which all forms of heterosexual experience are legitimate and eventually lead to the domestic (yet still erotic) world. In short, just as the sentimental novel sexualizes domesticity, pornography domesticates sexuality.

In this pornutopia, it is not sex or sexuality that defines the prostitute, but her economic contributions to society, and it is her free movement through and interaction with male society that is most important in Cleland’s text. He imagines a sexual world in which business and pleasure are perfectly mixed and benefit both genders. In her text on coquettes and their role in eighteenth-century society and literature, Theresa Braunschneider argues that the literary figure of the prostitute gains widespread purchase around this period largely because she offers a model of consumer behaviour (40). The eighteenth century marks England’s great economic boom and the fictional prostitute is often portrayed as the consumer of the goods produced in that boom. The coquette is associated with both consumerism and deviance and, as such, she is associated with the complexities of a world in which the new values of the marketplace associate social good with traits long deemed worldly vices (41). While individual honesty, frugality, prudence, and modesty are perfectly respectable attributes, they will not drive a thriving national economy; the luxuries widely available to British customers in the early 1700s require a population of consumers actuated by fickleness, vanity, acquisitiveness, imprudence, and the pursuit of pleasure. The prostitute thus embodies what are perceived to be the worst tendencies in female nature as well as the characteristics that constitute the model consumer.

Cleland combines heterosexual practice with contemporary economics in his depiction of idealized brothel life. Although the novel describes alternative sexual practices, it presents heterosexuality as the only game in town and Cleland, through Fanny, rejects anything but heterosexual coupling; the novel ends, after all, with the bourgeois marriage of Fanny and Charles. The middle section of the novel is comprised only of sexual escapades in typical picaresque fashion that fill in the period of their separation. For many of Fanny’s working friends, their career as prostitutes ends happily with either a marriage or a return to the family fold. Despite this apparent endorsement of heterosexuality, Cleland offers an alternative to the heterosexual and bourgeois ideologies. While Fanny does seem to outgrow female sexual pleasure, female intimacy remains central to brothel life and reader interest.

Cleland creates a fantasy world – a pornutopia – in his descriptions of brothel life. His prostitutes revel in sexual pleasure, become immensely wealthy, maintain perfect health, avoid unwanted pregnancy, and form strong bonds between themselves. Thus, Cleland creates an all-female community based on pleasure and profit – the erotic and the economic. Kate Levin describes this world as a fantasy world of commercial relations that are often mutually satisfying and beneficial (333). Mrs. Cole, the second madam for whom Fanny works, is described as an excellent business manager, content[ing] herself with a moderate living profit upon her industry and good offices, and had nothing of their greedy rapacious turn . . . never woman delighted more in encouraging a brisk circulation of the trade, for the sake of the trade itself. The brothel is presented to the public in domestic terms, having as its front a millinery shop where in the outer-parlour or shop three demure young ladies provide a cover for the real commercial traffic of the establishment. By combining the domestic (the parlour) with the economic (the shop), Cleland blurs the lines between the female and male spheres. The prostitute thus can effectively cross between both worlds in an age which was seeing the association of the domestic sphere solely with the female. In a sense, Cleland’s fantasy of an economic utopia for women relies on women’s ability to recognize their status as a commodity in a patriarchal market, and then manipulate that market to their own ends. As Beynon states, their awareness of their hyper-commodified status, both as women in a patriarchal society and . . . as women whose bodies are literally exchanged in a world of trade, allows them to recognize their status [and] to exercise a degree of control over the system (15).

This all-female co-operative is eroticized in the text. While open lesbianism does not seem to be an accepted, permanent possibility in the novel, female gaze is certainly eroticized. Cleland’s novel seems to view female desire for fellow females as a normal phase in sexual development. As Lillian Faderman notes, lesbian relations are lightly regarded as an initiation into heterosexual intercourse (9). Once Fanny leaves Mrs. Brown’s brothel where she is tutored by Phoebe, she is taken up by Mrs. Cole and her bevy of young ladies. Here Fanny’s fellow prostitutes form a loving family of sorts. As Lisa Moore points out, the orgy scene in the novel, which requires each participant to be paired off in opposite sex couples, sees the male participants become hazy figures serving as a backdrop to female ecstasy . . . [while] the prostitutes exchange knowing glances and assist one another in maintaining their sexual poses. For these women, the heterosexual encounter is not enough to consummate their sexual revels (19). This little troop of love appropriates each heterosexual encounter for themselves by channelling their sexual ecstasies toward one another and showering one another with compliments and caresses. Fanny describes Mrs. Cole’s brothel and the heterosexual transactions of both business and pleasure that take place there as a little Seraglio. In Cleland’s day, Europeans had a long tradition of characterizing the seraglio as a female utopia, forbidden to men’s view and evoking heightened libidinal desire with homoerotic overtones in the Western women who describe them (Nussbaum 137). Cleland’s comparison of the London brothel to an exotic harem would have obvious connotations of Sapphic desires for contemporary readers. This sexual bond, however, is temporary and replaced by a more socially acceptable and economically viable heterosexual bond. At the end of her time as a prostitute, Fanny returns to bourgeois life as wife to Charles and mother to at least one son. Economically, Fanny has made a considerable fortune as a prostitute and is thus an even more desirable partner for her beloved Charles. In short, despite her initial Sapphic inclinations, Fanny is able to conform to the desired, acceptable, heterosexual, bourgeois ideal of eighteenth-century society.

Lesbian relations are not viewed in the same way as male homosexuality in this novel. Sapphism is mentioned in the Bible only briefly[3] and Christian tradition has developed no clearly focused image of the female homosexual. Lesbian as a term is an invention of the nineteenth century. In the early-modern period, there was no recognized sexual act without a penis. As Hufton states, if an action is not defined, then it is not punishable in itself (259). Western society tended to treat lesbian relations as a secular vice rather than a religious sin, and no monstrous figure equivalent to the Sodomite had arisen. Literary traditions of the lesbian were more likely to draw upon the classical image of the excessively lascivious woman, and her lust is more likely to be part of a wider range of vices in which same-sex love plays only a part. Unlike the long history of punishment for sodomy, women in England were not tried for homosexual relations until 1792 and those trials were few in number. Sodomy, however, was another issue entirely. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sodomy became a concern for a broad section of the public which was convinced that sodomites were a curious and probably dangerous species essentially different from other men. This wide public concern was due in part to the clamour for moral reform that swept England after the fall of the Stuart monarchy in 1688. Societies for the Reformation of Manners were created in the 1690s to hunt down blasphemers, drunkards, whoremasters, and – the group that most alarmed them – sodomites. In his essay Whoredom (1720) Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) wrote that in ancient Times, these Criminals were burnt by Common Law. Indeed such Monsters ought to be the Detestation of Mankind, pursued by Justice and exterminated from the earth (quoted in Crompton 35). As German Protestant theologian Johann Michaelis (1717-92) wrote, [sodomy] will be the greatest force of depopulation and weakness, not in its initial stages but three or four generations later. Not only does sodomy weaken marriage . . . and aid and abet him who refuses to raise a family . . . [it brings] the nation . . . to the brink of destruction (quoted in Greenberg 322). Marriage was often used as a cover for homosexuality since it was widely believed that a married man could not be a sodomite. In short, it was feared that, if marriage bonds and families are destroyed because men find sodomy more compelling than domestic virtue, then there was only a short distance to the destruction of civilization itself. As Bryne Fone states, sodomites disturbed the accepted order of male and female. . . . Posing as a weakened and passive quasi-man, a sodomite would cause unhappiness to both married and marriageable women, and bring about the destruction of the family (242). In order to rid society of this threat to its existence, sodomites were tried and executed in great numbers during the eighteenth century.

Although Memoirs is filled with erotic instances of aberrant heterosexual and Sapphic practice, male homosexual acts are either made comic with identity confusion or made horrific and presented as deviant. The first instance involves Emily, one of Fanny’s fellow prostitutes, who attends a masquerade ball in the guise of a shepherd. There, she is seduced by a gentleman who mistakes her for a boy, and who is sorely disappointed when he discovers at the last moment that she is not. However, he overcomes this disappointment and, as Fanny states, he got with much ado whip and spur to his journey’s end. Emily is rewarded with a present not any thing inferior to what she could have expected. In other words, Emily is handsomely paid for her services, despite the gender confusion, and thus accomplishes the economic transaction so essential to brothel economy. In another episode that has a hint of homoeroticism, Fanny encounters a young sailor who whisks her off to a nearby pub for a quick business transaction. In his urgency, which Fanny attributes to a long fast at sea, he bends Fanny over a table and knock[s] desperately at the wrong [door]. When Fanny attempts to correct the error, the sailor mutters Pooh . . . any port in a storm, before altering his course, much to Fanny’s relief. While Fanny innocently attributes his choice of position to exigency, her amorous sailor is actually employing a common homosexual technique. His any port in a storm statement not only applies to the orifice he is selecting but also to the sexual partner he would have access to while at sea. Homosexuality in the British navy was a common source of anxiety and this appears to be reflected in Fanny’s encounter. However, both of these men are able to overcome their homosexual inclinations and perform heterosexual acts, reaffirming the bourgeois, domestic ideal.

These are humorous instances of sexual confusion and they are corrected by the prostitute’s expertise in handling her man. However, one instance of arbitrary taste that Fanny is unable to condone involves two sodomites whom Fanny spies on while at a public house. Fanny claims that she watches so criminal a scene through to the end, despite being disgusted by it, in order to gather more facts . . . in order to raise the house upon them. Thus, Fanny and the reader are voyeurs to the entire erotic encounter. The preposterous pleasure is condemned by Fanny as abhorrent. The sodomite represents a foreign contagion in English society; sodomy was seen as a sexual practice of the Italians and French. Young Englishmen on their grand tour acquired, not just languages and antiques, but also continental habits, not all of them good.[4] These young men were seen as sexually ambiguous, or, as one character in a 1773 comedy laments, contemptible creature[s] when they adopt the follies and vices of other nations (Hitchcock 5). Economically, homosexuality upset the social balance since sodomites represented an indifference to participating in exchanges of female bodies for money. As Mrs. Cole informs Fanny, male homosexuality is objectionable specifically because it has too limited an audience, noting that it is the common cause of womankind, out of whose mouths this practice tended to take something more precious than bread or, in other words, takes away a woman’s means of subsistence. Homosexual relations also precluded the production of future consumers; economies run on population growth and homosexuality excludes reproduction. Despite any Sapphic desires they may have, women are able to participate in heterosexual relationships and produce offspring; thus bourgeois domesticity can be maintained, at least in appearance. Thus, the act of sodomy in a pornutopia becomes an act that is counterproductive in an economic system. Unlike Sapphics or libertines who still function in the bourgeois domestic sphere, sodomites provide no support to the English economic system. However, according to Cleland, real English men are not continental dandies who are a contagion to their society. Instead, England is blessed with sexually robust yet morally upright males. As Mrs. Cole states, whatever effect this infamous passion had in other ages, and other countries, it seem’d a peculiar blessing on our air and climate, that there was a plague-spot visibly imprinted on all that are tainted with it, in this nation at least and ends by labeling them unsex’d male-misses.

While homosexuals are considered a plague in society, the novel also considers the libertine to be a danger to domestic virtue and lifestyle. Mr. Norbert and Mr. H— represent the old libertine regime. Unlike the image that libertines like Wycherley and Wilmot created of the witty, carefree, sexually irresistible debauchee, Cleland presents the libertine as a relic of a past age, with their wasted bodies, wasted fortunes and inadequate penises. For example, Mr. Norbert is described as addicted to sexual excesses and wastes his fortune and his health through his over-violent pursuit of the vices of the town. He is easily tricked into believing that Fanny is a virgin and is inveigled out of a considerable sum to take her supposed maidenhead. Cleland makes much of Norbert’s physical weakness, gullibility and effeminacy. Mr. H—, however, is physically vigorous and sexually potent, keeping Fanny constantly in exercise till dawn of morning. Despite these manly qualities, he cannot inspire Fanny with anything more than an involuntary sexual response. Although masculine, Mr. H— lacks the necessary refinement and politeness of a true gentleman. In short, aristocratic social class is no longer the mark of a gentleman. It is in the rustic servant Will that Fanny finds the necessary combination of masculine vigor (in his delicious instrument) and feminine gentleness (in his maiden bashfulness); these are the traits of the ideal bourgeois man.

Throughout Memoirs, Cleland presents his readers with a bourgeois ideal of English sexuality. His ideal prostitutes are good English country girls whose natural desire for men leads them to find temporary careers in which they are paid for their pleasure. Their natural gentility and virtuous hearts make them acceptable objects of desire for equally good English men. These men are not the aristocratic libertines of the Restoration, but examples of the polite and civilized bourgeoisie. In the novel, Mrs. Cole restricts her clientele to customers of discretion. Her brothel reflects this domestic ideal where everything breath’d an air of decency, modesty and order. In fact, Fanny calls the residents of the brothel a little family of love, reinforcing the connection between the domestic and the sexual. The prostitute’s vagina is a sort of telescope through which male character is evaluated; polite sexual practices are seen as truly English and purely heterosexual.

[5]

Pornography is generally seen as antifeminist with its trafficking of women as commodities in a patriarchal society. Cleland’s sexual picaresque certainly presents its prostitutes as generically nubile and sexually voracious, but there is also a political subtext that makes it unusual. His novel is a mix of libertine pornography and domestic ideology; with its elaborate language and erotic plot, it finds connection with the aristocratic tradition of Restoration literature. However, with its decline into domestic and sentimental design and promotion of heterosexual intercourse, it also finds connection with the bourgeois novel of manners. With Memoirs, Cleland produced a hybrid novel in that it is part libertine erotica and part bourgeois conduct manual. Memoirs marks the dividing line between the libertine, aristocratic masculinity of the Restoration and the refined, domestic, bourgeois society of eighteenth-century England.

Sylvia Hunt

Works Cited

Benyon, John C. "‘Traffic in More Precious Commodities’: Sapphic Erotics and Economics in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure."

Launching Fanny Hill: Essays in the Novel and its Influences.

Ed. Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson. New York: AMS, 2003.

3-25.

Braunschneider, Theresa. Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the

Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,

2009.

Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-

Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic

Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to

the Present. New York: Quill, 1981.

Fone, Byrne. Homophobia: A History. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Foxon, David. Libertine Literature in England 1660-1745. New

York: New Hyde Park, 1975.

Greenberg, David. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Hitchcock, Robert. The Macaroni, a Comedy; As It Is Performed at

the Theatre-Royal in York. York: A. Ward, 1773.

Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in

Western Europe 1500-1800. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Kendrik, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern

Culture. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Levin, Kate. "‘The Meanness of Writing for a Bookseller’: John

Cleland’s Fanny on the Market." The Journal of Narrative

Technique 28: 3 (Fall 1998). 329-349.

Loth, David. The Erotic in Literature: A Historical Survey of

Pornography as Delightful as it is Indiscreet. London: Secker

& Warburg, 1962.

Macaulay, Thomas. The History of England from the Ascension of

James II. London: Dent, 1962.

Moore, Lisa. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of

the British Novel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and

Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Sade, Marquis de. 120 Days of Sodom. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

Trumbach, Randolph. "Erotic fantasy and Male Libertinism in

Enlightenment England." The Invention of Pornography:

Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. Ed. Lynn

Hunt. New York: Zone, 1993. 253-282.

Weed, David. "Fitting Fanny: Cleland’s Memoirs and the Politics of

Male Pleasure." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31:1 (Fall 1997). 7-20.

Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Sodom: or the Quintessence of

Debauchery. Paris: Olympia, 1959.

Libertine literature was not simply pornographic. It attempted to stimulate both the body (through graphic depictions of sexual acts) and the mind (through explorations of Enlightenment beliefs in emancipation from prejudices).

In The Other Victorians (1966), Steven Marcus coined pornotopia, a space in which everyone is ready for everything (25). Marcus’s terms also applies to a set of values that undermine the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals of a capitalist society idealizing sobriety, propriety and productive labour. A product of the eighteenth century, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure does not fit this view: it is not subversive or scientific. In addition, instead of undermining social values, Cleland’s novel associates sex with bourgeois/domestic ideals. For this reason, I use another term, pornutopia, to describe the sexual space instituted by Fanny’s narrative.

In Romans, the text states for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature (1:26-27).

The macaroni was a product of this exposure to continental fashion and cuisine. This stylish young man was dressed in vibrant, body-conscious clothing, and had a taste for gambling, drinking, womanizing and dueling. In literature, he is often presented as either an effeminate fop or a dangerous libertine.

Fanny Hill’s name is a vulgar translation of the Latin mons Veneris, reinforcing the novel’s focus on the vagina.

JOHN CLELAND: A CHRONOLOGY

1710 – (Late summer) Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, in southwest London. His father is William Cleland (1673/4-1741), of an ancient Scottish family and friend of Alexander Pope. His mother is Lucy DuPass Cleland, the daughter of a wealthy Anglicized Dutch Jewish merchant. – (24 September) He is christened.

1721 – Enrolls at the prestigious Westminster School, but withdraws in 1723, for reasons unknown.

1728 – Becomes a soldier for the British East India Company in Bombay, where he remains until 1740.

1730 – According to his own account, Cleland and friend Charles Carmichael (d. 1733) work on a first version of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

1738 – He is promoted junior merchant and then secretary of the Bombay Council.

1741 – Back in England with his dying father.

1742-1743 – In London and Lisbon, trying to persuade the King of Portugal to found a Portuguese East India Company.

1748 – (23 February) Arrested for a debt of £840 and brought to Fleet Prison, where he remains until March 1749. – (21 November) First volume of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure published by G. Fenton (Ralph Griffiths).

1749 – (14 February) Second volume is published. – (May) Begins writing review articles for Griffiths’ Monthly Review (until 1774). – (November) Arrested for obscenity, along with Griffiths and the printer Thomas Parker.

1750 – (March) Memoirs of Fanny Hill (expurgated version of his first book). Again arrested for obscenity.

1751 – (September) Memoirs of a Coxcomb, Cleland’s second novel.

1751-1758 – Publishes a series of translations from French and Italian, including a popular Dictionary of Love (1753).

1757 – Begins writing political commentary for the Public Advertiser (until 1787).

1759-1760 – He publishes two verse satires: The Times! An Epistle to Flavian and another Epistle to Flavian.

1760-1764 – He publishes four romances, collected in 1764 under the title The Surprises of Love.

1761 – He publishes The Institutes of Health, a medical treatise.

1763 – His mother dies.

1765 – A second medical treatise: Phisiological Reveries.

1766-1769 – Publishes two books about language: The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things and Specimen of an Etimological Dictionary (with an Additional Article to the Specimen of an Etimological Dictionary).

1768 – Cleland publishes his third novel, The Woman of Honour.

1778-1779 – Visited twice by James Boswell.

1789 – (23 January) Dies at his home in Petty France, near St James’s Park, where he had moved in 1782. His obituary states that he was 80 years old, and many reference books and articles, based on information published before the discovery of his baptismal record, continue to give 1709 as his year of birth.

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NOTE ON THE ORIGINAL TEXT

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was published in two volumes dated 1749 by G. Fenton, in the Strand (a cover for Ralph and Fenton Griffiths). The original text, with its idiosyncratic punctuation and unusual spellings, was not reproduced for more than two centuries, until Peter Sabor published it with Oxford University Press in 1985, and has not been reproduced since. The present edition follows very closely the 1749 version of John Cleland’s novel, and attempts to improve on Sabor’s outstanding effort from three decades ago. The reader is invited to accept the fact that the narrator is a sparsely educated country girl, who uses many archaic and regional spellings, sometimes two or three different spellings for the same word. Punctuation in the eighteenth century was meant to assist a readership that was used to read aloud. Sentences were often very long and may appear today overly punctuated. The colon marked a long pause and introduced related information; the semicolon marked a medium pause and often introduced a parenthetical remark; the comma marked a short pause. Even so, Fanny Hill’s use of punctuation signs was then, and is today, quite taxing for readers. However, with the exception of a few misplaced commas overlooked by the 1749 printer, the original punctuation has been faithfully reproduced. All the apparent misspellings have also been preserved, as long as they have been registered in the Oxford English Dictionary as variants of the standard spellings (Sabor’s edition, for instance, corrects the possessive it’s and words such as Turky, heighth, etc., although these were accepted versions at the time). Obvious typos have been corrected (Sabor does not notice prepararion, which should read preparation; instead, he corrects the French word minuties and replaces it with minutes). On the other hand, if the meaning of a word may not be easily understood today because of its unusual spelling, it is explained in a footnote. The present edition is the most extensively annotated version of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

VOLUME I

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 prefaces, 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[1] 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 snuff[2] 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 stair-case or saloon.

This, and enough, premised, I go souse[3] 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 subsistance, 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 any thing 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 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 Kentish-man). 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,[4] the Lions,[5] the King, the Royal Family, the fine Plays and Operies, 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 cloaths did not rise above dowlass[6] shifts,[7] and stuff gowns,[8] beheld Esther’s scower’d sattin-gown, 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 townswoman with her, was the trivial, and all the motive[9] 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 VARTUE,[10] some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand, and happy, and some, may-hap come to be Dutchesses: Luck was all, and why not I as well as another," with other almanacs[11] to this purpose, which set me a tiptoe 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 expectations of care and protection from: She was however so just to me, as to manage the turning into money 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 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 Chester-Waggon,[12] I pass over a very immaterial scene of leave-taking, 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[13] 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 defray’d with the utmost chearfulness, and thought myself much obliged to her into the bargain. She took indeed great care that we were not over-rated,[14] 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 the town, in our slow conveyance, though drawn by six at length.[15] As we passed thro’ 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 dependance, 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[16] towards me, but what was natural and in order, begun 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 harrangue: "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 was more places than parish-churches—that she advised me to go to an intelligence-office[17]—that if she heard of any thing stirring, she would find me out, and let me know,—that in the mean time I should take a private lodging, and acquaint her where to send to me,—that she wish’d me good luck,—and hop’d I should always have the grace to keep myself honest, and not bring 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 distitute and friendless, I began then to feel most bitterly the severity of this separation, the scene of which had past 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 oppression of my heart; though I still remained stupified, and most perfectly perplex’d how to dispose of myself.

One of the drawers[18] coming in, added yet more to my uncertainty, by asking me, in a short way, if I called for any thing? to which I replied, innocently, No; but I wished him to tell me where I might get a lodging for that night: he said, he would go and speak to his mistress, who accordingly came, and told me drily, without entering in the least into the distress she saw me in, that I might have a bed for a shilling: and that, as she supposed I had some friends in town (here I fetched a deep sigh in vain!) I might provide myself in the morning.

’Tis incredible what trifling consolations the human mind will seize in its greatest afflictions. The assurance of nothing more than a bed to lie on that night, calmed my agonies; and being asham’d to acquaint the mistress of the inn that I had no friends to apply to in town, I proposed to myself to proceed, the very next morning, to an intelligence-office, to which I was furnish’d with written directions, on the back of a ballad of Esther’s giving me. There I counted on getting information of any place that such a country-girl as I might be fit for, and where I could get into any sort of being,[19] before my little stock should be consumed: and as to a character, Esther had often repeated to me, that I might depend on her managing me one; nor, however affected I was at her leaving me thus, did I entirely cease to rely on her, as I began to think, good-naturedly, that her procedure was all in course, and that it was only my ignorance of life that had made me take it in the light I at first did.

Accordingly, the next morning, I dress’d me as clean and as neat as my rustic wardrobe would permit me; and having left my box, with special recommendation, to the landlady, I ventured out by myself, and without any more difficulty than may be supposed of a young country-girl, barely fifteen, and to whom every sign or shop was a gazing-trap, I got to the wish’d-for intelligence-office.

It was kept by an elderly woman, who sat at the receipt of custom, with a book before her, in great form and order, and several scrolls, ready made out, of directions for places.

I made up then to this important personage, without lifting up my eyes, or observing any of the people round me, who were attending there on the same errand as myself, and dropping her curtsies nine-deep,[20] made just a shift to stammer out my business to her.

Madam having heard me out, with all the gravity and brow of a petty-minister of state, and seeing, at one glance over my figure, what I was, made me no answer, but to ask me the preliminary shilling, on receipt of which she told me, places for women were exceeding scarce, especially as I seemed too slight-built for hard-work; but that she would look over her book, and see what was to be done for me, desiring me to stay a little till she had dispatched some other customers.

On this, I drew back a little, most heartily mortified at a declaration which carried with it a killing uncertainty, that my circumstances could not well endure.

Presently, assuming more courage, and seeking some diversion from my uneasy thoughts, I ventured to lift up my head a little, and sent my eyes on a course round the room, where they met full-tilt with those of a lady (for such my extreme innocence pronounc’d her) sitting in a corner of the room, dress’d in a velvet manteel[21] (nota bene, in the midst of summer) with her bonnet off; squob-fat,[22] red faced, and at least fifty.

She look’d as if she would devour me with her eyes, staring at me from head to foot, without the least regard to the confusion and blushes her eying me so fixedly put me to, and which were to her, no doubt, the strongest recommendation, and marks of my being fit for her purpose. After a little time, in which my air, person, and whole figure, had undergone her strict examination, which I had, on my part, tried to render favourable to me, by primming,[23] drawing up my neck, and setting my best looks, she advanc’d, and spoke to me with the greatest demureness:

Qu. Sweet heart, do you want a place?

Ans. Yes! and please you, (with a curtsy down to the ground.)

Upon this, she acquainted me, that she was actually come to the office herself, to look out for a servant—that she believed I might do, with a little of her instructions,—that she could take my very looks for a sufficient character,—that London was a very wicked, vile place,—that she hop’d I would be tractable, and keep out of bad company,—in short, she said all to me that an old experienced practitioner in town could think of, and which was much more than was necessary to take in an artless unexperienced country-maid, who was even afraid of becoming a wanderer about the streets, and therefore gladly jump’d at the first offer of a shelter, especially from so grave and matron-like a lady, for such my flattering fancy assur’d me this now mistress of mine was: I being actually hired under the nose of the good woman that kept the office, whose shrewd smiles and shrugs I could not help observing, and innocently interpreted them as marks of her being pleased at my getting into place so soon: but, as I afterwards came to know, these Beldams[24] understood one another very well, and this was a market where Mrs. Brown (my mistress) frequently attended, on the watch for any fresh goods that might offer there, for the use of her customers, and her own profit.

Madam was, however, so well pleased with her bargain, that, fearing, I presume, lest better advice, or some accident might occasion my slipping though her fingers, she would officiously take me in a coach to my inn, where calling herself for my box, it was, I being present, delivered without the least scruple, or explanation as to where I was going.

This being over, she bid the coachman drive to a shop in St. Paul’s churchyard, where she bought a pair of gloves, which she gave me, and thence renew’d her directions to the coachman, to drive to her house in — street, who accordingly landed us at her door, after I had been chear’d up, and entertain’d by the way with the most plausible flams,[25] without one syllable from which I could conclude any thing but that I was by the greatest good luck fallen into the hands of the kindest mistress, not to say friend, that the varsal world[26] could afford; and accordingly I enter’d her doors with most compleat confidence and exultation, promising myself, that, as soon as I should be a little settled, I would acquaint Esther Davis with my rare good fortune.

You may be sure the good opinion of my place was not lessened by the appearance of a very handsome back-parlour, into which I was led, and which seemed to me magnificently furnished, who had never seen better rooms than the ordinary ones in inns upon the road. There were two gilt pier-glasses,[27] and a beaufet,[28] in which a few pieces of plate, set out to the most shew, dazzled, and altogether persuaded me, that I must be got into a very reputable family.

Here my mistress first began her part, with telling me, that I must have good spirits, and learn to be free with her; that she had not taken me to be a common servant, to do domestic drudgery, but to be a kind of companion to her; and that, if I would be a good girl, she would do more than twenty mothers for me; to all which I answered only by the profoundest and the aukwardest curtsies, and a few monosyllables, such as yes! no! to-be-sure.

Presently my mistress touch’d the bell, and in came a strapping maid-servant, who had let us in: Here, Martha, said Mrs. Brown, I have just hir’d this young woman to look after my linnen, so step up, and show her her chamber; and I charge you to use her with as much respect as you would myself, for I have taken a prodigious liking to her, and I do not know what I shall do for her.

Martha, who was an arch jade,[29] and being used to this decoy, had her cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up with her, and accordingly show’d me a neat room two pair of stairs backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I was to lay with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress’s, who she was sure would be vastly good to me: then she ran out into such affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how happy I was to light upon[30] her,—that I could not have bespoke a better,—with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton who was perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said, in the very sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and blind to its wires.

In the midst of these false explanations of the nature of my future service, we were rung for down again, and I was reintroduced into the same parlour, where there was a table laid with three covers; and my mistress had now got with her one of her favourite girls, a notable manager of her house, and whose business it was to prepare and break such young Fillies as I was to the mounting-block[31]: and she was accordingly, in that view, allotted me for a bed-fellow; and to give her the more authority, she had the title of cousin confer’d on her by the venerable president of this college.

Here I underwent a second survey, which ended in the full approbation of Mrs. Phœbe Ayres, the name of my