I

During the nineteenth century, photography and affordable print technology allowed men and women of the British lower classes increased access to literary and visual materials as both consumers and producers. Among these newly accessible materials was pornography.Footnote ¹ In response to the growing availability of pornographic materials, middle-class social reform organizations like the National Vigilance Association (NVA) campaigned against the commercial production and distribution of sexually explicit literature and images, claiming that an enormous (albeit nebulously defined) variety of social evils resulted from exposure to obscene content.Footnote ² This represented a shift away from blasphemy and sedition as the primary subjects of censorship and an increased focus on sexual obscenity as a social threat.Footnote ³ Members of social purity organizations almost invariably presented their campaigns as an effort to protect allegedly vulnerable and psychologically weak groups – women, children, and the lower classes – from the damaging effects of pornography consumption. Their rhetoric and policy choices, however, also betray an underlying fear of middle-class and elite sexual pollution resulting from pornography consumption. As this article argues, these contradictions in social purity campaigns can only be understood through attention to pornography transactions between people of different genders and class backgrounds.

In contrast to earlier periods, late nineteenth-century print technology and advancements in photography allowed members of the lower classes, including women, to become increasingly involved in pornography and other elements of British popular culture. This article posits that anxieties resulting from the middle-class consumption of materials produced by women and the lower classes were a fundamental part of the motivation to censor and prosecute pornography distributors. This position contrasts with works on British pornography that point to increased lower-class consumption rather than production as the driving force behind regulation efforts. Of crucial importance to this analysis is recognition of two key points. First, the pornography trade occurred across gender and class boundaries; transactions formed connections between lower-class pornographers and elite customers, as well as between men and women. Second, social purity forces were aware of these dynamics and attempted to grapple with them on both a practical and discursive level. This article thus employs a two-pronged analysis, exploring the daily operations of the pornography trade on the one hand and the social purity movement's approach to the trade on the other. By re-examining the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade alongside social purity rhetoric, we can identify anxieties in anti-pornography campaigns that do not become apparent if analysis is restricted to elite male pornographers or to social purity campaigners alone.

Previous studies of British pornography and the regulation of obscenity have focused on men, the middle class, and literary materials rather than the visual. Victorian pornography first emerged as a subject of interest in the 1960s with The other Victorians, Steven Marcus's landmark work on British sexuality and print culture.Footnote ⁴ This work applied literary and Freudian analysis to gain insight into the psychology of aristocratic and middle-class British men of the nineteenth century through the study of the particular sexual acts and literary tropes described in their pornographic literature.Footnote ⁵ In contrast to Marcus's book, work produced in the last two decades goes beyond textual analysis of British pornography to discuss the context in which Victorians produced, regulated, and consumed these materials. Scholars like Lynda Nead and Lisa Z. Sigel have recognized a greater role for men and women of the working and lower middle classes in the pornography trade by providing evidence that rising literacy rates, the invention of photography, and the Victorian period's explosive increase in affordable publications gave a broad range of customers unprecedented access to pornography.Footnote ⁶ Using themes of public space and visibility, Nead in particular has raised important questions about gendered fears of obscene publications and their complex relationships to other social anxieties.Footnote ⁷ In these works, pornography appears for the first time as an integral part of Victorian culture instead of the subject of an anomalous, secret underworld.Footnote ⁸ This trend is of enormous significance, as it opens up possibilities for exploring the relationship between pornography and other aspects of Victorian society such as dynamics of class and gender. These works do not, however, dedicate substantial attention to the role of the lower-class producer and distributor. Moreover, little work specifically addressing female pornographers and sellers has been produced.Footnote ⁹

This article builds on the works discussed above by exploring the relationship between middle-class consumers and lower-class and female distributors of pornography, as well as the role of that relationship in anti-pornography discourse. As in previous works on Victorian obscenity and sexuality, this analysis dedicates close attention to language and terms used in debates surrounding the dangers of obscenity, particularly those invoking images of sexual ‘pollution’ or contamination across social boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰ Editorials and polemical literature of the nineteenth century suggest that middle-class fear of pollution extended beyond situations requiring physical contact; in fact, attempts to regulate the lower-class pornography trade reveal powerful fears of cultural and moral contamination. In addition, reformers viewed women of the lower classes as particularly dangerous carriers of sexual immorality; as a result, any well-rounded analysis of social purity rhetoric and pornography must consider both class and gender dynamics.Footnote ¹¹

It is important to note that nineteenth-century moral reformers rarely used the term ‘pornography’ and that the legal category of ‘obscene publications’ encompassed blasphemous tracts, works containing seditious or vulgar language, and a variety of other non-sexual materials.Footnote ¹² While this renders ‘pornography’ something of an artificial label, the evidence discussed in this article suggests that sexual materials intended for arousal contributed to a distinct set of social anxieties and should therefore be considered as a separate category.Footnote ¹³ Despite ambiguity surrounding the nature of materials in some legal records and newspaper accounts, every attempt has been made to limit analysis to cases involving materials declared obscene on sexualized or erotic grounds. For example, court records describing nude postcards would be included as examples of pornography production, while vulgar street ballads would not.Footnote ¹⁴ In addition, the social purity materials employed here are ones that refer to specifically sexual materials and forms of corruption rather than other social evils. One should, however, remain aware of the ambiguities surrounding pornography's definitions and relationships to other ‘obscene’ or indecent materials.

II

The second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial period for pornography regulation and social purity. Social purity organizations addressed a wide variety of perceived evils over the course of the nineteenth century, with pornography typically featuring as part of their agenda. Only gradually, however, did it become a central concern of the social purity mission. Older organizations, such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV), founded in 1802, were initially more preoccupied with blasphemy and other non-sexual offences than with pornographic literature. During the mid-Victorian period, however, the SSV and other social purity organizations began to dedicate greater attention to prostitution and pornography. Their main legal weapon prior to the 1850s was the 1824 Vagrancy Act, a broadly worded law used to prosecute publicly visible offences ranging from prostitution to sleeping in the street.Footnote ¹⁵ Under this legislation, obscenity prosecutions appeared as part of a larger effort to purify public spaces like the street rather than as an attempt to monitor pornography consumption in the private sphere.Footnote ¹⁶

The Obscene Publications Act of 1857, passed by reluctant members of parliament largely in response to pressure from the SSV and other social purity organizations, increased penalties for publishing pornography and gave law enforcement officials additional authority to seize and destroy evidence.Footnote ¹⁷ A decade later, the 1868 ruling in Regina v. Hicklin created the definition of obscenity that would govern all subsequent obscenity cases in Britain. In his ruling, Justice Cockburn declared the following: ‘The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged … is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall.’Footnote ¹⁸ This case made obscenity prosecutions dependent on establishing the possible audience of the publication; rather than serving as a limitation, this ruling allowed campaigners to make arguments of obscenity based on potential readership rather than on actual sales alone. By arguing, for example, that a package of pornographic goods could conceivably find its way into a child's hands, purity campaigners could secure a conviction while circumventing the question of whether or not pornographic materials had actually been sold to a child or other morally vulnerable person.Footnote ¹⁹ In establishing this precedent, the Hicklin decision gave middle-class purity campaigners a greater incentive to publicly emphasize pornography consumption among women, children, and the lower classes.

The Obscene Publications Act and the Hicklin decision provided the legal framework with which the SSV attempted to combat pornography, a framework taken up by later purity organizations such as the NVA, founded in 1885. As the pornography trade began to make increasing use of the postal service near the end of the century, parliament passed two important measures: the 1884 Post Office Protection Act and the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act, both of which increased the ability of purity campaigners to investigate aspects of the pornography trade that employed more clandestine methods than public displays in the street or shop windows.Footnote ²⁰ Anti-pornography efforts by social purity organizations peaked during the 1880s, but they continued to influence policy and prosecutions after the turn of the century.Footnote ²¹ While these organizations in many cases had differences in ideological, religious, or political affiliation, they were united in two ways: all drew the majority of their ranks from the middle classes, and all developed a strong opposition to pornography by the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²² While social purity reformers did not represent a homogeneous group, the unified front they presented on pornography makes it possible to analyse them as a single movement in the context of this particular issue and period.Footnote ²³

Social purity campaigns against pornography embraced a wide variety of publishing formats. Some reformers produced lengthy moral treatises on pornography and other social purity issues; the specialized subject matter and language of these books imply that they had a fairly limited audience composed of those heavily invested in purity campaigns.Footnote ²⁴ The mainstream press also, however, frequently employed anti-pornography rhetoric sympathetic to the social purity cause, broadening the audience for such campaigns well beyond those directly involved in the social purity movement.Footnote ²⁵ In addition, obscenity arrests under both the Vagrancy Act and the Obscene Publications Act resulted in a number of highly publicized trials that attracted heated newspaper coverage and alarmist claims surrounding the impact of obscene publications.Footnote ²⁶ The genre of Victorian urban ethnography, such as reformer Henry Mayhew's 1851 study London labour and the London poor, also sought to publicize vice among men and women of the lower classes.Footnote ²⁷ It is important to note that, despite the inflammatory nature of these public debates, pornography never surpassed prostitution as the foremost concern of purity campaigners.Footnote ²⁸ The strident tone and highly public nature of anti-obscenity campaigns, however, call into question the rather peripheral position pornography has in much of the existing literature on social purity.Footnote ²⁹ In one striking example, an 1871 newspaper advertisement in which the SSV requested donations to support its efforts, the only specific example of the Society's valuable campaigns included in the column was the prosecution of dealers in obscene photographs.Footnote ³⁰

In short, while anti-pornography social purity campaigns may have only directly included a small segment of the middle class as active members, these organizations wielded a disproportionate influence over late nineteenth-century British society. In addition to enacting concrete policy changes such as new legislation and numerous obscenity prosecutions, the social purity movement shaped attitudes toward pornography in mainstream newspapers and other media. This brings us to the questions of why pornography occupied an increasingly central position in social purity campaigns and why campaigners adopted the particular narratives and policy efforts found in late nineteenth-century social purity literature. As the following sections explore in greater detail, growing alarm about pornography compared to other forms of obscenity or sexual deviance appears to have coincided with the increased presence of women and members of the lower classes in pornography production and distribution. Situated in this context, the social purity movement's late nineteenth-century emphasis on pornography appears as a response to the specific conditions of late nineteenth-century production and distribution.

III

Like many moral issues addressed by the social purity movement, reformers alternately presented pornography as an aristocratic vice and a sign of corruption among the poor. Despite criticism aimed at the dissolute aristocracy, actual campaigns and legal actions focused almost entirely on the lower classes. It is from this group that the most evidence of production and distribution patterns can be found. Rather than existing as a shadowy activity of the criminal underworld, pornography distribution was in fact a well-established source of income among the lower classes. In articles speaking out against the pornography trade, contributors to the social purity publication the Sentinel described areas like Holywell Street, in which independent street hawkers sold pornography to passers-by.Footnote ³¹ While it is entirely possible that purity campaigner authors exaggerated the scope of the problem, several independent publications verify street hawkers as a prominent source of pornography. Henry Mayhew, for example, wrote extensively on the phenomenon of the ‘sham indecent publications’ seller, hawkers who claimed to be selling pornographic photos or prints but in fact trading in parcels of newspaper and straw.Footnote ³² Mayhew's study and several relevant periodical articles date as early as 1850, indicating that lower-class people participated in the pornography trade even before the arrival of widely available affordable photography.

While wealthier middle-class areas clearly contained pornography distributors, they received far less attention in the press than street hawkers and other lower-class pornography sellers.Footnote ³³ As this relative lack of discussion and the small number of criminal prosecutions indicates, middle-class purity campaigners did not consider wealthier pornography merchants a problem on the same scale as shops or street hawkers in London's lower-class areas of Holywell Street and Drury Lane. This class bias, apparent in social purity publications like the Sentinel, could also be seen in the mainstream press. Newspapers rarely reported news of elite publishers, instead framing pornographers as members of the degraded urban poor. For example, a spate of news articles in the 1880s identified street hawkers and ‘barrowmen’ who sold pornography to pedestrians as a serious problem, suggesting that a licensing system would help to separate obscene publications dealers from respectable hawkers.Footnote ³⁴ Other articles, while acknowledging the existence of expensive pornography, claimed it did not warrant the same attention as cheap prints and pamphlets sold on the street. The Northeastern Daily Gazette, for example, argued that the people who bought expensive ‘ten guinea’ books in elite shops were already depraved middle-aged men, but that the customers buying from street hawkers tended to be young and still capable of reforming.Footnote ³⁵

While street hawkers may have been the most visible group of pornographers, small shopkeepers and those operating mail-order businesses dominated the trade. Several journal contributors complained of the obscene prints and postcards that could be found in newsstands and the windows of the notorious Holywell Street tobacco shops.Footnote ³⁶ These small, shabby establishments, which usually sold cheap postcards and booklets from behind the counter, featured as a major source of concern in purity campaign literature. Looking beyond campaign literature, it becomes apparent that claims of lower-class pornography distributors cannot be dismissed as social purity fantasy; criminal prosecutions provide persuasive evidence that many pornography sellers did indeed belong to the ranks of small shopkeepers and manual labourers. Records from the 1877 trial of pornographers Richard Estrabrook and John Baker, for example, described both men as involved in a variety of occupations. Estrabrook produced and sold pornographic photos while not occupied with his day job as a portrait photographer, while his business partner, Baker, worked as a window-washer.Footnote ³⁷ Several other cases from the same period described similar situations, in which small shopkeepers, tobacconists, and others from working- to lower-middle-class professions supplemented their meagre incomes with pornography sales.Footnote ³⁸ Even those with the means to print and mass-produce their own materials tended to run operations consisting of two or three people handling all aspects of the business. In one typical case, shopkeeper Edward Francis Stirling, arrested for selling pornography in 1876, ran a business with his wife's assistance and personally coloured the postcards sold to customers.Footnote ³⁹ As examples like Estrabrook and Stirling confirm, members of the lower classes not only sold pornography, but possessed the equipment and technical knowledge to produce it themselves.

The pornographic materials sold by distributors like Richard Estrabrook and John Baker did not stay in lower-class hands. Middle-class men frequented the bookshops of the Strand and purchased the wares of street hawkers. Anti-vice forces were not blind to this reality; writing in 1849 or 1850, Henry Mayhew described the men taken in by a street hawker's sham pornography scam as ‘principally boys, young men, and old gentlemen’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thirty-five years later, NVA secretary W. A. Coote warned of young male college students purchasing French novels and indecent postcards in major commercial centres; ‘With such seed so sedulously sown by the devil's emissaries’, he grimly predicted, ‘there can be no question as to what the harvest will be’.Footnote ⁴¹ With this statement, Coote contradicted the narrative of social purity efforts as an attempt to protect the lower classes by reframing pornography as a potentially devastating threat to middle-class boys and young men. Reformers found the danger pornography posed to adolescent males so alarming that they devoted significant time and energy to writing and distributing literature designed to prevent youths from succumbing to temptation, a trend that calls into question their purported mission of protecting the lower orders.Footnote ⁴²

Legal records provide evidence of ways in which lower-class distributors established contact with middle-class customers beyond the college or street corner. The passage of the Obscene Publications Act and subsequent legal crackdowns forced distributors to take precautions against arrest by reducing the visibility of their trade and relying to an increasing extent on the postal service. While mail-order services were also legally targeted, first through the Post Office Protection Act and then the Indecent Advertisements Act, the anonymity and clandestine nature of these operations rendered them difficult to monitor and prosecute.Footnote ⁴³ One common way of attracting customers involved sending unsolicited catalogues and advertisements to middle-class homes (and, in one ill-advised move, to the office of a virulently anti-pornography MP).Footnote ⁴⁴ This method involved a certain amount of risk, but appears to have been profitable enough to continue into the twentieth century. Some of the people charged with engaging in the mail-order pornography trade had small print shops or engaged in fairly respectable occupations like clerical work.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others, however, were identified in the press as career criminals with multiple convictions. Uneducated Irish immigrant Sidney Osborn Fowler, for example, turned to mail-order pornography and various other criminal activities after receiving a court marshal and dishonorable discharge from the army.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other convicted mail-order pornographers worked as porters, gilders, or in other occupations involving manual labour.Footnote ⁴⁷ As this range of professional labels indicates, mail-order pornography was accessible to a variety of occupations and income levels rather than to elite publishers alone.

Some recipients of mail-order catalogues sympathetic to the social purity cause turned them over to the NVA, which then pursued legal action or used the contents of the catalogue as fodder for its campaigns. While mail-order pornography might appear to be quite similar to the older and more elite system of pornography distributed through private membership lists, as well as a decided improvement on seeing the materials displayed in public windows, purity campaigners and their sympathizers drew a clear distinction. A mail-order catalogue advertising affordable reprints of previously rare erotic works led one Saturday Review contributor to declare that ‘All decent-minded people must lament that the “cabinets of the curious” were not allowed to retain a monopoly on this jewel.’Footnote ⁴⁸ This statement implied a belief that pornography could be acceptable or at least tolerable as long as it remained in discreet elite hands. While no information exists on the author of the particular catalogue under discussion, by the late nineteenth century it was entirely possible that he or she could have been a member of the lower classes like Sidney Osborn Fowler. The Saturday Review contributor, however, identifies the catalogue's recipient and potential customer as a respectable middle-class citizen. Given the prevalence of detailed newspaper reports discussing pornography distribution, it appears likely that purity campaigners were fully aware that circulars sent to potential middle-class customers could easily have originated with someone from the lower classes.

IV

Middle-class publications provide clear evidence that women participated in the pornography trade as consumers and distributors. This industry operated in many respects like other businesses owned by members of the lower classes; just as the wife of a butcher or tailor might keep the books or manage other aspects of her husband's business, a pornographer's wife often worked in his shop or took over his business while he served a term in prison.Footnote ⁴⁹ Several investigations into pornographic mail-order businesses resulted in arrests of women who carried on their husbands' trade after they had died.Footnote ⁵⁰ Women did not, however, restrict their involvement to times in which their husband had died or was incarcerated; rather, they worked in the print and tobacco shops on a regular basis. In one typical instance, a police officer testifying in the case of Edward Francis Stirling stated that he visited the defendant's shop on several occasions when only Stirling's wife was present.Footnote ⁵¹ In other cases, lone female shopkeepers and dealers appeared in court on obscenity charges.Footnote ⁵²

Female distributors also appeared among the peddlers and street hawkers selling postcards and cheap literature to pedestrians. Mayhew pointed to ‘paper-workers’, women who hawked packets of pornographic drawings and stories in pubs and taprooms, as contributors to urban vice.Footnote ⁵³ The anonymous author of one opinion piece complained of the large numbers of ‘men, women, and children’ selling indecent materials on street corners.Footnote ⁵⁴ Their customers included women, some of whom worked as servants in middle-class homes.Footnote ⁵⁵ In one case, evidence given at the trial of mail-order pornographer Fanny Marshall included letters from female customers requesting various materials.Footnote ⁵⁶ As early as 1839, a comprehensive study of European prostitution claimed that female pornography hawkers gained access to schools under false pretences in order to sell indecent literature to the students. Furthermore, most of the schools where this phenomenon occurred catered exclusively to female students.Footnote ⁵⁷ These examples, like the previously discussed claims of pornographic catalogues sent to colleges, reinforce arguments for a pornography market comprised of lower-class distributors and middle-class consumers. In some cases, both parties happened to be female.

There is also compelling evidence that women participated in the writing and publishing aspects of the trade. Most authors of pornographic literature employed pseudonyms, making it virtually impossible to determine how many of them may have been women; some examples did, however, leave traces. In the popular ‘whore biography’ genre, for example, prostitutes recounted their erotic experiences for the reader. As one middle-class author observed, ads offering payment for erotic anecdotes hung in bookshop windows next to copies of popular whore biographies.Footnote ⁵⁸ While little evidence survives on how many women responded to such ads, the existence of a market for women's stories challenges the notion that men of any class ever held a monopoly on erotic fiction. Further evidence of female involvement in pornography production can be found in the fact that numerous nineteenth-century pornographic authors adopted female pseudonyms like Mary Wilson, Spinster.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition, some pornographic books and novels displayed a female publisher's name, such as Sarah Browne or Madame Le Duck, or otherwise implied that the work had been produced by women.Footnote ⁶⁰ While there is every possibility that many or most of these works were produced by men, the popularity and acceptance of feminine pen names and publishers' pseudonyms suggests that women participating in the pornography trade would not have been viewed as interlopers in a male domain. The involvement of women in writing and publishing went beyond pseudonyms in at least a few confirmed cases; Brussels publisher Emilie Christiaens produced English-language pornographic books with her husband during the 1880s, while a Mlle Doucé moved from Belgium to Paris in 1883 after the death of her partner (a pornographer) and began publishing erotic works for English consumers.Footnote ⁶¹

Women played another crucial role in pornography production: that of the model. Modelling constituted the most visible aspect of female participation in the nineteenth-century pornography trade. Very little information regarding pornographic models can be found in court records, government documents, and other conventional sources; these women were rarely if ever arrested and prosecuted for their involvement in the trade, and legal authorities tasked with combating the trade never included performers among their policy concerns. In 1952, the undersecretary of state's staff responded to an inquiry regarding underage nude models by stating that the issue had never been considered by the Home Office and that no legal or policy documents on nude or erotic modelling could be found.Footnote ⁶² Insight into the nineteenth-century women who posed in pornographic photos must therefore be gleaned from three sources: pornographic ephemera, scattered references to nude modelling in newspapers and other literature, and newspaper advertisements seeking the services of models. Most of these materials did not frame pornographic models as a distinct category; all nude artists' models, regardless of pose or the legitimacy of the artist, appear as downtrodden or depraved women.Footnote ⁶³ As a result, descriptions of the working conditions of nude modelling are often ambiguous at best.Footnote ⁶⁴

The classified sections of penny and half-penny papers frequently contained advertisements for artists' models. In all likelihood, many of these ads sought models for non-pornographic artistic purposes; some, for example, listed contact information for art academies.Footnote ⁶⁵ Other ads, however, contained more questionable features. Some specified the need for a young woman with a ‘good figure’ or asked for applications in the form of ‘a photo in the most advantageous position’, listing only anonymous post office boxes as contact information.Footnote ⁶⁶ Another, requesting models of both sexes, promised ‘strictest confidence’.Footnote ⁶⁷ These ads appeared in cheap but widely circulated provincial and national papers like the Edinburgh Evening News, the Surrey Mirror, and the Daily Mail, indicating that they were aimed at low-income women. In addition, artists' model ads appeared alongside those for domestic servants. While the lack of clear detail renders these ads inconclusive as evidence, they do suggest that working-class women could seek occasional employment in nude photography.

As carefully staged images designed to stimulate an erotic response in the viewer, pornographic photos must be interpreted with extreme caution. Some photographs featured explicit sexual acts, but the majority revealed only a nude model in a series of poses. The NVA and its supporters, when confronted with these images, eagerly framed nude models as victims of male exploitation. As one contributor to the Sentinel wrote in 1884, ‘We have another name for the wretch who can tempt a needy girl or woman, by the offer of money, to allow her modesty to be trampled on’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rarely, however, did they provide evidence to support the stereotype of nude models as vulnerable waifs. In addition, the professional consensus among artists concerning the selection of models (nude or clothed) was that the success of a photograph or painting depended largely on the talents of the model. Journal articles aimed at photographers and artists expressed a clear belief that models contributed active performance to the scene rather than mechanically following the instructions of the artist. As one contributor to the Century Illustrated Monthly claimed, high-quality models possessed ‘that dramatic instinct without which it is impossible to throw life or spirit into a pose’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The dramatic talents of the model also appear to have been important for Victorian pornographic photos, which depended on facial expressions and body language rather than close-ups of genitals or other isolated parts of the female body. In the vast majority of postcards and photos, models engaged with the camera and projected a strong sense of confidence and even humour.Footnote ⁷⁰ While these photos cannot reveal the true thoughts and motivations of women who posed nude or in sexually explicit scenes, recognizing the performative nature of Victorian photographic pornography raises serious questions about the validity of discussing pornographic models and actresses solely as passive objects. Additionally, the inclusion of models in social purity literature forces us to consider the question of how middle-class knowledge of working-class female participation in nude photography contributed to purity campaigners' views of the pornography trade. Regardless of whether the narrative surrounding models was one of victimization or voluntary immorality, late nineteenth-century discussions of nude modelling still constituted acknowledgement of lower-class female involvement in the pornography trade. This has particular relevance when considering the sexual connections that formed across social boundaries when members of the middle class consumed erotic images of women from the lower classes. As the section below discusses, social purity discourses reveal a strong sense of unease surrounding the socially contaminating nature of sexual and commercial transactions connecting people across class and gender lines.

Fig. 1.

Anonymous 1885–90 nude photograph. Courtesy of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Fig. 2.

Anonymous 1895–8 semi-nude photograph. Courtesy of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

V

Awareness of female and lower-class participation in the pornography trade shaped social purity discourse, often introducing an element of ambiguity regarding the exact nature of the threat posed by pornographic materials. Despite claims that pornography posed an enormous threat to children and the lower classes, middle-class authors saw their own class and family as vulnerable. Tacit acknowledgement of a middle-class demand for these products can be found in one purity campaigner's 1874 discussion of a mail-order pornographer, addressing the decidedly middle-class readership of the Saturday Review: ‘We forbear to give the name and address [on the catalogue]; for, though we should have no hesitation in pillorying the man, we have no wish to advertise [his business].’Footnote ⁷¹ The SSV allegedly kept all pornographic evidence in a metal box that could only be opened with the simultaneous use of three different keys, each belonging to a different member of the organization; as a result, no single person could access the pornography alone or in secret.Footnote ⁷² Precautions of this sort served as unspoken acknowledgement of the temptation pornography represented even to highly respectable social purity campaigners.

Just as cross-class interactions contributed to internal contradictions in social purity discourses, the presence of both men and women in the pornography trade led to ambiguity surrounding gendered threats posed by pornography. In some situations, purity campaign literature discussed female models as victims or otherwise emphasized the corruption of women.Footnote ⁷³ In other contexts, however, reformers adopted a surprisingly gender-neutral stance, framing pornography as a problem threatening both men and women. For example, reformers claimed that pornography constituted a danger and a temptation to children, but included both male and female youth in this argument; writing in 1884, an anonymous Sentinel contributor referenced the ‘diabolical efforts of the vendors of this pestilential filth to introduce it into schools both for boys and for girls’.Footnote ⁷⁴ While some reformers attempted to establish a link between pornography consumption and entering the world of prostitution, thereby constructing distinct dangers for women, they perceived equal if not greater dangers for young men.Footnote ⁷⁵ Cases of pornography sold to young men and boys, in fact, tended to attract the most heated condemnation in the press.Footnote ⁷⁶

As in the case of class-based vulnerability, gender occupies an uncertain position in purity campaign literature; women appeared both as part of the group that had to be protected from pornography and, in cases like Mayhew's paper workers or the female hawkers at girls' schools, as potential moral threats.Footnote ⁷⁷ Males, similarly, featured as the social category tasked with defending others from exposure to pornography or as victims depending on age and other factors. Purity campaigners' shifting and uncertain characterization of the relationship between the pornography trade and people of different gender categories should be understood in the context of cross-gender pornography production and distribution, including situations involving working-class female models and middle-class consumers, which created troubling connections across social boundaries.

As in the case of anti-prostitution campaigns, middle-class articles and editorials discussing the effects of pornography employed images of contagion, contamination, and pollution.Footnote ⁷⁸ Terms used to describe pornography included ‘pestilence’, ‘plague’, ‘scourge’, and ‘pollution’, all of which imply transmission between individuals or groups.Footnote ⁷⁹ As other historians have observed, much of this moral contagion appeared to take place in public venues like the street.Footnote ⁸⁰ The anonymous author of an 1868 article entitled ‘Pestilent Publications’ emphasized the public display of obscene prints and images in shop windows, which spread moral corruption without even requiring customers to purchase the materials.Footnote ⁸¹ Other supporters of purity campaigns, all of whom employed terms implying contagion and corruption, also discussed the need to purify public spaces before moral contagion spread even further. These claims that public obscenity threatened to corrupt middle-class men and their families co-existed uneasily with the larger paternalistic claims of the social purity cause as an effort to protect the morally vulnerable members of society.Footnote ⁸²

Even more terrifying than the corruption of public space was the spread of moral pestilence into the middle-class household. In this case, the working-class servant, usually female, served as the carrier of contagion; campaigners dedicated far less discussion to the issue of male servants, apparently assuming that fewer of them possessed pornography or that they avoided bringing it into the middle-class home.Footnote ⁸³ In a particularly heated anti-pornography editorial, Samuel Smith listed as evidence of England's quickly decaying morals ‘a system of supplying servant girls with obscene pictures and books in a suburb of London’.Footnote ⁸⁴ While this might appear to be consistent with purity campaigners' claims that their efforts aimed to address lower-class immorality, they paid particular attention to servants whose positions placed them within the middle-class home and in close proximity to middle-class children. One social purity supporter, writing in 1881 under the pseudonym J. C., warned against allowing contact between middle-class children and servants in possession of indecent literature. The author then established a direct link between obscene imagery and the spread of moral contagion between classes and genders with the following anecdote: ‘I knew a mistress, who was in the habit of imparting elementary education of another sort by drawing indecent figures on childrens’ [sic] slates, and of enticing young men of the village to her house for impure purposes.‘Footnote ⁸⁵ By including a description of the mistress's sexual escapades with young men, the author framed her as a threat to children who could spread immorality through the sexualized drawings. Additionally, campaigners expressed fears that pornographic advertisements and catalogues sent to middle-class homes would fall into children's hands.Footnote ⁸⁶ In depicting pornography as a lower-class contagion threatening to infect the middle class, purity campaigners revealed their anxieties surrounding the poor in general and working-class women in particular as sources of pornographic materials. Placing emphasis on the corruption of youth raised the stakes by framing pornography as a threat to Britain's future.

VI

By viewing court records and pornographic ephemera alongside middle-class periodicals, newspapers, and social purity literature, this article has drawn attention to the ways in which purity campaigners responded to the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade. This focus on purity campaign literature directed at the general public, coupled with legal evidence from the period, reveals the presence of women and the lower classes in the pornography trade as well as middle-class fears arising from that fact. Based on newspapers and trial records from the second half of the nineteenth century, it appears that lower-class people controlled various aspects of production and distribution. In addition, women did not merely exist as the passive subjects of pornography; rather, they played critical roles at every point of the production and distribution process. These lower-class and female pornographers sold to the allegedly respectable classes, using a variety of methods. Moreover, both prosecution records and the more abstract rhetoric of purity campaign literature reveal recognition of the ways that the commerce of the pornography trade crossed class and gender boundaries. This awareness of the class and gender composition of the pornography trade clearly fed anxieties and contradictions at the center of anti-obscenity campaigns.

This evidence adds to the study of Victorian beliefs regarding social purity and obscenity in a number of ways. On the most basic level, it challenges the notion of Victorian pornography as an obscure hobby dominated by male middle-class and aristocratic writers. More importantly, it identifies a relationship between the realities of the pornography trade's changing business practices and the class-based and gendered anxieties found at the heart of social purity rhetoric and policy efforts. Viewing these elements together provides evidence of anti-pornography campaigns as a manifestation of deeply entrenched middle-class fears of lower orders whose sexuality and values, by the end of the nineteenth century, became increasingly visible and influential in both the public sphere and the middle-class home.