This book is a bit like looking into a mirror. As the coauthor with Patricia Cline Cohen and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (2008), I find that much of Donna Dennis's Licentious Gotham reflects familiar historical images. She examines the charges of blasphemy leveled against the Sabbath publication of Sunday Flash. She covers the blatant and open glorification of prostitution. She points out how the flash press condemned censorship proponents as hypocrites for prosecuting representations of immorality while permitting immoral behavior itself go unchecked. She recognizes that attacks on licentiousness frequently mimicked the condemnations of female moral reformers. She concludes that the flash press editors of the 1840s set the stage for successors such as the National Police Gazette to portray more eroticized accounts of crime.

But Dennis tells a larger story. Indeed, she removes the historical veil that has covered much of the erotic enterprise and cultural production of American pornography. She begins with obscenity prosecutions in the early nineteenth century, including Commonwealth v. Sharpless (1815) in Massachusetts and indictments in New York City in the 1820s and 1830s, and concludes with Edward Bliss Foote and the National Defense Association's challenges to and confrontations with Anthony Comstock. In between, Dennis demonstrates beyond much doubt that pornography was hardly a marginal, nineteenth-century subculture. Rather, it was a flourishing industry. Pornographic and erotic publishing assumed multiple forms: illegally imported novels, lithographs, sporting weeklies, American-bred fiction, photographs, brothel guides, “racy” books, and much more. And why not?: Profit margins for legitimate publishers generally ranged between 10 and 20 percent; by contrast, erotic goods generated earnings from 300 to 500 percent.

Dennis documents the fascinating and creative ways pornographers marketed their products. The Whig lithographer Henry R. Robinson and book publisher Richard Hobbes manufactured erotic prints in early 1840s. Like their successor, book publisher William Haines, all relied on pirated texts of England's radical pornographer William Dugdale. By the 1850s and lasting into the 1870s, Haines and bookbinder George Akarman were arguably the nation's leading pornographers, much to the chagrin of Anthony Comstock. Decades before Aaron Montgomery Ward pioneered mail-order enterprise, Akarman exploited the U.S. Postal Service to avoid local obscenity prosecution in New York City. In this way, he successfully (and profitably) supplied “‘gentlemen’ at a distance.” Akarman was, in a sense, the Al Goldstein (of Screw magazine fame) of nineteenth-century Gotham.

Females also participated in this erotic production. The wives of Haines and bookseller William Simpson were active in their spouses' enterprises, and Comstock later complained about the school and shop girls who consumed such pornography, perhaps seduced by the lesbian and “pleasurist” themes in Venus Miscellany. Dennis uncovers this history by careful historical excavations of newspaper reports, municipal and federal prosecutions, business investigations by R. G. Dun, quasi-medical treatises, “yellow-jacket literature,” and other “racy” publications.

Dennis emphasizes the political economy of erotic cultural production. Her findings challenge William Novak's interpretation that enforcement of public morality was a central, consistent concern of nineteenth-century governance (The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America [1996]). Dennis's evidence argues that the legal and political culture of New York City “manifested both pervasive corruption and principled opposition to Republican moral ideology” (her emphasis, 220). Republicans lobbied for obscenity laws in New York, frequently invoking rhetoric that linked Democrats with obscenity and drinking, the “sex and drugs” of the nineteenth century. The Young Men's Christian Association often led the charge after 1860, championing morals law enforcement and campaigns that laid the foundation for the aggressive antiobscenity movement of Anthony Comstock. In 1868, for example, the Republican Tribune derided Democrats for their tolerance of flash and obscene publications: “It is a manifestation of their idea of liberty of the press. As the grog-shop is the Democratic nursery, so these bawdy publications are their fairy stories” (228).

Dennis, however, implicitly argues that contemporaries and later historians alike made too much of this rhetoric. The expansion, popularity, and persistence of pornography throughout the nineteenth century speaks to an alternative relationship of municipal governance with social or “immoral” behaviors. For many, if not most, Democrats, reading Venus' Miscellany, flash weeklies, or George Thompson novels was like drinking on Sunday, gambling, or even “whoring”—these were harmless activities and entertainments. Efforts to suppress and regulate such behaviors represented a threat to individualism and personal liberty. Republican-led campaigns to pass summary judgment laws (statutes authorizing the immediate destruction of obscene publications based simply on the summary judgment of a magistrate) ultimately failed. Here Dennis might have offered a more direct connection with the postbellum antidemocratic antisuffrage movement of New York's Republican Party (as analyzed in David Quigley's Second Founding). In both campaigns, Republicans envisioned a coercive Christian state led by property-owning elites emboldened by moral reform, law, and Protestantism. Democrats, by contrast, rejected the notion that the purpose of criminal law was to maintain an orderly, virtuous, well-regulated society.

In New York City, Democrats usually prevailed. But on the state and national levels, it was a different story. Passage of the Comstock Act of 1873 federalized obscenity prosecution in the United States. As Dennis points out, during the seven years prior to passage of the statute, the Post Office prosecuted a mere seven obscenity cases. In the seven years after passage, federal authorities pursued over 100 such prosecutions. More important, Comstock's national efforts in the federal courts proved far more successful than his earlier ventures in Gotham's municipal courts.

Licentious Gotham demonstrates that the city's pornographic subculture enjoys a long, complicated history, and joins an ever-expanding bibliography on the informal and underground economies of the nation's largest city. Historians will be henceforth compelled to include such erotica in their future examinations of commercial sex in the metropolis.