Cleland, John

John Cleland (1709–1789) was a minor eighteenth-century writer, now famous chiefly on account of his succès de scandale , the notoriously successful pornographic novel The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure . Being no stranger to the debtor’s prison, Cleland actually completed the manuscript in the Fleet Prison between February 1748 and March 1749. The book’s history of controversy began with warrants being issued against the author, printer, and publisher on its original publication, and ended in litigation when it was eventually reissued in the United States in 1966. Brought before the Privy Council, Cleland pleaded poverty, was merely reprimanded, but given a comparatively light fine, on condition that he did not repeat the offense. While the bookseller reportedly made some £10,000, Cleland’s royalty was £20. He nevertheless prepared a heavily expurgated version, Memoirs of Fanny Hill , after the name of the heroine, published in March 1750. This too was prosecuted. He proceeded with Memoirs of a Coxcomb (an idiot) (1751) and Memoirs of an Oxford Scholar (1755), both written in a similar vein. He eventually died in poverty.

Despite the content of his works, Cleland’s style is entirely typical of its period, preferring high register or formal vocabulary to coarse “four-letter” words. It is thus, paradoxically, pornography without “dirty words.” In this extended description of one of her many sexual encounters, Fanny is “loath to leave the tender partner of my joys behind me.” Accordingly:

I not only tightened the pleasure-girth around my restless inmate by a secret spring of suction and compression that obeys the will in those parts, but stole my hand softly to that store-bag of nature’s prime sweets, which is so pleasingly attached to its conduit pipe from which we receive them; there feeling, and most gently indeed, squeezing those tender globular reservoirs; the magic touch took instant effect, quickened, and brought on upon the spur the symptoms of that sweet agony, the melting moment of dissolution, when pleasure dies by pleasure, and the mysterious engine of it overcomes the titillation it has raised in those parts, by plying them by the stream of a warm liquid that is itself the highest of all titillations, which they thirstily express and draw in like the hot-natured leech, which to cool itself, tenaciously attracts all the moisture within its sphere of exsuction. (1994, 106)

This typical description of sexual congress shows the unintentional comedy arising from using a scientific, more especially hydraulic, register (words like suction, compression, globular reservoirs, engine , and exsuction ) to a vital and passionate activity.

Cleland also uses metaphors of a high poetic quality, sometimes straining a little for their effect; for example: “The platform of his snow-white bosom, that was laid out in a manly proportion, presented, on the vermilion [scarlet] summit of each pap the idea of a rose about to blow” (1994, 63). The curious use of pap instead of the more direct nipple shows Cleland’s essential delicacy. The coarse sexuality of the underworld is as steadfastly avoided as its argot: “Avoiding the company of jades [prostitutes] and?s, I was thus constant in my fidelity,” writes his decadent Oxford scholar in his Memoirs (1969, 99). Only occasionally does he descend to incongruously direct words such as rod or clit . Yet Cleland covers the taboo subject of masturbation, alluded to by such euphemisms as the solitary vice, inferior gratification, digitation , in addition to the common word at the time, pollution . Such latinized terms were de rigueur during the period for “rude” topics. Cleland even uses the word pego (thought to be a Greek word for “fountain”) for “penis,” although his more preferred terms are machine and engine .

Bearing in mind that the original manuscript was read out at a meeting of the notorious Hell Fire Club in 1737, it is possible that Cleland is occasionally indulging in deliberate exaggeration in such robust sexual metaphors as battering ram, weapon, stiff gristle of “amour,” and volvanic eruptions . His use of the formal Venus Mound is a direct translation of Latin Mons Veneris , which could be more coarsely rendered as “Fanny Hill.”