Invisible Ink: no 318 John Cleland

The time has come, it seems, to talk about Fanny. We’re British of course, and the avoidance of discussing anything to do with gusset-bothering was (along with having a splendid Navy) what made our nation great.

Prudery in public, licentiousness in private, resulted in the peculiar situation here, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

John Cleland was a very naughty boy. Naturally argumentative, he was kicked out of Westminster School in 1723, abandoned by his family, arrested for debt, and spent more than a year in Fleet Prison.

While there, the later author of Titus Vespasian and Tombo-Chiqui, or The American Savage, supposedly wrote the book which he publicly wished could be “buried and forgot” – Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

It’s a topical, politically sophisticated, erotic satire filled with in-jokes (and filled with something else too, but we’ll get to that). Its appearance is a mystery; it doesn’t feel as if it was written in the pokey but in Bombay, where Cleland was stationed earlier.

The author was arrested and the book was withdrawn for a century, although private copies continued to circulate. None of his other books was successful, but Fanny bounced back. In 1955, any bookseller caught handling it (sorry, it’s so hard – sorry) faced prosecution, and any buyer received a formal police warning and confiscation order.

In 1960, Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been cleared of obscenity in the British courtroom (it helped to have E M Forster championing Lawrence’s unexpurgated work) but it took until 1970 before everyone could enjoy Fanny.

Does anyone now read it? If they did, they’d find it’s a very peculiar work, obsessed with male member size, written from a female viewpoint.

Fanny leaves her village at the age of 15, heads for the city and undresses simpleton Will (a role that will doubtless go to Channing Tatum in the next film version) to be astounded by his massive “maypole”.

Victorians believed that dim-witted men were especially endowed (hence, as literary critic John Sutherland points out, the depictions of stupid Mr Punch and his big truncheon).

Fanny is racier than Lady C, featuring voyeurism, brothels, drag, self-pleasure and gay sex (the shock of seeing this causes Fanny to knock herself out), but the acts themselves are expressed in euphemism.

It’s generally thought that the measurement-obsessed Cleland was gay. After bans, and a bishop accusing the novel of causing earthquakes, Fanny gave readers a happy ending.