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The flower language played an important role during the Victorian Era

The Victorian era was a time when a farmer society developed into an urban society and as such it was also a time of contradictons. A class system that permitted exploitation gave rise to a plethora of social movements, and phenomena such as child labour existed side by side with the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and high morals.

Our preconceptions of Victorian era morals are often blurry and few people do for instance know that Queen Victoria drew and collected male nude figure drawings in a time when communication of romantic feelings was so proscribed that courting couples often preferred to use the highly fashionable flower language. The Victorian era was also a period when scientists studied and published articles on the female orgasm, and numerous erotic letters from the period has survived into our time. Written explicit erotica flourished, partly thanks to an increasing literacy rate within the United Kingdom, and there is for instance the famous memoir “My Secret Life” using the penname Walter and “The Pearl, A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading”, a monthly magazine issued for 18 months in 1879-1880.

My Secret Life is presented as being a truthful memoir of a Victorian gentleman’s sexual development and experiences. No one knows how much of My Secret Life that is actually true and how much is nothing more than sexuall fantasies from the writer but there are signs that indicate that it might be true such as the fact that the story lacks elements common in Victorian Erotica. The book contains plenty of mundane detail and the writer isn’t shy of including incidents that do him little personal credit.

My Secret Life was first published as a private edition of eleven volumes which gradually appeared over the course of seven years, from 1888 and onward. The eleven volumes spans more than 4000 pages. The first edition was likely very small and some source say that it might have contained as few as 20 copies. During the 1900s, My Secret Life was reprinted in abridged versions but had a hard time escaping censorship. A New York publisher was for instance arrested in 1932 after reprinting the first three volumes, and it would take until 1966 before My Secret Life was finally published without censure in the USA. It was published by Grove press which is famous for having published D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover ” and the first edition of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer“, as well as the words of radical political thinkers likes Malcolm X and R©gis Debray.

British printer Arthur Dobson published a UK reprint of Me Secret Life and found that the British weren’t as liberal as the Americans and found himself convict to two years in prison in 1969. The complet work was not openly publsihed in the UK without repercussions untill 1995. It was published by Arrow Books.

The true identity of the writer of My Secret Life has never been unveiled, but book collector, writer and bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee is often cited as a possibility; either as the writer or as a compiler and editor of experiences, anecdotes and fantasies from friends as well as from his own life.