The truth behind prostitute Fanny Hill's sexual antics 200 years ago


Last updated at 00:14 10 October 2007

On this occasion, the earth moved quite literally.

In 1750, severe land tremors struck London, rattling the chinaware in rich houses, toppling old buildings and chimneys in slum quarters, and causing thousands of the capital's inhabitants to flee from the metropolis to safety in the country.

When they returned, it was to the words of their bishop, Thomas Sherlock, denouncing from the pulpit the sins that had brought this divine anger down on their heads.

The taste for bawdy books was among the evils he identified.

"Have not the histories of the vilest prostitutes been published?" he asked his frightened flock.

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fanny hill

And he singled out one in particular - 'Memoirs of Fanny Hill, this vile book, the lewdest thing I ever saw.'

Fanny Hill, the story of a country girl who makes her fortune selling sex in the brothels that abounded in London in the 18th century, was pornography.

Literally so, because 'pornography' was a word made up at exactly that time, from Greek roots meaning 'writing about prostitutes'.

It was explicit in its graphic descriptions of sexual couplings - 'the truth, stark naked truth', as its author wrote, full of 'unreserved intimacies' and expressly 'violating the laws of decency'.

The affronted bishop called for 'its progress to be stopped', and so powerful was his voice that its author and publisher were arrested and threatened with prison.

Fanny Hill was banned - and remained illegal for more than 200 years.

Not that it disappeared from sight.

Far from it. For centuries it circulated in underground editions, a titillating open secret among the posh, literate classes.

The Duke of Wellington, when an unknown junior Army officer, carried a copy in his baggage.

The eminent American scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin had one, too.

By the end of the 18th century there were at least 20 versions in circulation in English, 14 French translations, and other editions in German, Italian and Portuguese.

But it stayed firmly out of sight.

Even as late as 1961, a judge halted its publication in England.

Not until 1970 was Fanny free from restraint, and even since then it has had the taint (or attraction) of infamy.

Today, in one London library, you have to ask the librarian to see it.

But now Fanny's crinolines and corsets are being comprehensively tossed aside and all frustrations released in a lavish BBC television adaptation of the novel, to be aired later this month.

With its quota of heaving bare bottoms and orgasmic heavy breathing, it is certain to cause some consternation among the fainthearted.

The drama is the work of controversial screenwriter Andrew Davies - master of ripping bodices and breeches, who famously sexed up Jane Austen with his TV adaptation of Pride And Prejudice.

With the openly bawdy Fanny Hill - 'So perfect for me!' - he has not needed to stray far from the text to make the sexual impact he delights in.

But here the book has the better of him.

The TV version, for all its effrontery, is tame in its shockingness compared with the original words, set down more than two centuries ago in circumstances that are still as mysterious as they are intriguing.

The first the world ever knew of Fanny Hill was an advertisement in a London paper on Monday, November 21, 1748: "This day is published Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure."

It was priced at three shillings and its author was identified only as 'A Person of Quality'.

Just 750 copies were printed and quickly snapped up.

The content was explosive. By the end of the first dozen pages, 15-year-old Fanny had been lured into the sex trade by the owner of a brothel and initiated in the pleasures of her new calling by another of the girls, 'whose lascivious touches lighted up a new fire that wantoned through my veins'.

She should, Fanny admitted, have "jumped out of bed and cried for help against such strange assaults'; but she did not. 'I was more pleased than offended."

Fanny was a goner, hooked on sexual pleasure, which, in much of the rest of the book's pages, she pursued with abandon and elan.

Here was paid-for sex idealised in a way that makes today's soft-porn ramblings of Belle de Jour seem like searing social commentary.

For Fanny Hill, every man was hugely endowed; every woman a willing participant. No abuse, only pleasure - and described in language rich with

metaphor and humour. Fanny, it seemed, was truly a woman of her times.

Georgian England revelled in personal freedom and opportunities for advancement.

Greed was good; so, too, was the pursuit of individual happiness.

Such sentiments led to what one historian has called 'the mentality of a frontier post' in London.

In such an atmosphere, the clever and cunning Fanny told how she had thrived, with every hope of emulating the real-life Mrs Hayes, whose brothel for toffs was so successful that she had salted away a £20,000 fortune for her retirement.

Three months after the first volume of 'Memoirs', a second appeared.

But as Fanny's notoriety spread, it was not long before the bishop put his ecclesiastical black mark on the project.

The publisher, Fenton Griffiths, whose name appeared on the title page, was arrested and quickly agreed to identify the author of this scurrilous work.

And here came the first surprise.

For Fanny Hill was not who she claimed to be.

She was not a prostitute at all.

In fact, she was not even a woman.

'Her' real identity was one John Cleland - an educated but impoverished gentleman who had worked first as a soldier, then as a trader with the East India Company in Bombay for 13 years, but failed to make his fortune.

He had returned to London expecting a sizeable legacy from his dying father, but been disinherited.

Penniless and with debts approaching £1,000, he had been committed to the decrepit and disgusting Fleet Prison in London, where he stayed for 376 days.

To buy his way out, he let his creative mind run free and wrote his pornographic tale.

In our mind's eye, we can try to imagine the middle-aged Cleland at work, finding a quiet corner amid the squalor and mayhem of the prison yard and for a year scratching out with a quill pen the extravagant prose and the indecent exploits that would make him famous.

It is a compelling image. But is it true?

Certainly that's what Cleland would initially claim as the origins for Fanny Hill.

But when faced with being sent back to jail for 'corrupting the morals of the king's subjects', he changed his mind. He said it was really the work of an unnamed 'young nobleman', and that he had just polished it up a bit and prepared it for the printer.

Years later, the story changed again.

In old age, he told the diarist James Boswell that he had written it when he was just a youth, then 25 years later had revived it for publication when he was in prison and desperately needed money.

But the money is another mystery. The book certainly made a profit, but most of it - £10,000, a life-changing sum in those days - went to the publisher.

Cleland seems to have been paid at most £100, and sold the copyright for a mere 20 guineas.

His payout was nowhere near enough to have paid off his debts and thus secure his release from jail.

Yet somehow he was freed three weeks after the second volume was published.

Were his debts secretly paid off by an admirer?

In fact, there were no records that his debt was ever settled.

More mystery. But one thing is sure. Out of prison at last, Cleland would do or say anything to stop himself being sent back when the king's officers came for him as Fanny's notoriety spread.

In public, at least, he became utterly contrite.

He regretted every word, and the offence it had caused.

He argued that the publication run was finished, the whole venture over and done with, and that a public row over it - for which he rightly blamed the Church - would serve only to encourage demand.

On that, he was absolutely right, as under-the-counter sales for two centuries would show.

Fanny continued to prosper, while Cleland was doomed to a life of poverty and disappointment.

His only success was as a political writer making scathing attacks on the government of the day, dismissed tellingly by Boswell as being the rantings of a 'sly malcontent'.

He died in his lodgings in Petty France in London, a crusty old bachelor, in 1789, aged 79.

He took many secrets to his death, not least where he had come upon all that intimate knowledge of the whore's world to write such a convincing narrative.

Here was a novel written from the woman's point of view, and in which he portrayed the sexual feelings of a woman in eye-watering detail - an unusual accomplishment, presumably only made possible by ample research and experience in the field.

But Cleland had no wife or mistress, at least not that his only biographer knew of.

Did he frequent brothels, spend his time in the company of whores, learn from them the tricks and fancies that make Fanny so convincing? Again, there is no evidence - except one unwitting hint.

Towards the end of his life, Cleland wrote a health manual, a guide to good living of the sort that is commonplace today but very unusual 250 years ago. He praised the virtues of fruit and vegetables, cold baths and exercise, and particularly the control of 'passion'.

And what were his credentials for giving such advice?

Because, he wrote, his own health had suffered 'irretrievable damage' as a result of 'the most abandoned intemperance'.

Had his been a misspent youth? We can only surmise, because he offered no more detail of his philanderings.

However, it seems a safe assumption.

How else to explain his extraordinarily detailed and intimate knowledge of London's seedy underbelly?

At the time he was writing, there were believed to be 10,000 whores in London, lining the streets and tempting the likes of James Boswell to an outdoor coupling on the newlybuilt Westminster Bridge.

A streetwalker could be had for sixpence; a night with a high- class courtesan cost six guineas.

Sexual services, from gigolos to aphrodisiacs to VD cures, were advertised in papers, and there were even published directories of prostitutes, such as The Whoremongers' Guide To London, for thrill-seekers to thumb through.

Soho was the venue for frequent masked balls, which were just fronts for pick-ups.

At Mrs Hayes's 'pleasure dome' in Pall Mall, a dozen 'nymphs and youths' performed a Tahitian love dance to tantalise and delight the young men in the audience.

Perhaps Cleland had been among them, every detail imprinted in his memory, to be recalled when he picked up his quill in desperation.

But there is one final theory about the provenance of Fanny Hill.

Was Cleland just re-telling an old story that had been circulating in sordid social circles for years? His biographer, William Epstein, in trying to uncover the mysteries of Cleland's life, came across a strange report about a men-only secret society in Scotland.

It was called the Most Ancient Order of the Beggar's Beniso, its members were all respectable gentry, magistrates and merchants, and its motto was a salute to sex and wealth: "May pr**k nor purse ne'er fail you."

The initiation rites for this manly club began with the novice 'knight' resting the most intimate parts of his anatomy on a pewter platter.

What happened next involved a lot of what today would be called ' inappropriate touching', followed by toasts and sacred oaths, bawdy songs and dancing by naked girls.

And at the annual ceremony in 1737, the club's records reveal, there was an additional pleasure - 'Fanny Hill was read.'

Yet this was more than a decade before Cleland's book. How could this have happened?

Another source suggests the novel had also been read out to the aristocratic rakes of the notorious Hell Fire Club in Buckinghamshire.

It is possible, then, that a prototype of Fanny had been around for a long time, a secret text read out at debauched societies, and that somehow-it came into Cleland's hands.

We will never know for sure.

But whatever its origins, Fanny Hill has now taken her place as one of the heroines of classical English literature. The book is viewed as a masterpiece of erotic writing, freely available and taught on university courses.

That does not mean it doesn't still make uncomfortable reading - and, in the case of the television adaptation, awkward viewing.

Along with its contemporary successors such as Belle De Jour and Confessions Of A Working Girl, its 'happy hooker' theme sits awkwardly with news stories of sex trafficking, of girls being forced by poverty into the same circumstances as Fanny, 250 years on

And while Cleland's heroine eventually discovers that true sexual fulfilment can only be found within the confines of marriage, that is hardly the message she has sent down through the centuries, as the latest adaptation makes only too plain.

The television story ends with a cheeky wink and nod from impressive new 22- year- old actress Rebecca Night as Fanny: 'Virtue is better than vice,' she pouts, 'but we can't always choose.'

FANNY HILL, a two-part adaptation, starts on BBC4 on October 31.


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