Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (review)

It's been over half a century since I found Dad's "girlie" magazines hidden in the garage attic. I can't remember what was more exciting—invading my father's secret space, or the pictures drawing my rapt attention. Had we lived a century earlier, however, his collection would have been called "fancy" literature, a term pornographers used to market their mid-nineteenth century printed wares. Licentious Gotham documents the legal world surrounding the production and distribution of these products, which consisted of salacious books, erotic photography, and lewd pamphlets, engravings, lithographs, and prints. Boston, Philadelphia and New Orleans had their centers of production, but by the Civil War they could not match the volume of material sent through the mails from the Nassau Street area of New York City. It appears many of the Union soldiers passed these materials freely amongst themselves. Funny, I never saw this kind of stuff at any of the Civil War battle reenactments I've attended. Maybe participants should read Donna Dennis's book to make their activities more historically accurate.

At mid-century New York was a manufacturing, financial, cultural, and communications center in a nation less than a century old. There book and newspaper publishing industries flourished during good times, survived during bad, but whether good or bad some publishers were tempted to exploit several basic human instincts in order to sell printed products that could titillate and satisfy. Pornographic pioneer publishers like George Akarman happily supplied the market with these kinds of materials, which required a new descriptive vocabulary-publishers like William Haines, Jeremiah Farrell, Thomas Ormsby, and Frederick Brady issued "fancy books," editors like William Snelling, George Wooldridge, and George Wilkes ran "flash" newspapers, and people like Henry Robinson crafted "fancy" lithographs. Added to the mix were "racy" novels authored by George Thompson and others of his ilk. But opposing them were moral crusaders like John McDowall and, of course, Anthony Comstock.

The battles between pornographers and moral crusaders provide the backdrop for Donna Dennis to weave her way through the thicket of mid-nineteenth century obscenity laws and demonstrate the symbiotic relationship erotic publishing and prosecution had with each other. When missionary John McDowall pushed in one direction by publishing a report on pornography for the Magdalen Society (known as the Magdalen Report) in 1831, someone identifying himself as "A Butt Ender" pushed back by authoring in 1939 Prostitution Exposed; or, a Moral Reform Directory, Laying Bare the Lives, Histories, Residences, Seduction &c. of the Most Celebrated Courtesans and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of New York, which was dedicated to the "Ladies Reform Association for the Suppression of Onanism." Men of means visiting Gotham knew how and where to ask for the pamphlet, which provided them with directions to locate a lady of the evening. Because participants did not complain of injury from any of these encounters, a legal culture provided few incentives for prosecution. The successes of Prostitution Exposed and Fanny Hill, whose fictionalized sexual experiences combined with anti-aristocratic politics (I read it as a teenager), encouraged entrepreneurs to expand markets, particularly to urban workingmen.

As the law shifted to address perceived moral transgressions, pornographers found new ways to get their products into the hands of people who wanted them. New technologies brought new forms of pornography, which in turn required new laws to regulate and prosecute the people who produced them. The sexually suggestive male- oriented "flash" papers that appeared in the 1840s capitalized on anti-elitist political sentiment to challenge conventional thinking about what was appropriate subject matter for the press. Several of these papers outed Christian merchants, upper-class women, and evangelists who had committed adultery; pressure for stronger obscenity regulation followed. Flash papers themselves evolved into crime-oriented newspapers like the National Police Gazette, all with salacious descriptive styles.

Certain book and cheap pamphlet publishers observed these successes, and followed the carefully nuanced reporting flash newspapers used to avoid prosecution...