Pictorial Prostitution: Visual Culture, Vigilantism, and "Pornography" in Dunton's Night-Walker

Pictorial Prostitution: Visual Culture, Vigilantism, and "Pornography" in Dunton's Night-Walker JAMES GRANTHAM TURNER This essay traces a recurrent topos—the brothel masquerading as a culturally respectable if mildly erotic gallery of paintings—as it migrates between various genres that might historically be called "pornographic." Across a surprising range of discourse, including bawdy tales, lawsuits protesting against sexual defamation, political satires, and crusading journalism , this motif exploits the ambiguous relationship between two etymological elements that would eventually combine: pome (signifying the prostitute openly revealed and reviled) and graphe (the expressive mark or engraved sign, verbal as well as visual). Everything depends on who is making that mark and who controls its interpretation. Each of these narratives pits a woman's autographism or self-representation (as genteel art collector or respectable matron) against efforts by the narrator/defamer to pry open or cut into this high-cultural exterior, to reveal the expected story of sexual exposure and conquest—the "pornographic" moment in the modern sense. My principal example, however, suggests a third usage of the term, partway between the modern meaning and its etymological roots, corresponding more closely to the eighteenth-century word pornographe coined by Restif de la Bretonne: the collective portrait of urban vice brought to light by a private citizen who blends into the murky demimonde and extracts its most salacious truths. John Dunton predates Restif by a century, but he creates a similar persona in his ostensibly factual monthly The Night- Walker, part detec55 56 / TURNER tive and part sociologist. Both of these faintly sinister secret agents proclaim a larger moral purpose—indeed, Dunton's eponymous "night-walker" presents himself as a contributor to the great Reformation of Manners—but both clearly revel in their familiarity with the illicit counter-culture and their ability to simulate the fashionably lascivious^Jânewr. Dunton clearly plays a game of appearances that resembles (in reverse) that of the prostitutes he endeavors to expose: these cultured courtesans display the forbidding exterior of the virtuosa and the connoisseuse (only revealing the sexual interior at strategic moments), while Dunton adopts the costume and manner of a Restoration rake scenting the night air for sexual opportunity, driven by titillated curiosity (only revealing his reformist zeal at the last minute). The origins of his vigilante project suggest a deeper investment in voyeurism and vicarious appetite, however. Several years before the launch of The Night-Walker it emerges as just another curious item in the popular journalism that Dunton helped to found: in summer 1691 several issues of the Athenian Mercury (the English equivalent of the Mercure galant) whet the reader's appetite by promising the "Six Nights Rambles" of a Gentleman in search of whores, to illustrate its ongoing discussion of the efficacy and ethics of the "present offers at a Reformation"; the anonymous writer first solicits the editor ("desires to know whether it be convenient to insert" his account), who then tantalizes the reader with hints of "the Confessions he has got from several lewd Women (some of 'em of no mean Rank)." (Dunton himself was of course the publisher, and quite probably the author-confessor too.) On August 4 these "Rambles" actually appear, conveying the pornobiographical revelations that come to light when the young spy "imitates" flesh and blood (exactly the style of the Night-Walker five years later). The entire passage is repeated, incongruously, in Dunton's The Ladies Dictionary , Being a General Entertainment for the Fair-Sex, with the title "Six Nights Rambles of a Young Gentleman through the City, for the detection of lewd women," and passages are again recycled in The Night Walker itself— though they are now presented as the author's own direct experience.1 This speck of mercury is thus heated and stretched into an autonomous serial publication , one which (despite its "design to expose Vice" and thereby extirpate prostitution) could continue to sell ad infinitum, for as long as London provides stylish courtesans and salacious-indignant readers. Each of the following episodes chooses visual culture as the battleground where one kind of "design" maneuvers to outwit another. The weapons of this confrontation are not only actual pictures but hermeneutic modes of understanding the visible...