Porn Studies

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The autobiography of a Victorian pornographer:

Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life

Stefania Arcara

To cite this article: Stefania Arcara (2017): The autobiography of a Victorian pornographer:
Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life , Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2017.1309989

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Published online: 28 Jun 2017.

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PORN STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2017.1309989

The autobiography of a Victorian pornographer: Edward

Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life
Stefania Arcara
Human Sciences, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Written by Edward Sellon just before his suicide, The Ups and Downs Received 8 August 2015
of Life (1867) is at once a book of pornography and a pornographer’s Accepted 10 March 2017
philosophical testament. This article analyzes the literary strategies,
KEYWORDS
discursive practices and ideological implications that inform this Victorian pornography;
‘erotic autobiography’, a remarkable text so far neglected by Victorian literature;
scholarship. With the methodological tools of gender studies and autobiography; feminist
feminist literary criticism, the article examines the porno/ literary criticism; gender
autobiographer’s efforts to construct a heroic, heterosexual studies; queer theory
masculine identity through the discourse of philosophical
libertinism, and his tragic failure. The Ups and Downs expands our
knowledge of the Victorian subculture of pornography and sheds
further light on the relationship between libertinism and
masculinity, as well as on the power of pornography to challenge
dominant public and literary discourses. With his skilful
manipulation of generic categories (the realist novel, the ‘men of
letters’ autobiography) and the search for a metaphysics of the
flesh, Sellon destabilizes the boundaries between high and low
culture: by choosing to recount the ‘ups and downs’ of his life
(and of his penis) as an experiment in pornographic writing, he
invents a textual space for articulating counter-hegemonic
discourses otherwise unspeakable in Victorian culture.

Introduction
The pornographer, in spite of himself, becomes a metaphysician when he states that the fric-
tion of penis in orifice is the supreme matter of the world. (Carter 1979, 16)

Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life, published posthumously in 1867 ([1867] 1996),
opens with a title-page illustrated by the author in pen and ink, a curious little masterpiece
of Victorian erotica depicting his personal Weltanschauung: it associates ‘the Ups and
Downs of Existance’1 (Figure 1) respectively with an erect phallus pointing upwards and
a limp one bent downwards. Arranged to form an indecent, surreal coat of arms are all
the ingredients of Sellon’s pornotopia: a whirl of naked female body parts, a lesbian cun-
nilingus scene, drink, weapons, Cupid’s bow and arrows – one of which is broken – and the
archetypal icon of mortality, a skull. Hovering above, two vulvae with a clitoridal erection,
and breasts attached as wings, drift upwards like fleshly butterflies in search of
transcendence.

CONTACT Stefania Arcara arcara@unict.it Human Sciences, University of Catania, Piazza Dante 32, Catania 95124,
Italy
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. ARCARA

Figure 1. Edward Sellon, The Ups and Downs of Life, 1867, title page. Illustrated by the author.

The Ups and Downs of Life was Edward Sellon’s last pornographic output, an
obscene testament left unfinished when, in April 1866, the author shot himself in a
London hotel at the age of 48. A convinced libertine and atheist, Edward Sellon
was not only a pornographic writer and illustrator, but also a self-taught Orientalist,
translator and anthropologist. Although Victorian pornography scholarship has pro-
duced stimulating analyses on the intersections of class, gender and race in various
texts of the period,2 Sellon’s writings have been generally neglected. Except for
Sandra Macpherson’s (2005) literary analysis of his novel The New Epicurean, critics
and historians have mentioned Sellon in passing, confining their comments mostly
to his eccentric personality and adventurous life.
One of my aims in this article is to fill this gap, by offering a critical reading of Sellon’s
‘erotic autobiography’ – a text which is doubly interesting, as an instance of Victorian
obscene writing with a distinct literary quality and as the life-story of a professional por-
nographer who believed in the philosophical premises of libertinism. Together with the
far more famous sexual memoirs, the anonymous My Secret Life ([1888–94] 2008),
Sellon’s text may be considered one of the few ‘authentic’ autobiographies of Victorian
obscene literature (Kearney 1982, 114).3
 PORN STUDIES 3

Because of its peculiarities, The Ups and Downs expands our knowledge of the Victor-
ian subculture of pornography and sheds further light on the relationship between lib-
ertinism and masculinity, as well as on the power of pornographic writing to
challenge dominant public discourses. More specifically, my analysis of Sellon’s text
intends to be a contribution to the study of Victorian pornography in terms of pornogra-
phy’s literary history: my contention is that nineteenth-century obscene writing must be
placed in the literary context of the age, as one of the popular subgenres that flourished
at the time and cannibalized the features of respectable genres (the realist novel, the
autobiography, the travel account, some poetic forms), creating a textual space for the
expression of otherwise unspeakable counter-hegemonic discourses. Social and cultural
historians have provided ground-breaking studies of pornography in a diachronic per-
spective, such as Lynn Hunt’s (1993) The Invention of Pornography, Lisa Sigel’s (2002) Gov-
erning Pleasures and Colette Colligan’s (2006) The Traffic in Obscenity. However, a
mapping of Victorian pornographic fiction from the perspective of literary history and
textual analysis is still partial – a lingering effect of Marcus’ careful distinction between
‘pornography’ and ‘literature’ (1966, 278). My study on Sellon intends to contribute to
this mapping by analyzing the literary strategies, discursive practices and ideological
implications that inform this remarkable text.
Through the methodological tools of gender studies and feminist literary criticism, I will
offer a reading that traces the subversive and counter-discursive elements embedded in
what appears to be, at first glance, the self-narrative of a misogynist pornographer, and
I will examine the writer’s efforts to construct a heroic, heterosexual masculine identity
through the discourse of philosophical libertinism, and his tragic failure.
As we shall see, a plethora of conflicting discourses are intertwined in Sellon’s porno/
autobiography, combining imperialism, heteronormativity, misogyny, marital violence
and the predation of women with anticlericalism, social critique, the celebration of
female desire and sexual agency, and a determined demystification of the Victorian bour-
geois ideals of femininity, domesticity and motherhood. What Macpherson observes about
Sellon’s (1865) previous novel The New Epicurean can equally be said of The Ups and Downs
of Life: ‘it is, one might venture, both feminist and misogynist’ (2005, 489).

Edward Sellon, Victorian pornography and sexual radicalism

Twentieth-century scholars have been appreciative in their brief remarks on Sellon,
describing him as ‘talented and scholarly’ (McCalman 1984, 109), ‘one of those gifted,
but at heart deeply unhappy, Epicureans’ (Bloch [1938] 1996, 569) and ‘probably the
most interesting member of Ashbee’s circle’ (Webb 1982, 116). Kearney mentions his ‘con-
siderable intelligence and promise’ (1982, 112) while Pearsall even applauds The Ups and
Downs of Life as ‘the nearest thing to a classic Victorian erotology has’ (1969, 369), yet none
of these critics provides an analysis of Sellon’s writings. Such scholarly neglect contrasts
with the place assigned to Edward Sellon by the maximum authority on Victorian
erotica, his contemporary Henry Spencer Ashbee, in the frontispiece of the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum (Ashbee 1877) (Figure 2): here Sellon’s name features alongside some of the
most acclaimed erotic writers of all times – Pietro Aretino, the Marquis de Sade and the Earl
of Rochester – while the entries devoted to Sellon’s works in Ashbee’s volume are very
appreciative and several pages long.
4 S. ARCARA

Figure 2. Pisanus Fraxi [Henry Spencer Ashbee], Index Librorum Prohibitorum (London, 1877; frontis-
piece). Sellon’s name features in the left column, third from the bottom.

According to his autobiography, Edward Sellon – ‘the son of a gentleman of

moderate fortune’ ([1867] 1996, 17) – joined the army at age 16, spent several
years in India as a Captain of the British army and, upon his return to London,
led a turbulent life, plagued by debt, working as a coach-driver and a fencing-
master.4 As a writer, Sellon occupies an ambiguous position in mid-Victorian
London between high and low culture, between an increasingly consumer-oriented
market of obscene literature, with no recognized aesthetic value, and the intellec-
tual élite of bibliophiles, gentlemen-collectors and literati dealing with erotica
from a privileged standpoint. After an early attempt to gain success as a respect-
able author with Herbert Breakspear, a historical novel on the Mahratta wars (‘my
first literary effort’; Sellon 1848, n.p.), in the 1860s Sellon was active as a clandestine
‘hack writer’ (Kearney 1982, 112; McCalman 1988, 209) in the London circles of pub-
lishers and readers of erotica, as a translator of Italian, Latin and Oriental erotic
 PORN STUDIES 5

texts and, simultaneously, as an author of scholarly essays published by the Anthro-

pological Society of London, which he wrote in his self-fashioned role as an expert
on ‘phallicism’. Sellon gained credibility in this field to the extent that he was given
the important task of arranging the phallic collection in the British Museum (Jen-
nings 1884, xxv). As a self-taught scholar and member of the newly founded
Anthropological Society, he investigated Indian esoteric sexual practices and
beliefs, devoting himself to the study of Tantrism, which he introduced to Britain
long before Richard Burton’s translations of Oriental erotic texts.5
His works, both pornographic and anthropological, belong to that complex network of
discourses on sexuality that proliferated in the nineteenth century (Foucault [1978] 1998).6
Sellon, Ashbee and a number of Victorian intellectual sexual radicals shared an anti-estab-
lishment and nonconformist view of society, centred around the idea of instinctual sex as a
liberating, ‘natural’ force, a starting point for a radical critique of civilization and morality.
Sellon was thus a pornographer for ‘the highest of motives’ (Bloch [1938] 1996, 569), in the
tradition of European philosophical libertinism with its roots in erotic and sceptical classi-
cism (McCalman 1984, 97).

A Victorian pornographer’s writing strategies

The Ups and Downs of Life is an ‘erotic autobiography’ – the narrator affirms – addressed to
‘my erotic readers’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 101 and 112). It is presented as a pornographic
story produced for the titillation of readers and as the authentic autobiography of a
modern-day, free-thinking libertine. In the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Ashbee upholds
its authenticity, commenting that ‘this book … is in truth the autobiography of its
author and artist Captain Edward Sellon’ and that ‘in the original MS. the real names of
the persons were given’ (1877, 379–380). This is confirmed by James Reddie Campbell,
Sellon’s intimate friend and fellow pornographer.7 However, what interests me here is
not the ‘authenticity’ of Sellon’s narrative, or the extent to which it is a fictional autobio-
graphy,8 but the pornographer’s writing strategies.
Sellon’s previous pornographic works, The New Epicurean (1865) and Phoebe Kissagen
(1866), were written in the form of epistolary novels, structured as a series of sex scenes
with little emphasis on the narrator’s personality or interiority. With the choice of recount-
ing his own life, just before his suicide, in a pornographic narrative, Sellon offers instead a
very personal tale. It is a tale full of rage, rancour, frustration and melancholy, with an
impetuous, desperate ‘I’ that dominates the narrative and affirms the author’s libertine
subjectivity at every turn of the phrase. This renders The Ups and Downs a rather idiosyn-
cratic book in comparison with the more formulaic obscene fiction of the time: not only
does Sellon place copulation scenes in the context of an adventure narrative with a picar-
esque hero, in the hegemonic tradition of the English novel, but he combines this with the
literary conventions of male, middle-class autobiography – a genre that was in the ascen-
dant in the Victorian age – including ‘the conventions of autobiographical depth and inter-
iority’ (Broughton 1999, 16). With this manipulation of modes of writing and generic
categories, Sellon poses both an aesthetic and a moral challenge in Victorian literature:
he invents a new textual space for articulating discourses of sexual radicalism and philo-
sophical libertinism, together with the themes of failure, decay, imperfection and mortality
in relation to sex.
6 S. ARCARA

Despite being a frankly obscene, fast-paced and at times even comic narrative, The Ups
and Downs is interspersed with meditative passages where the protagonist’s voice
becomes confessional and elegiac, with a continuous play between the present ‘I’ narrat-
ing the story and the past ‘I’ as agent of the narrated events. The story unfolds chronologi-
cally, narrating the protagonist’s search for sexual pleasure since he was a 16-year-old
cadet setting out for India ‘on a cold night in February 1834’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 17). In
the tradition of the travel account, the narrator transcribes the pidgin English spoken by
his Indian servant and informs us of child prostitution and of the sexual customs of
British colonial troops in India. We learn about the lives of young servant-maids in
England, a sea voyage, a sword duel and other details that form the context of Sellon’s
adventures of the flesh, including a farcical scatological anecdote and an episode of
transvestism.
A comparison of The Ups and Downs with the eminent example of Victorian porno-
graphic life writing, the 11-volume My Secret Life by ‘Walter’ ([1888–94] 2008), reveals
radical differences in the circumstances of publication and the authors’ intentions.
Sellon – a professional pornographer – produced his self-narrative, complete with
obscene illustrations (Figure 3), as one more book he could sell to his publisher William
Dugdale (but took his life before completing the project). More than 20 years later,
‘Walter’, a wealthy gentleman in a position of power, paid a Belgian publisher to
arrange the printing, over a number of years and only in a few copies, of the 4200 manu-
script pages containing his private memoirs (Gibson 2002, 166).
Compared with My Secret Life, Sellon’s narrative is closer to the realistic novel tradition,
with the hero as picaro who recounts the ‘ups and downs’ of his life (and of his penis) and
occasionally addresses the reader as interlocutor. Walter’s prose also possesses a novelist’s
descriptive quality, but its monumental prolixity and the confessional mode make it a very

Figure 3. Edward Sellon, The Ups and Downs of Life, 1867. Illustrated by the author.
 PORN STUDIES 7

different pornographic experiment in life writing. Walter obeys more directly and, in a
sense, more naively the injunction ‘to tell everything’ and to transform sex into discourse
noted by Foucault ([1978] 1998, 22–23). He chronicles his experience with ‘some element
of scientific purpose’ in mind (Best 1969, 210): ‘a secret life should have no omissions …
man cannot see too much of human nature’ (My Secret Life, [1888–1894] 2008, 4.17, n.p.),
while he also writes for his own pleasure, to augment ‘the sensations he experienced with
the details of what he said about them’. (Foucault [1978] 1998, 23). Unlike Walter’s obses-
sive and solipsistic narrative, Sellon’s prose is aimed explicitly at entertaining the reader,
and in this sense it obeys the rules of the pornographic book market. Yet The Ups and
Downs does not conform to Peter Webb’s definition of such fiction as ‘a succession of
erotic scenes with as few distractions as possible … [containing] little character analysis
or philosophical discussion’ (1982, 97) and clearly departs from the tendency ‘toward
the elimination of external or social reality’ described by Marcus (1966, 44–45).
The adoption of a first-person narrator and of some autobiographic conventions is of
course a common strategy in the history of British pornographic literature – at least
since Cleland’s epistolary novel Fanny Hill ([1748] 1985) because it allows for a virtually infi-
nite, paratactic series of copulation scenes, linked together by the chronological pro-
gression of the protagonist’s life. As has been argued (Hunt 1993, 30–33; Mudge 2000,
27–30; Potter 2003), the evolution of modern pornography is strictly related to the rise
of the novel in the late eighteenth century. ‘Pornography and the novel were “invented”
together’, as Mudge (2000, 28) points out, but in the process of differentiation from the
respectable genre of the novel in the context of an expanding cultural marketplace, por-
nographic prose increasingly focused on its erotic function – that of providing the reader
with a ‘vicarious sexual experience’ (Shanafelt 2013, 271). In most Victorian pornographic
novels written in the form of memoirs or autobiographies, in fact, the narration of non-
erotic events is regularly kept to a minimum: factual information on the protagonist’s
family history, occupation, economic status and so forth are often condensed into one
or two paragraphs at the beginning of the text, while indicators of time and space are
occasionally interspersed in the narrative with the sole purpose of introducing erotic
encounters. This is the case, as Marcus discusses, for instance, of The Amatory Experiences
of a Surgeon (1881), with its ‘highly conventionalized form’ (1966, 238), where elements of
the plot such as the events that lead the protagonist to become a medical man are con-
centrated briefly in the first pages so as to leave space for the succession of loosely con-
nected sex scenes. Marcus’ observation on Randiana; Being the Experiences of an Erotic
Philosopher (1884) sums up this writing strategy: ‘apart from being chronologically
ordered, these stories have no inner connection or coherence’ (1966, 248).
Something analogous occurs in La Rose d’Amour, or the Adventures of a Gentleman in
search of Pleasure ([1880] 2009), another one of those stylized and formulaic works
(Sigel 2002, 93) criticized by Ashbee (1877, xliii) for their lack of verisimilitude. In La
Rose d’Amour the context is kept to a strict minimum, the narrator has no distinct person-
ality and the female figures are indistinguishable, existing in the text solely as sexualized
bodies, who are all models of beauty. Not so in Sellon’s narrative, where the stormy
relations between the protagonist and his lovers are explored in a variety of ways and
female characters possess strong personalities and even, in one case, ‘bad teeth’. In count-
less other pornographic narratives, especially of the 1880s and 1890s – to name but a few,
Lady Pokingham, The Adventures of Lady Harpur, The Simple Tale of Susan Aked and
8 S. ARCARA

Gynecocracy – the autobiographic convention is functional to the accumulation of copu-

lation scenes and only the events and circumstances leading to erotic situations are nar-
rated, often in brief.9
The Ups and Downs differs in many ways from the first-person narratives of Victorian
pornography which share these stylized textual features: Sellon’s self-narration contains
factual and historical information in a measure that surpasses that of similar texts, and
its form is more contiguous to the literary tradition of the English novel, with the centrality
of the protagonist-hero who has a distinct personality. Above all, Sellon’s peculiarity as a
pornographer consists of his skilful appropriation of the conventions of Victorian autobio-
graphy, a narrative mode aimed at the production of white, male, bourgeois subjectivity
(Gagnier 1991, 41–54; Broughton 1999, 7; Amigoni 2006, 2). In particular, with his medita-
tions on time, death, desire and failure, Sellon engages in a dialogue with the ‘men of
letters autobiography’ (Broughton 1999, 8) which he contaminates with the indecent
matter of pricks, cunts, gamahuching and frigging. In the course of this operation, porno-
graphic writing produces a complex pattern of new meanings.

Masculinity and libertinism

The normative model of Victorian male, middle-class autobiography implied the pro-
duction of a disciplined subject that served as exemplum: ‘the husband, devoted; the
father, loving; the citizen, public spirited; and the gentleman, Christian’ (Kendall 1965,
105). The narrator of Sellon’s porno/autobiography sabotages each of these prescriptions:
he abhors marriage and ill-treats his wife (‘Here’s to the man who knows how to tame a
shrew!’; Sellon [1867] 1996, 95), feels no fatherly love for his son (‘And the baby …
grew into boyhood, and … to man’s estate, and became a curse and a disappointment’;
[1867] 1996, 111), has no respectable or economically successful public persona (‘For two
years I drove the Cambridge mail, but not under my own name’; [1867] 1996, 100) and is
fiercely anticlerical (‘Don’t abuse me, you blasted humbugs, members of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice! Forsooth! Look at home, most worthy religious people!’; [1867] 1996,
110). Sellon thus powerfully destabilizes the ‘narrative of improvement’ typical of life-
writing by middle-class men, ‘employed to articulate claims to success and public recog-
nition’ (Loftus 2006, 67).
Sellon’s professionalism as a pornographic novelist and illustrator could not aspire to
any aesthetic recognition in high culture, and his financial problems denied him access
to narratives of self-making and success that were key elements in the ascent of
middle-class masculinity around the mid-nineteenth century (Tosh 2005, 64). Sellon,
then, affirms his (anti)heroic masculine identity in the contested site of the discourses
about sex, specifically through the discourse of libertinism: he displaces his desire for rec-
ognition by addressing the homosocial subculture of pornography. While he looks back to
his life, the textual construction of himself as a subject worthy of the regards of others can
only be achieved within, and through, a pornographic mode of writing.
The discourses of gender, sexuality and libertinism in Sellon’s porno/autobiography are
inextricably intertwined with wealth, class privilege and empire. Some women (his wife, his
mother) are attacked as the embodiment of the oppressive social forces of monogamous,
respectable, reproductive sex, and are also blamed for dragging on him financially; others
(colonial subjects, English prostitutes and servants) are merely legitimate game for the
 PORN STUDIES 9

libertine’s sexual predation; while an élite of wealthy women – the fellow hedonists – are
respected and admired. These are the privileged ones who inhabit, and indeed are essen-
tial to, Sellon’s pornotopia, of which The Ups and Downs gives us rare glimpses: an ideal
world where egalitarian promiscuity reigns, hedonistic materialism is the only ethics,
and ‘natural’ (hetero)sexuality, devoid of jealousy, monogamy and all the strictures of
society and culture, stands for radical individual freedom. Sellon’s rejection of Victorian
sexual norms, like Walter’s, is ideologically significant, but as Ellen Bauyk Rosenman
observes about My Secret Life, ‘it is not politically subversive in the sense of challenging,
in any real or public way … power inequities’ (2003, 193).
In The Ups and Downs masculinity is performed mostly through references to heterosex-
ual voracity pertaining to a gendered discourse of libertinism, but the protagonist’s mascu-
line identity is also bolstered by narratives of travel in the empire (Amigoni 2006, 9). The
title of Chapter Two, for instance, boasts: ‘In which I demonstrate beyond dispute I am a
man of mettle, by my amours with the native women’. Many of the women in The Ups and
Downs – house servants, Indian and English prostitutes – are female flesh available for the
enjoyment of the privileged, dominant subject: the male libertine. Predictably, Sellon’s
description of his time in India (‘I now commenced a regular course of fucking with
native women’; [1867] 1996, 55) draws on imperial, racial and orientalist discourse: he
lists the customs and qualities of ‘those salacious, succulent houris of the Far East’
([1867] 1996, 56) compared with European women – a passage which confirms the histori-
cal connection between empire and sexuality illustrated by Ronald Hyam (1990). Despite
its misleading title, however, the second chapter of The Ups and Downs concentrates on
the young captain’s sexual liaisons with the wives of British officers, with only one
episode revolving around a young Indian prostitute.
Autonomous sexuality and subjectivity are denied to the colonized, but not to all
female characters in Sellon’s narrative: a few white middle-class women are subjects as
well as objects of erotic desire, admired by the protagonist as fellow Epicureans. These
female hedonists, untainted by bourgeois sentimentality or patriarchal possessiveness,
are wealthy married women or even economically independent widows – material circum-
stances which are crucial to their practice of libertinism. Mrs T, wife of a Major of the British
army in India, and Mrs B, an Irish widow with a house in Hyde Park, are powerful characters
who manage to maintain a façade of respectability while actively leading a life of pleasure.
They skilfully negotiate the restrictions imposed on female sexuality and elude society’s
control over female desire, officially pretending to conform to Victorian moral standards
while promoting, through a series of strategies, their own sexual agency. Both are por-
trayed by Sellon as prodigious heroines of promiscuity: ‘Why, this woman’ – he says admir-
ingly of Mrs T – ‘is a perfect Messalina!’ ([1867] 1996, 60). Mrs T herself remarks: ‘ … as for
me, I would have as many men as I liked’ ([1867] 1996, 67), while the voluptuous Mrs B
declares that she, being an Irishwoman, has ‘a great contempt for your comme il faut
English society’ ([1867] 1996, 105) and ‘she entertained gentlemen … when they took
her fancy’ ([1867] 1996, 104). Through an astute manipulation of domestic space, involving
a system of secret springs, wardrobes and interconnected bedrooms, Mrs B accommo-
dates Sellon in her house in Hyde Park for three months, passing him off as her brother,
although on two occasions she makes him vacate the room ‘for a rival’ and finally dis-
misses him with ‘a cheque for a cool thousand’ ([1867] 1996, 110). When, in the course
of the narrative, Sellon places an emphasis on these female libertines, he implicitly
10 S. ARCARA

advocates the egalitarian values of the sexual agenda of libertinism for both men and
women. However, sexual choices and sexual control have to do not only with gender
but also with economics, and libertinism remains unquestionably predicated on wealth.
Sellon’s masculinity is thus negotiated uncomfortably between his aspiration to a rich
man’s vision of libertinism and his status as an impoverished middle-class gentleman.

A pornographer’s wife
Power relations based on gender, class and economic privilege are also at work when the
narrator strives to reconcile libertinism with his marital life and attempts to affirm his mas-
culine agency in his own bourgeois home. This occurs when we are presented with the
character of Augusta, his young and beautiful wife. He marries her for money, following
his mother’s advice, but he soon becomes acrimonious on discovering that not only is
she nearly ‘a pauper’ but she is also ‘exceedingly jealous’. Although the sensual Augusta
is also the co-protagonist of pornographic scenes, unlike the hero’s other lovers and
fellow Epicureans she is hated for upholding social and moral conventions. The character
of Augusta thus embodies the potential for erotic fulfilment and libertine companionship
but simultaneously serves the narrative function of representing the normative power of
monogamy: ‘Pity she was my wife; but for that chain I could have loved her, could have
admired her’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 98).
Augusta is portrayed rancorously (‘But, alas, there is a perversity about wives’; [1867]
1996, 100) as standing on the enemy’s side, that of traditional morality. Constantly
intent on curbing the libertine’s freedom and spoiling his promiscuous pleasures, she sym-
bolizes the oppressive forces of society that the sexual radical hero opposes. At the same
time, however, she is implicitly blamed for not bringing with her dowry the longed-for
affluence which would have enabled the protagonist to experience the true freedom of
libertinism. The domestic conflict explodes in ‘Some Little Episodes Commonly Called
“Lovers Quarrels”’ announced in the euphemistic title of Chapter Three, where the narrator
exercises his mastery in the home as paterfamilias in order to affirm his right to adultery as
a male libertine. In a lengthy account of a fierce marital row, the jealous Augusta, who had
voiced her anger upon discovering her husband’s intrigue with a maid, is first presented as
‘one of the Furies’, a wild animal to be tamed, a ‘tiger’, a ‘panther’, who kicks and bites him
([1867] 1996, 92–94). She is then humiliated and reduced to submission through violence,
so that she begs his forgiveness.
This intensely misogynistic episode is quoted in full in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
by Ashbee, who enthusiastically calls Sellon ‘our hero’ (1877, 385). Sellon’s violent ‘taming’
of his wife is applauded by Ashbee and offered by both authors to the complicity of the
pornographic readership. For Sellon, as well as for Ashbee, marital violence is a heroic
means for affirming what they see as a fundamental principle of libertinism: that of
sexual promiscuity as a masculine prerogative. ‘My hands were streaming with blood,
some of the veins were opened’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 94): this is how the libertine literally
fights against the forces of moral conservatism and bourgeois marriage (jealousy, posses-
siveness, monogamy) which he projects on the body of his wife Augusta.
Pornographic writing, then, provides Sellon with the possibility to affirm his masculine
libertine identity by defying, even through violence, the Victorian middle-class ideal of dom-
esticity and marital harmony (Tosh 2005, 66): his married status is defined as ‘chains’ and
 PORN STUDIES 11

‘fetters’, and Augusta is ‘a crown of thorns’ for her husband – a hindrance to the hero’s
radical hedonism. In his earlier novel The New Epicurean, set in the eighteenth-century
English countryside, Sellon had created the character of a perfect female companion, the
adolescent wife of the protagonist Sir Charles, Lady Cecilia, who is ‘free from all those silly
notions of propriety and jealousy’ (1865, 48), and actively procures new lovers for her
husband. In contrast with The New Epicurean’s pastoral pornotopia, The Ups and Downs
describes with autobiographic realism a world where the narrator must confront insti-
tutional monogamy, a rebellious wife and the frustrating reality of the economic system
– as a gentleman devoid of the financial means to put his libertine philosophy into practice.
Only at one point in the narrative is Augusta associated with the hero’s happiness: the
narrator recalls a three-year period he spent with his wife in rural seclusion in a remote
cottage in Hampshire (again for economic reasons) and admits, but says he is unable to
‘explain’, that those years were ‘the happiest of my chequered existence’ (Sellon [1867]
1996, 102). He recalls with nostalgia his period of prolonged abstinence from that
sexual variety which is essential to libertinism (as well as to pornographic narration). But
Sellon’s marital fidelity, so unfitting for a libertine, is compensated by his wife’s complete
sexual availability and by her equally complete domestic servility during their time in the
countryside. Here he enjoys the erotic pleasures of the monogamous libertine and the
patriarchal pleasures of the hunting squire:
Augusta would strip naked, place herself in any attitude, let me gamahuche her, would gama-
huche in her turn, indulged all of my whimsies, followed me like a faithful dog – obtained
good shooting for me in the season, and a good mount if I would hunt. (Sellon [1867]
1996, 102)

This is the closest the porno/autobiographer comes to ‘the fantasy of domestic bliss’ (Lee
2007, 15), but the protagonist’s rural happiness is interrupted by his wife’s pregnancy and
the birth of a son. These life events, far from being narrated as testimonies of the bour-
geois value of marriage – as they would have been in the hegemonic tradition of Victorian
autobiography – serve instead, in the pornographic narrative, to voice an uncompromising
desacralization of motherhood: the narrator recounts how appalled he was by his wife’s
sexual unavailability when pregnant and how he subsequently left her when ‘the young
usurper’ was born. Like a good pornographer’s, Sellon’s existential priorities are hedonistic
rather than reproductive, and the libertine hero shows no hint of paternal pride for the
birth of his son, whom he perceives on the contrary as a hindrance to his erotic practices:
‘All day long nothing was to be seen but baby clothes lying about the room; she could talk
of nothing but baby – drew off my marital amusements’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 103).

Normative transgressions and queer temptations

Sellon rejects the roles of loving husband and father that were crucial to bourgeois mas-
culinity, while he safeguards his virility by articulating the discourse of libertinism in
aggressive heteronormative terms. Unlike Walter in My Secret Life, who, with his taxonomic
curiosity for sexual experimentation, even attempts to have intercourse with a man,
Sellon’s transgressions remain within the carefully policed boundaries of heterosexual
and conventional erotic practices. For the pornographer, the only acceptable form of
sexual dissidence is the libertine’s heterosexual promiscuity, glorified as a prerogative of
12 S. ARCARA

virile, ‘honest men’ like himself, while male homosexuality is condemned by association
with religious hypocrisy and lower-class degradation:
Gentlemen, I leave such illicit pleasures to the clergy; as for me, I’m a mere fuckster. I like
women, and I have them. Go along, you damned, old sodomitical b–rs, and have your
boys; but in common honesty, leave honest men to fuck their women in peace, and be
damned to you! (Sellon [1867] 1996, 110)

As for ‘that most voluptuous Sapphic love’ (Sellon [1867] 1996, 35), the narrator admits that
as a young man he was initially prejudiced against it, but later came to ‘fully understand
and appreciate’ it as a spectacle for male enjoyment. Yet pornographic writing once more
also provides the space for the articulation of oppositional discourses: gender and sexual
norms are destabilized at one point in the narrative through the practice of transvestism,
in an episode where the narrator agrees to participate, dressed as a woman, in a theatrical
performance organized by British officers in India.10 Mrs B promises, if he would oblige, to
take him as a lover, and it is this prospect of illicit heterosexual pleasure, we are assured,
that convinces the reluctant protagonist to perform femininity. He is admitted to the
secrets of the female toilette and submits to the elaborate procedure of ‘metamorphosing’
into a lady. Most of this cross-dressing episode has the flavour of a farce and consists of a
series of comic sketches where, on stage and during a fancy dress ball, the protagonist
adopts ‘masculine’ behaviour, such as swearing or excessive eating, which clashes with
the female clothes he wears and thus serves to reassure us that his essential masculinity
is not jeopardized by the travesty.
The farce that takes place in public, however, is preceded by a vivid account of the dres-
sing up procedure in the privacy of Mrs B’s chamber – an example of the author’s best
descriptive erotic style – which reveals the production of femininity as a performative
ritual. From the beginning of the episode, this ritual is eroticized, as it is shared by the
two lovers, Sellon and Mrs B, and it is through seduction that she persuades him to
become a woman (‘suppose … I were to consent to dress you?’; [1867] 1996, 74): he
desires her, she desires to dress him up as a woman. Mrs B attires her lover with all the
womanly paraphernalia for a night-ball: ‘laced chemises’, ‘silk stockings and rose-coloured
garters’, lush jewels and a wig. The transformation is so amazing that the excited narrator
describes his new self in the third person: ‘I glanced at the mirror, and did not know myself
in the least. I beheld a laughing rosy girl, with a profusion of dark brown hair falling in ring-
lets all over her shoulders; it was myself’ ([1867] 1996, 80).
Every detail in the production of femininity, every item in the stylization of the body
(including ear-piercing, padding, make up) is described with fetishistic fascination:
Then I put on a pair of white satin shoes and she laced up my stays and put a great pad of wool
for each breast and a padded belt on my hips; then came three petticoats, then a white muslin
dress, made rather high in the neck, and with short sleeves; then she placed a real rose in my
bosom, ruthlessly ran a great needle through both my ears and hung in a pair of superb
emerald earrings, flung a necklace of pearl round my neck, which, with my face, she pow-
dered, and then, handing me a pair of white kid gloves, she pronounced me perfect. I
glanced at the mirror again. It was truly wonderful! ([1867] 1996, 79–80)

Travesty and gender confusion become part of an erotic, as our cross-dressed narrator
participates in turn to the ritual of Mrs B’s dressing up for the ball (‘Then she began to
dress herself, I assisting her and kissing her lovely back and shoulders and breasts all
 PORN STUDIES 13

the while’; [1867] 1996, 80), at which point a sex scene ensues. When the lovers risk being
discovered by Mrs B’s husband who knocks on the door, they appeal to the norms of
social convention, Mrs B declaring she is unable to open the door as she and her lady
friend ‘Miss J’ are not yet presentable: the ritual of the production of femininity has to
do with ‘him’ becoming ‘her’ as well as with ‘her’ becoming ‘her’ – he dresses up ‘as a
woman’, but so does she, in order to be socially acceptable. Performativity is thus not
merely a dressing practice that has to do with transvestism, but a social practice that
has to do with gender.
Although this temporary queering of the narration provides erotic excitement and a
degree of ‘gender trouble’ (Butler 1990), in the rest of the episode the author adopts a far-
cical mode, as if to distance himself from the possibility of pleasure when gender is
unstable. However, some gender confusion is produced when Sellon plays with gender
performativity: this incursion into queerness is another instance of the hybrid quality of
his porno/autobiographic narrative, which reveals the fragility of masculinity as a perfor-
mative gender construction.

‘Vivat lingam. Non resurgam’

Sellon’s sexual adventures are told through an existential perspective that is excruciat-
ingly nostalgic – and which is less prominent, or absent, in contemporary pornographic
novels: in Lady Pokingham, for instance, presented as the memoirs of a ‘poor consump-
tive on the verge of the grave’ ([1879–80] 2009, 5), the perspective of a present ‘I’
looking back nostalgically at the past is a rhetorical device which recurs only in the
incipit and in the epilogue of the book (‘Amen! I am unable to hold my pen any
longer’; [1879–80] 2009, 158), while the rest of the autobiographic mode is merely func-
tional to the succession of sex scenes.
On the contrary, an elegiac tone circulates as an undercurrent through the pages of The
Ups and Downs, and even the most vivid sex scenes are subtly pervaded by a melancholy
light, as the narrator is conscious of the passing of time and of the fleeting nature of sexual
pleasure. In contrast with Marcus’ claim that ‘it is always summertime in pornotopia’ (1966,
273), Thomas Joudrey has argued that ‘Victorian pornography grapples with the terrifying
prospects of bodily decay, suffering, and mortality’ (2015, 424), and The Ups and Downs is a
poignant instance of this. Sellon’s hedonist perspective co-exists with the idea of a funda-
mental impossibility of the gratification of desire and with the emergence in the narrative
of the themes of death and decay, of lost happiness and the transience of life. The author
skilfully combines obscenity with elegy, the language of pornographic descriptivism in
which he was well versed (comprising all the lexical variety of Victorian sexual slang: ‘to
frig’, ‘to spend’, ‘to gamahuche’), with literary motifs, an ornate style and a fluid, at
times elegant, prose.11
In some passages he even undermines the pornographic effectiveness of his copulation
scenes by revealing that the eroticized body of a lover he has just presented in detail to the
reader has been dead and buried for many years. For instance, a pornographic scene
recounts the ‘first delicious fuck’ of his life with a young Portsmouth prostitute:
I seized on her beauteous cunt … I fucked Polly four times, the little girls twice a-piece, I drank
two bottles of champagne and returned to my hotel at five in the morning, with my prick as
raw as a carrot. ([1867] 1996, 20)
14 S. ARCARA

Immediately after, the narrative tone changes into an elegiac lament playing on the lit-
erary ubi sunt motif:
Ave! Polly! dear destroyer of my virginity! where are thou now? Alas, alas! poxed! used up!
dead, perhaps; or, sad alternative! perhaps grown old, stale and shrivelled, you sell oranges
at the corners of the streets, or sweep a dirty crossing. Telle est la vie! ([1867] 1996, 21)

Similarly, after the episode on transvestism discussed earlier, the narrator laments that
‘ … alas, dear Ellen, her husband and F- have been dead for years’ ([1867] 1996, 84).12
The dimension of the past also emerges as an ethical question, with the protagonist’s
remorse for a young love rival he killed in a duel: ‘I must confess that I felt that poor
fellow’s death poignantly … I felt this for years afterwards. I often feel it now … ’
([1867] 1996, 72). But the narration once more returns to its pornographic focus in the
next sentence: ‘Yet such is life, and so inconsistent is human nature, that it did not
prevent me from passing the next night in the arms of Mrs T … What a happy night
we had! What gamahuching, what fucking … ’ ([1867] 1996, 72–73).
The textual space of pornography thus provides Sellon with the opportunity to articu-
late a discourse of interiority – his inner struggle combining sensualism and nihilism,
attempting to make sense of life, death, desire and failure through narration. Unlike the
hegemonic tradition of the confession narrative, where the author is expected to recall
previous tribulations in order to demonstrate his own moral development (Starobinski
1980, 79), there is no trace of teleology in Sellon’s porno/autobiography, which opens
with the Shakespearean epigraph ‘all the world’s a stage and all the men and women
merely players’.
The Ups and Downs of Life terminates abruptly in mid-sentence: the author’s suicide
solved the problem of the narrative epilogue – that common literary aporia of porno-
graphic novels, as well as of autobiographies. The Ups and Downs is at once a book of por-
nography and a pornographer’s philosophical testament, true to the author’s anti-
Christian personal motto Vivat lingam. Non resurgam [‘Long live erection. I shall not rise
again’]. This was the Latin subtitle of the poem ‘No More!’, published posthumously in
Cythera’s Hymnal (1870) and supposed to have been the last piece Sellon wrote, which
allegedly he sent to his mistress at the time of his death.13 Written in the tradition of clas-
sical Scepticism and Epicureanism, with a bitterness unmitigated by consoling expec-
tations of an afterlife, and yet resonant with the Victorian poetic obsession about death,
it provides a fitting conclusion to the pornographer’s life-story:
No more embraces, wanton kisses,
nor life, nor love, Venus blisses – No more.
…
For I am in the cold earth laid,
In the tomb of blood I’ve made.
Mine eyes are glassy, cold and dim,
Adieu my love, and think of him – No more. (Cythera’s Hymnal 1870, 68)

Like his contemporary Christina Rossetti’s song ‘When I am dead’ – which also, for very
different purposes, features the voice of a protagonist speaking from the grave –
Sellon’s ‘No More!’ is entirely devoid of sentimentalism and touches upon the ‘love and
death’ literary topos very unconventionally. The male voice recalls past erotic pleasures
(‘that delicious coral lip’, ‘the heaving breast’, ‘the rapturous sigh, the amorous pant’)
 PORN STUDIES 15

that are gone forever and urges his lover to choose oblivion: contrary to the
conventional poetic epilogue of love’s victory over death, love shall not survive in the
afterlife. In this poem, as in The Ups and Downs of Life, death defeats love irrevocably
because, for Sellon the pornographer, love coincides with the pleasures of the corruptible
body.
Sellon searches for an existential meaning immanent in the flesh, and for him – to use
Angela Carter’s (1979, 16) words – ‘the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical
quest’. In a moment of erotic ecstasy with a fellow Epicurean, the narrator proclaims: ‘All
that man ever enjoyed with woman, all that poets ever imagined, I realised at that
moment. … To slap and toy with her nakedness and feel her spend, I was in the
seventh heaven’ [1867] 1996, 107). Although ‘heavenly’, ‘paradisiacal’, ‘celestial’ and
similar hyperbolic adjectives are a common rhetorical strategy to evoke orgasmic pleasure
in Victorian pornography, in Sellon’s case these formulaic features at times serve to evoke
a world of eroticized bodies where matter and spirit are one, a type of metaphysical mate-
rialism that echoes his anthropological interest in Tantric rites and Indian esoteric knowl-
edge, especially his essay on ‘the worship of the female power’.14 However, for Sellon the
anthropologist and expert on ‘phallicism’, the discourse of metaphysics is always, predic-
tably, phallologocentric, as the illustrated title page of The Ups and Downs makes clear:
even the flying vulvae hovering above the central image are endowed with clitorises in
the shape of mini-phalluses.
Sellon’s phallus, although longing for transcendence, is proudly atheist and anti-Chris-
tian, in stark contrast with Walter’s deism in My Secret Life, where the narrator repeatedly
calls his penis ‘the procreator’ and comments that ‘the sexual organs … are emblems of
the Creator and fucking is obedience to his laws and … worship of him’, as ‘the divine
function of Nature’ is for ‘man to inject the precious life giving sperm into the cunt’ (My
Secret Life [1888–94] 2008, 8.7, n.p.), or with the similar deism of the author of Venus in
India ([1889] 1931, 6–7) who likewise associates ‘the tool of Man’ with ‘the work of the
Creator’.
The only existential horizon for the ‘New Epicurean’ Sellon is that of the pleasure of the
erect penis in the hic et nunc: the hegemonic discourse of reproductive futurity is alien to
the atheistic libertinism that informs his pornographic writing. Life coincides with virility,
but ‘lingam’ at some point does not resurrect: ‘That was my “age of iron”’ – the pornogra-
pher muses early on in the narrative – ‘In youth we can do such things, and all is couleur de
rose, but grown old and grey, we succumb at last’ ([1867] 1996, 84).
Atheism, the search for a non-Christian metaphysics of the flesh and the celebration
of hedonistic over romantic, monogamous, reproductive sexuality are radical
discourses whose articulation is made possible, for a Victorian writer, only in the textual
space of pornography (and, less explicitly, in the contiguous field of anthropology).
With its conflicting discourses on sexuality and subjectivity, The Ups and Downs of Life is
a textual experiment that destabilizes the boundaries between literary genres and
between high and low culture, a narrative where the pornographer transforms erotic
desire into both a political affirmation and a metaphysical aspiration. It is an instance of
Victorian pornography as a space for experimentation, both for the literary subversion
of genres, forms and modes of writing and for the libertine subversion of hegemonic
social and moral values – a subversion that was otherwise unspeakable in nineteenth-
century English literature.
16 S. ARCARA

Notes
1. ‘Existance’ (sic) was later substituted, probably by the publisher William Dugdale, with the less
philosophical ‘Life’.
2. See, among others, Sigel (2002), Rosenman (2003), Dau (2014) and Joudrey (2015).
3. Like Kearney, pornography scholars who mention The Ups and Downs do not question its auto-
biographical ‘authenticity’, with the exception of Gibson (2002, 53 and 195). My use of the
term ‘authentic’ in quotation marks refers to the vast critical debate on the issue of authen-
ticity and fiction in scholarship about life writing. See note 8.
4. In the dedicatory letter to his uncle in his novel Herbert Breakspear, Sellon (1848) declares that
he spent ‘nearly six years’ in India, in contrast with the ‘ten years’ mentioned by the narrator of
The Ups and Downs.
5. Like Sellon, Richard Burton ‘drew on Orientalism to criticise English pruderie’ (Colligan 2006,
34). Burton published the first English translations of two Hindu treatises on love: Kama
Sutra in 1883 and Ananga Ranga in 1885 (on Burton and obscenity, see Colligan 2006).
About 20 years earlier, Sellon had published an essay on Tantric worship, ‘Annotations on
the Sacred Writings of the Hindus’ ([1865] 1902), which would become an influential text in
the sexually-oriented British occultist tradition culminating in Aleister Crowley’s ‘sex magick’
(see King 1971, 10; Urban 2006, 94–95).
6. The boundaries between anthropology and pornography in the late Victorian age were very
unstable (Lyons and Lyons 2004, 57; Sigel 2002, 50–72): Sellon belonged to the notorious Cannibal
Club, the inner circle of the Anthropological Society of London, founded by Richard Burton, whose
members were all connected with pornography, as writers, collectors or consumers (see Sigel
2002, 50–55). The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was also one of the ‘Cannibals’.
7. According to Campbell, Sellon’s original memoirs were ‘twice as long at least as the printed
version’. After Sellon’s death, Campbell sold the manuscript to the publisher William
Dugdale, who asked him to excise the majority of non-erotic passages. This information is con-
tained in Campbell’s letter to Ashbee, dated 21 January 1877, in the possession of Patrick
J. Kearney, who believes it is authentic (Kearney 2008, n.p.). The text is consistent with the
information provided by Ashbee in the Index and, more importantly, Campbell’s intervention
in the original manuscript would explain the brusque narrative turns of some passages in The
Ups and Downs, such as the reference to the protagonist’s life as a coach driver: ‘The adven-
tures of that part of my life alone would form a volume, but as this proposes to be an erotic
autobiography, I abstain’ (Sellon 1996, 100–101; emphasis added).
8. As Starobinski notes about the genre of autobiography: ‘No matter how doubtful the facts
related, the text will … present an “authentic” image of the man who “held the pen”’
(1980, 75). A similar observation is made by Rosenman about My Secret Life: ‘no matter
what its historical status, the text is an invaluable record of the fantasies produced by hetero-
sexual masculinity’ (2003, 170).
9. There are exceptions to this general tendency: topographical and historical references are
present in a larger measure, for instance, in the fin-de-siècle gay novels The Sins of the Cities
of the Plain (1881) and Teleny (1893) where the urban setting plays an important role. See
Cook (2003, 18–22).
10. Sellon played ‘the part of Laura in Love, Law and Physic’ ([1867] 1996, 74), a farce in two acts by
English dramatist James Kenney.
11. On the language of Victorian pornography, see Sigel (2000) and Virdis (2015). This weaving
together of base language and a high register is a stylistic peculiarity of The Ups and Downs
that characterizes Sellon’s pornographic subversion of the ‘men of letters autobiography’.
12. This of course blatantly contradicts Marcus’ definition of pornotopia as a textual space where
‘women are immortal’ (1966, 270), and where time, space and social reality are irrelevant. I use
the term ‘pornotopia’ throughout this article by re-signifying it in contrast with Marcus’ defi-
nition: whereas Marcus used it to describe pornographic fiction as a mere ‘utopian fantasy’, a
mechanistic textual operation aimed at the erotic stimulation of the reader, devoid of social
and political significance and incapable of any true subversive purpose or effect, I appropriate
 PORN STUDIES 17

the term to describe pornography’s potential for both formal experimentation and social cri-
tique – as Sellon’s porno/autobiography exemplifies.
13. For this claim, see Ashbee’s (1877) Index, where the poem is also quoted in full. ‘No More!’, first
published in 1870, has been reprinted in The Ups and Downs 1996 edition.
14. Parallel readings of Sellon’s porno/autobiography and of the anthropological essays he was
writing at the same time reveal fascinating connections and would provide an interesting
terrain for future analysis.

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful and stimu-
lating comments, and to Antonia Anna Ferrante for her queer support in the analysis of transvestism.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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