Muddying already murky waters

 It has recently been disclosed that the five letters allegedly written from James Campbell Reddie to Henry Spencer Ashbee, transcriptions of which are posted on Patrick Kearney's Scissors and Paste website, are in fact fabrications rather than genuine letters. Kearney has also copped to a fake entry (no 59) in the bibliography of the works of Maurice Dufleu.

While we have been hearing a good deal lately of the potential of AI to hallucinate works that never existed, we should not forget the human facility for fakery and hoaxing over the ages.

In some instances, it's true, naive readers have been deceived or misled by clever pastiches written as fiction - for example The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by 'Cleone Knox' and the case of the biographer of Madame de Maintenon who mistook a work which imagined

what the king's journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV

for the Sun King's actual journal. This is a literary genre that has a fairly long history.

However, there is also the endeavour to give a spurious air of authenticity to factitious productions. Some while ago I mentioned on this blog that there had been some mention on the erstwhile Histsex listserv of the 'Cremorne' series of erotic novels of the late Victorian era, about which I later received an email from the author who had written them anonymously in the 1990s. I have now been able to get a sight of a few of these volumes via the Internet Archive and they have introductions intending to give an air of authenticity by creating a backstory of the 'Cremorne Dining Society' which followed the closure of the actual pleasure gardens. This allegedly published a club magazine, a run of which had only recently turned up in a refurbished watermill near Oxford.... There are also references to private publications by the All-England Society of Priapus (!).

It's all fun and games until some scholar sets out to start researching the Cremorne Dining Society - said to include some names well-known in the sphere of Victorian erotica, e.g. Ashbee.

I would have thought that surely there was a plethora of - out of copyright - genuine Victorian smut that could have been republished. In fact I seem to recall that besides such works which may be considered to have some social historical relevance such as 'Walter's My Secret Life and The Pearl, various gems of the genre got reprinted in mass market paperback editions from the 70s onwards.  

But maybe it was more a question of not so much actual authentic Victporn as a simulacrum particularly appealing to the contemporary tastes and expectations of the 1990s? 

 

 

 

Reading with care

Reading with care and attention to historical and topographical detail would prevent people from posting on the internet an account of something that purports to be the menu from an early C20th brothel, with image, with claims that it refers to a London establishment, when the prices are in dollars, the address is 22nd St, and the spellings are US rather than UK usage. It has been suggested that in fact it derives from a fairly recent piece of erotica in pastiche period style.

Some years ago, in an earlier incarnation of  H-Histsex, there was a brief discussion touching on a series of novels with 'Cremorne' in the title, alluding to the famous C19th pleasure gardens, which were said to be reprinted works of Victorian pornography (though other descriptions indicate that the setting is Edwardian). A few years later I received an email from the person who had anonymously authored these during the 1990s... They appear to still be in print and to have taken on possibly new life as ebooks. I don't think I've ever come across them but am now tempted to find one just to see how convincing they are for period.

There is a long-ish tradition of modern pastiches of period works being taken as authentic narratives: a classic instance is Magdalen King-Hall's Diary of A Young Lady of Fashion 1764-65 (by 'Cleone Knox'). In spite of fairly early contemporary exposure of the 'hoax', this work still occasionally crops up being described as an authentic C18th account.