Hidden Porn?

[faustus]

The secret of Rochester being a bestseller - because, after all, Rochester's own poetry was so clean cut and innocent.



ETA: note this story, awfully close to the phrasing in the Grauniad - http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110402.html

Apparently Rochester wrote anti-porn. YMMV

Comments

[oursin]

'Rochester wrote smut' really isn't news.
It's not that long since Johnny Depp played him in a movie, silver nose and all.

[faustus]

'"The Cabinet is unusual," said Van Hensbergen, "because it shows us that people read pornographic writing directly alongside the verse of major poets. This raises interesting questions about what counts as literature and where the boundaries between high and low culture lie. These ideas were much more fluid in the 18th century than they are today."'

It's not clear that these pages "The Cabinet of Love" are just in this copy or all copies of this edition or all twenty editions - but the story at least seems to suggest Rochester didn't write porn.

The story has a link to http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/mar/03/books.artsandhumanities - maybe porn =/= bawdy?


And Graham Greene presumably didn't have any problems getting Lord Rochester's Monkey published in the 1930s, just after the publishers of an edition of Rochester weren't prosecuted... oh, hold up.


Incidentally, is "Blue Butter" an ointment supposed to cure/relieve gonorrhea etc? There's a Ted Sturgeon story with someone rubbing some on themselves.

[oursin]

'Blue butter' probably refers to calomel ointment, used as a syphilis prophylactic (I think it was blue)

Though I also recall various mentions of gentian violet in the treatment of gonorrhoea.