Henry Spencer Ashbee
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Nature has produced some strange abortions, both physical and moral, but probably never a greater mental monstrosity than Sade. Sprung from a stock which was most pure and honorable, reared and educated with the greatest care and simplicity, this mental monster burst forth suddenly, as it were without apparent cause, and became at once the most depraved libertine, the cruellest debauchee, the lewdest writer, and the most persistent propagator of immorality the world ever saw." "Better were it that such literature [erotic literature] did not exist. I consider it pernicious and hurtful to the immature but at the same time I hold that, in certain circumstances, its study is necessary, if not beneficial." -- Catena Librorum Tacendorum |
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Henry Spencer Ashbee (21 April 1834 – 29 July 1900) was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer, notorious for his massive, clandestine three volume bibliography of erotic literature written under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi. His Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the first of his trilogy on erotic literature was privately printed in London in 1877. He is also presumed to be the author of My Secret Life.
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Life
Ashbee was born in Southwark, London, and was married in Hamburg, Germany in 1862. He was by occupation a textile trader. He travelled extensively during his life, including Europe, Japan, and San Francisco, collaborating with Alexander Graham on Travels in Tunisia, published in 1887. He was an avid book collector, with perhaps the world's most extensive collections of Cervantes, and erotica.
Ashbee was a part of a loose intellectual fraternity of English gentlemen who discussed sexual matters with a freedom that was at odds with Victorian mores; this fraternity included Richard Francis Burton, Richard Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne, Frederick Hankey and others. He also amassed thousands of volumes of pornography in several languages. He wrote on sex under the pseudonyms "Fraxinus" (Ash) and "Apis" (Bee), and sometimes combined them as "Pisanus Fraxi".
Ashbee's will left his entire collection to the British Museum, with the condition that the erotic works had to be accepted along with the conventional items. Because the trustees wanted the materials related to Cervantes, the decided to accept the bequest. The trustees exploited a loophole to destroy some of the erotica, although some of the works are in the British Museum, including a work by William Simpson Potter.
He was the father of the designer Charles Robert Ashbee.
Books
Ashbee's most famous works were his three bibliographies of erotic works:
- Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1877. (The name is a reference to the Catholic Church's list of banned books "Index Librorum Prohibitorum").
- Centuria Librorum Absconditorum: being Notes Bio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1879.
- Catena Librorum Tacendorum: being Notes Bio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London, privately printed, 1885
My Secret Life
Ashbee is also suspected to be "Walter", the author of My Secret Life, a lengthy sexual memoir of a Victorian gentleman. Gershon Legman was the first to link "Walter" and Ashbee in his introduction to the 1962 reprints of Ashbee's bibliographies; the 1966 Grove Press edition of My Secret Life included an expanded version of that essay.
Influences
A character based on him is central to Sarah Waters's award-winning novel Fingersmith: a man obsessively collecting and indexing pornography and works about human sexuality, in an atmosphere of oppressive Victorian hypocrisy.
References
- The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee by Ian Gibson, Cambridge, MA: Da Capa, 2001 (ISBN 0-571-19619-5)
- Henry Spencer Ashbee, also known as "Pisanus Fraxi", Index of Forbidden Books (written 1880s as Index Librorum Prohibitorum), London: Sphere, 1969.
