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From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"In order to follow the traffic in obscenity in nineteenth-century British print culture, it would be useful to present some basic information about its circulation in the period. While the careers of Byron, Burton, and Beardsley will be familiar to many, the clandestine print communities with which their careers intersected will be less so. Except for underground catalogues, the occasional memoir, and the publications themselves, there is no record keeping on the trade in obscenity: little, especially the street material, has survived the test of time, library policy, or public tolerance. However, crucial, albeit piecemeal, information about this metropolitan print culture is found in legislation, parliamentary debates, trial documents, newspaper law reports, investigative journalism, and Home Office papers – the documents that flowed from the exercise of jurisprudence. Mendes, McCalman, and Sigel have done the most sustained bibliographical and archival research in this field. McCalman shows how a well-defined trade in obscene publications grew out of the postwar political radicalism and republican dissidence of the 1820s. Mendes, meanwhile, explores how book clubs and private subscription lists were central to up-market publishers. This research has helped identify the major underground publishers, from George Cannon, John Duncombe, and William Dugdale in the first half of the century to William Lazenby, Henry Judge, Harry Sidney Nichols, Charles Hirsh, and Charles Carrington in the latter half, when the London business shifted to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and especially Paris, where publishers such as Hirsch, Nichols, and Carrington ran a mail-order postal trade for its wealthier British clientele. But, many of the judicial papers and newspaper reports, some of which I am examining for the first time, reveal a far less scripted print culture and offer insight into how obscenity began to be understood in relation to its trafficking, informing fantasies and fears of relentless circulation" The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley
