Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Allison Pease

Critical Essay by Allison Pease

SOURCE: Pease, Allison. “Victorian Obscenities: The New Reading Public, Pornography, and Swinburne's Sexual Aesthetic.” In Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, pp. 37-71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Pease traces the relationship between increasing levels of literacy in Victorian England and the production and regulation of pornography.

Edmund Gosse characterized the British poetry scene in the 1860s as a time of almost deadening quiescence. Tennyson had settled into the tasteful repose of his laureateship, Browning was squirreled away producing The Ring and the Book, and minor writers were remaining resolutely so.¹ Looking for the next great poetic genius, literary London began to place its hopes on one particularly promising young poet, a Pre-Raphaelite with a preternatural ear for melody and an uncommon breadth of reading. In May of 1866, Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, celebrated this promising talent at the Anniversary Dinner for the Royal...
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