SOURCE: "Questionable Figures: Swinburne's Poems and Ballads" in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 43-56.

In the following essay, Pease examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, maintaining that the debate was not only about pornography, but also about "middle- and upper-class male privilege in a society whose rigid class boundaries were threatening to give way to a feminized underclass."

How does a society decide to call one naked body art and another pornography? Clearly context and the set of expectations brought to viewing the body are determining features. But such a notion raises the question of what a society wants and comes to expect from its art. This question becomes particularly interesting when posed against the Victorian backdrop of Swinburne's release of Poems and Ballads. For on August 4, 1866, the literary establishment of London was roused to great excitement over Algernon Charles Swinburne's latest...