Bringing together perspectives from the histories of medicine, sexuality, and the book, Sarah Bull presents the first study of how medical publications on sexual matters were made, promoted, and sold in Victorian Britain. Drawing on pamphlets, manuals, textbooks, periodicals, and more, this innovative book illustrates the free and unruly circulation of sexual information through a rapidly expanding publishing industry. Bull demonstrates how the ease with which print could be copied and claimed, recast and repurposed, presented persistent challenges to those seeking to position themselves as authorities over sexual knowledge at this pivotal moment. Medical publishers, practitioners, and activists embraced allegations of obscenity and censorship to promote ideas, contest authority, and consolidate emergent collective identities. Layer by layer, their actions helped create and sustain one of the most potent myths ever made about the Victorians: their sexual ignorance.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

‘This is revisionist history in the finest sense of the term. With far more depth than any previous study, it analyzes the business of publishing sexual literature in the nineteenth century. It challenges the myth of Victorian sexual ignorance, showing that erotic literature was far more available than we imagined. And it convincingly argues that Victorian censorship of sex was far from airtight.'

Jonathan Rose - Drew University

‘Bull skilfully connects Holywell Street pornographers, medical writers, and sex radicals in unexpected and wholly satisfying ways. She shows that Victorian medicine, sex, and obscenity were (dare I say it) often bedfellows.'

Mary E. Fissell - Johns Hopkins University

‘From the shady publishers of Holywell Street in the 1830s to the purveyors of ‘semi-scientific' pornography in the 1890s, we are taken on a journey through the world of sexual and medical publishing, with surprising findings which radically recast our understandings of the obscenity debates in the nineteenth century.'

Sally Shuttleworth - University of Oxford