Porn Studies, 2014

Vol. 1, No. 4, 402405, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2014.947753

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Digital archives and the history of pornography
One of the most significant challenges that historians of pornography face is locating
and accessing sufficient primary material. Due to the joint forces of censorship and
the passage of time, only a small proportion of literary and visual materials produced
for the purposes of erotic entertainment before 1900 survive, scattered among
collections across the globe. Acquiring knowledge of and access to the contents of
private collections can be difficult, and there are few collections dedicated to such
works in public institutions. Examining how pornography was produced, regulated,
and consumed in the past is equally fraught because of the state of the historical
record. In the British context, for instance, few readers documented their consumption of obscene materials, making it difficult to assess how readers experienced them
in the past (Sigel 2002, 78). Meanwhile, court records of obscenity trials and
government reports on the pornography trade are often incomplete, and producers
actively worked against leaving traces of their activities (Sigel 2002, 6). These factors
made pornography difficult to study, as the Victorian bibliographer Henry Spencer
Ashbee famously lamented, even for well-connected contemporary scholars (Fraxi
[1877] 1962, xxviixxix). It is therefore necessary for historians of pornography to
become archival magpies, seizing on any document that might shed light on the
details of its authorship, material production, and consumption in the past.
Digital technologies offer new opportunities to make the most of the extant
historical record by making it easier to locate, organize, and share archival documents
pertaining to pornographys production and consumption. The recent development of
digitized full-text newspaper databases, for instance, has tremendously expanded
access to little-studied primary material on the trade in nineteenth-century Britain by
making it possible for scholars around the world to search through dozens of
historical newspapers at a time. My own research on the Victorian pornography trade
has relied strongly on materials gathered through such database searches in
conjunction with traditional archival research. Using Gale Cengages 19th Century
British Library Newspapers and 19th Century UK Periodicals full-text databases,1
I discovered hundreds of advertisements that the pornographer William Dugdale
(18001868) issued between the early 1830s and the mid 1860s in political, sporting,
and theatrical periodicals such as the Northern Star and National Trades Journal,
Bells Life in London, and the Era. I also located advertisements for sexually explicit
books and images issued by several of Dugdales competitors in the same periodicals.
At first glance, these advertisements do not seem particularly informative. They
usually begin with a brief headline indicating items for sale, which may be specific
(Just published Memoirs of Harriette Wilson!; Smith 1839) or general (Books,
Songs, Tales, Prints; Wilson 1857). The headline is followed by a spare list of items
for sale, an address where they might be purchased in person or through the post,
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and the name (or, more often, pseudonym) of the seller. But these short notices
considerably enhance our knowledge of pornographys history in several ways. At a
basic level, they provide a larger body of evidence as to where, when, and how
different pornographers ran their businesses in the nineteenth century and reached
British customers. Their numbers confirm, for instance, that many dealers businesses
were quite lucrative. Newspaper advertising was expensive, particularly between 1836
and 1853, when the cheapest advertisement available for purchase in Era (To
Advertisers 1853), for example, cost far more than many of the books that Dugdale
advertised in the paper. Such dealers would have needed to draw on substantial
revenue to support the costs of issuing a dozen or more advertisements per week, as
Dugdale and several of his competitors did. That these advertisements appeared in
widely circulating, affordable periodicals also demonstrates that it was relatively easy
for a broad range of readers to seek out erotic entertainment, challenging views of
pornography as a luxury available only to wealthy men in the nineteenth century.
Additionally, these advertisements confirm the blurriness of the lines between
pornography and legitimate reading material in the period through their routine coadvertisement of bawdy songbooks, medical books, and popular fiction alongside
highly explicit books and images. Their analysis also represents an exciting new way
for scholars to determine the popularity and longevity of specific works with greater
accuracy, and track when sexually explicit representations became available to large
audiences in new media such as photography more precisely.
Although full-text databases offer a useful new method of undertaking historical
research, they do have significant shortcomings. As Charles Upchurch has recently
reminded historians, searches can produce misleading results because full-text
databases do not always recognize text accurately. Methods such as fuzzy searching
are often built into such databases to compensate for OCR technologys failures, but
they do so less than perfectly (Upchurch 2012, 92). The search functions that allow
us to locate material within these databases are also not intuitive, presenting another
challenge to the researcher: he or she must know what terms are likely to appear in
the documents sought in order to locate them successfully (Upchurch 2012, 9598).
My own research using full-text databases stalled initially because searches for
pornographers previously known addresses, aliases, and the titles of several wellknown pornographic works turned up either very few useful results or many
thousands of hits that would have taken weeks to sift through. I discovered only after
lengthy experimentation that searches for two works that predated the nineteenth
century, John Clelands novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) and the
sexual health manual Aristotles Masterpiece (Anon. 1684), could reliably locate
significant numbers of mid-Victorian pornographers advertisements since they
reprinted these works routinely. Once I located enough advertisements, I could
extrapolate their language to my searches and discover new advertisements that did
not list editions of Clelands Memoirs or Aristotles Masterpiece for sale.
The time-consuming labour involved in locating such primary materials
whether via digital databases or within traditional archival collections is replicated
all too frequently. Historians tend to cite only representative primary documents in
their publications, and rarely describe the full body of materials examined, or how to
locate them. Bibliographies of erotic materials fill some of these informational gaps.
Their necessarily narrow focus on particular periods, national contexts, publishers,
or institutional collections, their small numbers, and the expenses involved in

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producing updated editions, however, mean that a large volume of information

about the extant historical record still travels, slowly and unevenly, through word of
mouth. The labour involved in researching pornographys past could be significantly
reduced if scholars pooled information about where and how to find extant primary
sources after publishing work based on their findings. Individual websites, such as
Sheryl Straights The Erotica Bibliophile2 and Patrick Kearneys Scissors and Paste
Bibliographies3 represent one way in which many scholars have already begun to
share such information. But such websites are not peer reviewed, and not all scholars
are willing to devote time to maintaining an individual site. A promising alternative
is a project like the Reading Experience Database,4 housed by the English
Department of the Open University, which allows scholars to crowdsource material,
making it easier to share and locate primary materials that document the experience
of reading in Britains past. Scholars examining other aspects of media history are,
through organizations such as the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading
and Publishing,5 currently discussing ways to reconstruct lost publishers archives
online collaboratively, using similar models. Such projects certainly present their
own challenges, as they require cooperation not just from scholars but also from
private collectors, authors estates, public institutions, and corporations. Because of
their potential to expand the known field of resources and reduce the time taken to
find them, however, the rewards of building digital spaces where we can work
together to advance our knowledge of pornographys history could be considerable.
The recent establishment of Porn Studies, which seeks to bring scholars studying
pornography and its contexts into closer conversation with one another, should
prompt us to consider how we might begin to do so.

Notes
1. See http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/19th-century-british-library-news
papers.aspx and http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/19th-century-uk-per
iodicals-parts-1-and-2.aspx
2. See http://eroticabibliophile.com. Accessed July 7, 2014.
3. See http://scissors-and-paste.net. Accessed July 7, 2014.
4. See http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/. Accessed July 7, 2014.
5. See http://www.sharpweb.org. Accessed July 7, 2014.

References
Anon. 1684. Aristotles [sic] Master-piece, or, The Secrets of Generation Displayed. London:
J. How.
Cleland, John. 1748. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Vol. 1. London: Fenton.
Fraxi, Pisanus [Henry Spencer Ashbee]. [1877] 1962. Index Librorum Prohibitorum. London:
Jack Brussel.
Sigel, Lisa. 2002. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 18151914.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers.
Smith, Henry [William Dugdale]. 1839. Just published Memoirs of Harriette Wilson!
The Satirist; or, The Censor of the Times, August 4. 19th Century UK Periodicals, Gale
Cengage Learning. Accessed July 23, 2013. http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?recor
dID=NCBP1012-00208-0008-F&contentSet=NCUP&banner=53e14a57&digest=4adde27ac
16c8f83cd3f7fe71d25bece&scale=0.33&crop=36+67+1236+1810.
To Advertisers. 1853. Era, November 20. 19th Century British Library Newspapers, Gale
Cengage Learning. Accessed July 23, 2013. http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?record
ID=WO1_ERLN_1853_11_20-0008-F&contentSet=UBER2&banner=53e14865&digest=8f

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04c0c7e9e30daca99a51609a832109&highlight=00ff00+0.5+387+261+352+57&scale=0.33&
crop=25+74+282+869.
Upchurch, Charles. 2012. Full-text Databases and Historical Research: Cautionary Results
from a Ten-year Study. Journal of Social History 46 (1): 89105.
Wilson, John [William Dugdale]. 1857. Books, Songs, Tales, Prints. Era, July 12.
19th Century British Library Newspapers, Gale Cengage Learning. Accessed July 23, 2013.
http://callisto.ggsrv.com/imgsrv/Fetch?recordID=WO1_ERLN_1857_07_12-0002-F&content
Set=UBER2&banner=53e150f2&digest=46318b8d70adf4c6671194a77d492811&scale=0.33&
crop=9+72+1161+1751.

Sarah Bull
Simon Fraser University, Canada