Banned for more than 200 years, John Cleland’s erotic novel Fanny Hill has won its way into hearts and hands, bedrooms, ivory towers and classrooms across the globe.

Like many British novels of this era, Fanny Hill is composed in the form of letters written by the titular character, a married woman recounting her “loose” days in the sex trade. Fanny Hill is an English country girl orphaned at age 15, with no recourse but to “seek her fortune” in “London-town.” Desperately poor, the adolescent turns to prostitution as her only means of survival.

Although a common real-life scenario in 18th-century England, the graphic description of a woman enjoying illicit sex caused furor, mainly from the Church of England. On the other hand, newspapers and publishers took no issue with promoting the book. After all, sex sells – and author John Cleland certainly needed the money.

Composed from within the dingy depths of the Fleet Prison, Fanny Hill emerged from the debtor’s jail during Cleland's nine-month incarceration. When author and publisher were charged with “corrupting the King’s subjects” through obscene literature, Cleland excused his actions in the same manner as his controversial heroine – he pled poverty.

A single year post publication, the novel was banned in England in 1749.  Fanny Hill remained notorious as the first and most popular erotic fiction for decades, leaking from the English underground into the United States in 1821, where it was immediately banned.

This naughty novel was also blamed for two earthquakes (then deemed divine retribution) in England in the mid 1700’s. It has also been seized in Berlin, Germany and burned in Manchester, England, and in Japan.

Thanks to the American Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, Cleland’s elegantly written prose has gradually gained publication rights and overdue academic applause for its literary and historical value. The United States lifted its 145-year-old ban in 1966. The UK followed suit in 1970, 221 years after the initial ban was instated.

Critics now hail the book as on par with the work of French libertines. Cleland parodies Defoe (writer of Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe), references the Classics, and dazzles readers with an impressive array of eloquent euphemisms for genitalia.

Sadly, like so many avant garde artists, contemporaries overlooked John Cleland’s genius in his day. He continued to write for some 40 years, pursuing both fiction and journalism, in tame, fameless and forgettable fashion.

Cleland's Fanny Hill has since been translated for the silver screen 4 times, written into the popular comics The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and it served up as a romantic comedy off-Broadway in New York last year.
 
The full text of Fanny Hill is public domain and can be found online here.

-Natalee Blagden


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