CHAPTER FOUR: ‘THE RAKE’S REGRESS…
OR, MEMOIRS OF A YOUNG RAKEHELL…’
By the 1840s/1850s technologies were copulating in order to spawn new wonders. Photographic techniques were developed to a level allowing them to challenge the printed supremacy of the woodcut-image. Woodcut was a technology that had persisted since Albrecht Durer was painstakingly crafting relief-prints back in 1515, one of a rhinoceros, a rumoured animal he’d never seen but only imaged from traveller’s tales. Another of praying hands so real they’re photographically detailed.
It has been argued, at least since the fifteenth-century onwards, that artists would furtively utilise camera obscura or convex mirrors to trace the images that such optical devices projected. David Hockney has suggested that this ‘trade secret’ explains the shift among northern European artists towards greater naturalism and the lifelike detail found in Van Eyck and Caravaggio. Such optical gimmicks may well have assisted, rather than replaced the painters’ genius, yet they provide evidence that technical progress is very much part of a continuing interaction with art. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first modern photographic image in France in 1827. Then, during the summer of 1839 in Paris, Louis Jacques JM Daguerre’s crude ‘Daguerreotype’ fixed time into frozen images with its seven-second exposure-time, resulting in exquisite one-off pictures. He demonstrated to the French Academy how an image formed on a silvered metal plate covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in the presence of mercury vapour.
In his novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ (1969) Kurt Vonnegut writes about how, a brief two years later, in 1841, Daguerre’s assistant Andre Le Fevre was arrested in the Tuileries Gardens attempting to sell the first dirty photograph in history. Maybe it’s apocryphal, maybe Vonnegut made it up, but it must have happened something like that. The instant opportunistic application of new technology to the commerce of sex. With an equally predictable contra-argument, with Le Fevre pleading that because he’d portrayed the woman in the photo with a Shetland pony and flanked by Doric columns and a potted palm, he was posing a scene from classical mythology in which gods assume the form of beasts in order to copulate with mortal women. It was art, not filth. Neverthless, he was sentenced to six months.
The world was transforming itself. Photos are different from paintings. Paintings have been processed through the creative imagination of the artist. They don’t have a one-to-one relationship with reality. Photos have immediacy. The moment is fixed. The future in coming unhinged. Pristine, and perfect reproductions of life-images can be individually preserved for repeated perusal. The camera freezes society’s mixing process, its fluidity, its imperatives, mythologies, and absurdities, picking them out with its detached eye. Its skilled image-stealers revel in the fascinating connections they make, weaving pictures with history and memory into a beguiling tapestry. It is an art made out of light, the Victorians even call the earliest examples ‘sun pictures’. But it only functions through the interactivity of its opposite, the ‘dark room’, the alchemaic chamber where the images develop. A duality of light, and its attendant darkness, inextricably linked. Healthy sun, and spectral moon. Manichean alternatives. The lens exposes. And it also voyeurs. Yet it can be triggered by the contents of the most shuttered, secretive mind.
Then the 1850s brought glass-plate negatives allowing multiple duplicates of formerly single photos that could now be sold individually, or in sets on the Pokemon ‘Got To Collect Them All’ principle. The phenomenon was immediately adopted for ‘art studies’ – a flag of convenience that would continue at least into the mid-1960s, in a cunning guise to legitimise photos of fat girls with untrimmed pubic hair and natural breasts, in artless poses. Serving girls. Wenches. Whores. ‘Pinch-pricks’ and ‘fan-tails’. Whoever could be induced to pose. The Parisian ‘Lorettes’, New Women of loose – or liberated morals, named for the Notre-Dame de Lorette brasseries they frequent. Why do they do it? They are nameless faces and bodies. Lost in time. Yet they are still here. Still fresh. Unlike the tastefully manicured pubic mohawk-ridges of today’s spreads their tumultuous cascades of unruly pubescence run from the navel clear on down. ‘Portraits are the candle by which we read history’ wrote the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle. And these are portraits made by photographers with hands stained in silver nitrate.
Do photographs take us closer to what is ‘real’? Or do they shove us further away? Frederik Pohl says ‘most of the things we call ‘sexy’ are symbolic, you know, except perhaps an exhibitionist’s open fly.’ But we know even that is open to multiple levels of meaning.
Photography resides uneasily between the extremes of the human emotional spectrum. It possesses what Lincoln Kirstein calls a ‘tender cruelty’. It is a tender alchemy because it is a mechanical eye that enables us to celebrate and preserve forms of beauty we care for, and that we appreciate. While its cruelty lies in the tendency of the lens to also pick up on details that should perhaps remain unseen. Cecil Beaton accuses photography of being a ‘temporal medium’ because it freezes an aspect of time, while it instantly consigns those most prized moments to the past. We see the photos. They compassionately arrest time. They stop clocks. Isolate moments. End the inexorable processes of mortality. They pause the lives of participants… the lives of whom promptly resume once the shutter clicks, and reality ruthlessly accelerates as that freshness fades, as age advances on towards loss, decay – and eventual death.
So these fannies by gaslight are women who deserve our respect. They may be anonymous, but theirs are spontaneous portraits (were it not for those exposure-time restrictions), with surfaces that lead the voyeuristic viewer inwards, into intriguing glimpses of their lost lives. For theirs is an uncontrived, unposed beauty frozen a century-and-more ago onto film, and so immortalised long after their subjects became victims of time’s ravages and gravity’s saggages. They may be vaguely remembered somewhere by someone as their aged great-grandmother, yet we can still enjoy their ageless stay-fresh beauty, their bright eyes gazing defiantly out at the viewer, challenging us to deny their right to the freedom of their bodies, and boldly defying the restrictive preconceptions of their era.
While ‘scientific’ anthropologists snap undraped native peoples – a practice legitimatised when ‘National Geographic’ published its first bare-breasted photo in its November 1896 issue, and continued into the lure of the exotica during my grubby schooldays. Highjacked by quasi-science intended to assemble photographic evidence ‘proving’ absurd racial theories, these are made self-evidently ridiculous by the proud dignity and natural beauty of their subjects, who shame the intrusive Victorian prurience hiding behind the lens.
Technologies were copulating in order to spawn new wonders. The Autochrome colour photography technique, devised by the Lumiére brothers, is a process derived from potatoes. With the introduction of half-tone print reproduction in 1880, photographic images could be mass-produced. Those engines of change were soon transforming every aspect of individual lives. And just as the paradigm-shift of e-based cyber-culture began causing a third-wave communications revolution towards the end the twentieth century, so the tectonics of all those early years culminated in turn-of-the-century advances in printing techniques that were resulting in better-finished copies of periodicals being produced at much greater speeds. And as mass-production photography from rolls of nitrate film allied to lithographic printing it opened up limitless possibilities. Black-ink-on-white-paper printing is easy. Most newspapers were black-on-white up until the end of the twentieth century, the first web-offset mass production attempts at four-colour register resulted in half-tone print that needed 4D-glasses to make sense of it…
But wait – why do we need a history of print technology in a porn-overview? Because technology defines its leading edge. It makes it possible. Because ‘science and prurience proceed hand in hand.’ Spot-colour, in red – or magenta, was an easy addition to the greyish halftone world of newsprint, particularly if it was not too closely registered to the black, hence the term ‘red-top’. Blue – or cyan, too. Yellow was the problem. In what is termed CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow + black) four-colour printing, an understanding of primary, secondary and tertiary colours is necessary. Plus a pigment-based ink sufficiently efficient to carry them. Without yellow, there can be no greens or oranges. Yet printing the spectrum’s missing link proved to be a monumental technical task, with the presses deforming its hue into a sickly ghost-shade.
Spurred by a bitter circulation battle with the rival Randolph Hearst-owned ‘Journal’, the New York ‘World’, a paper owned by Joseph Pulitzer, produced an experimental four-colour page in 1893. Three years later its engraving foreman Charles Saalburgh perfected the process further, using it to produce a humorous illustration for the 16 February 1896 issue. The success of the format, and its widespread adoption across other popular titles, soon earned the epithet ‘Yellow Press’. It’s probably around this time that the print-erotica trade also diversified, went underground, and took on international dimensions, expanding from rich collectors of ‘erotomane’, to the prurient proletariat, speeded by the expansion of Postal Services. And was inevitably harassed by the vigilance of police attentions. Themes that would continue to interact throughout the coming decades.
Time-periods seldom neatly conform to precise year or decade-frames, or to the behavioural patterns that are expected of them. Victorians, according to preconception, were all about straight-laced starch, unsmiling repression, and no emotions. That’s true… up to a point. Philosopher Michel Foucault suggests they weren’t as repressed as we suppose, merely that by seeing them in that way makes us feel more liberated and smugly progressive about ourselves. But even the queen who gave the era its designation was initially anything but repressed, and behind closed doors was well-able to revel in her sexuality. Despite her passion-killing diet of roast beef, ice-cream and suet puddings, her infatuations extended to Lord Melbourne – an association that led to the infamous ‘Crisis of the Bed Chamber’, and her Scots adviser John Brown. But both extremes characterise her marriage to Prince Albert – at first fiercely positive in that she enjoyed a vigorous sex-life with him, until her equally intense bereavement cast the national shadow we now associate with dour ‘Victorian’ qualities, which led to a healthy growth in the republican movement.
But wherever there’s conformity, thankfully, there are rebellious misfits too, and even here there was more non-conformity than we sometimes assume. For this was also the time that Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton brought ‘The Kama Sutra’ sex guide to London. Initially, twenty-one year-old Burton had gone to work in India, during the height of the British Raj. A natural outsider he was soon bored and stifled by the cosy insularity of the English émigré community there, and horrified by the casual cruelties they inflicted on the people they governed. Looking beyond the teeming poverty and squalor, he instead found himself drawn into what he saw as the exotically sensual and less inhibited Indian society all around him. Fascinated, he ‘went native’ going places an officer and a gentlemen was not expected to go. In 1845, in the Sind province he assumed the identity of ‘Abdullah’, a travelling cloth merchant, a guise that enabled him to mix freely with the locals. In Karachi he non-judgementally frequented boy and eunuch brothels, under the pretext of carrying out surveys for the authorities. In his zeal for their more open sexual culture, he contracted malaria, went to Goa to study Sufi, and visited the erotic Hindu carvings of Elephanta Island.
It was while seeking out Hindu manuscripts that he discovered ‘The Kama Sutra’, believed to have been written by philosopher Vatsyayana in the third-century, not only a sex-manual but a life-style guide too, what novelist Hanif Kureishi calls ‘a carnival of desire and mayhem’. Returning to England he commenced its translation in 1876, and published the work anonymously in 1883. At odds with prevailing Victorian prudery and hypocrisy – which considered it licentious and filthy, the very gateway to damnation, he argued in favour of female pleasure through erotic foreplay, advising ‘as dough is prepared for baking’ so a woman must be prepared for sex.
He was a prolific writer, and other books duly followed, including ‘The Arabian Nights: The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night’ (1885) and ‘The Perfumed Garden Of Sensual Delight’ (1886). But the mysteries of the orient continued to attract him, and he returned east in 1853 intent on another feat of courage and deception, by completing the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. In Egypt he perfected a disguise that would enable him to do so, even circumcising himself to complete its authenticity. Later, back in London he married Isobel in 1861, but she lacked sympathy with his aims, and burnt many of his valuable manuscripts after his death in 1890 to ‘protect their respectability’. Despite her insensitive efforts, his most famous work retained its suppressed illegal underground status clear through until its republication in 1963, when ‘The Kama Sutra’ achieved renewed notoriety by introducing its liberalising possibilities to a new generation of receptive readers – although it’s been estimated it would take the average couple three-and-a-half years to work their way through every one of the 529 copulatory positions it describes!
There was a yearning to escape the stultifying straightjacket of Victorian morality, Richard Burton’s example of openness to exoticism was hardly unique. The romantic fashion for the east in art – going back to Byron’s orientalism in ‘Childe Harold’, and popularised at least in part by Burton’s writing, uses images of seraglios and harems as excuses for portraying languid opulently-jewelled nudity. In a form of fevered appropriation spinning only what cultural elements they select to suit their daydream whims, the artists show not the enslavement or suppression of the concubines, but a soft-focus Sapphic realm of indulgent leisure where women are subject to the acquisitive male gaze, where their only purpose is to be beautiful – and sexually available.
Although the more liberal west now views the Islamic world as an austere regime of fundamentalist repression, for straight-laced Victorians the opposite seemed true. The fact that the word ‘seraglio’ was derived from ‘cage’, and that those within, often supervised by cruelly mutilated eunuchs, had no choice in their confinement, meant less to them than the visions it conjured. Géròme Jean-Léon’s painting ‘Harem Pool’ lingers on naked prettification with female bodies strewn decorously around the fountain, while the subject of Paul Desiré Trouillebert’s ‘The Harem Servant’ is portrayed attractively topless, projecting the artist’s lavish fantasies onto the forbidden decadence of the Ottoman Empire. It’s an enticement that – oddly, persists in woman’s fantasy, spilling over into the Rudolph Valentino ‘Sheik’ soft-rape fantasies, and Anne Colon’s ‘Angelique & The Sultan’ (1960) novel-series in which the strong-willed heroine is first sold as a slave, then presented as a gift to Mulay Ismail, Sultan of Morocco, and imprisoned in his harem.
Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) was the next effete decadent, with a link back to de Sade, and to Charles Baudelaire (through his 1862 essay championing ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’). The poet-inventor of the ‘roundel’ form, his posthumously-published novel ‘Lesbia Brandon’ describes ‘Herbert’ being regularly and pleasurably beaten by his tutor. Although the prurient reader is rather spoiled for choice when seeking references to flagellation in Swinburne’s writings – a dedicated sadomasochist, his delight in caning flowered when he was still an Eton schoolboy.
Poet Arthur Rimbaud described his function in ‘A Season In Hell (Une Saison En Enfer)’ (1873) as ‘I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.’ While Charles Pierre Baudelaire knew everything there was to know about forbidden pleasures. For him ‘the unique, supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing wrong.’ Happiness is something earned. Pleasures are always stolen and fleeting. Selfish pleasure creates consequences. It’s where the moral stuff begins. And it was not a moral time.
The Industrial Revolution was a turning point for civilisation, but not necessarily for the better. Mass productivity went hand-in-hand with mass poverty. Soaring profits matched soaring prostitution. One estimate puts sex-workers at eighty-thousand in London alone. And increasing mechanisation sat alongside increasing child mortality. Seven angry young men found this social injustice too much to take. And in 1848, their Victorian blood boiling, they did what many groups of enraged twenty-somethings have done. They created art. Not the art of the murky, mechanised world around them, but one that was fading into hazy memory. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Milais crafted alternate worlds of outstanding beauty and unerring moral purpose filled with dazzling colours and near-photographic detail. Edward Burne-Jones offered a refuge from soiled Victorian reality. In the end, the most compelling works of the industrial age were produced by hand, not machine.
The first half of the 1890s was the era of the effete aesthete, and their beautifully indulgent ‘Yellow Book’ – the first issue published by Elkin Matthews & John Lane in April 1894, with a lavish Aubrey Beardsley cover. ‘Yellow’ itself carried daringly dangerous implications, because this was the colour of daringly dubious French novels. The precociously talented pale young Beardsley also designed the cover for no.2 (July 1894), and contributed interior art for “La Dame Aux Camelias” and a sketch of the “The Wagnerites” theatre-audience watching ‘Tristan Und Isolde’ for no.3 (October 1894). ‘Yellow Book IV’ (January 1895) includes Beardsley’s charming ‘The Mystery Of the Rose Garden’, with no.5 following in April. ‘Wind In The Willows’ author Kenneth Grahame was an early-contributer, with a series of non-erotic essays, including the now-rare “The Headswoman” (1894). Although nervous publisher John Lane promptly dropped Beardsley in response to the Oscar Wilde scandal, the book continued as a plush quarterly until no.13 (April 1897).
It was followed by its even more gorgeously fin-de-sickle successor ‘The Savoy’ – which survived for eight ultra-decadent issues from January to December 1896. This time, Leonard Smithers was the publisher, a libertine and pornographer who also practiced as a book-dealer, with catalogues containing rare erotic works and unique items, including books bound in human skin. With typically perceptive wit Oscar Wilde described him as ‘clean-shaven, as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose god is Literature.’ To Oscar, Smithers was ‘wasted and pale – not with poetry, but with poets who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women, little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion and a dear fellow…’
In league with Arthur Symons – author of ‘The Symbolist Movement In Literature’ (1899), Smithers was intent on creating a progressive successor to ‘The Yellow Book’. Symons was to be editor. He rescued Aubrey Beardsley – who had been dropped from ‘The Yellow Book’ the moment the Wilde scandal broke. Unconcerned, or perhaps even titillated by the affair, Symons recruited Beardsley as art editor. It was Beardsley who chose the new magazine’s name – borrowing it from the new London hotel to suggest both modernity and opulence. Other contemporary magazines had names like ‘Strand’ and ‘Pall Mall’, and this new title would give the impression of a grand and select location away from the main thoroughfare.
Ironically, for such a much-bowdlerised artist, even when surrounded by supposed friends and literary allies, Beardsley was unable to avoid censorship. The cover he prepared for the launch issue of ‘Savoy’ (January 1896) was to have shown a naked ‘putto’ cherub about to piss on a copy of ‘The Yellow Book’. Such an irreverently playful detail was one step too far for contributor George Moore, who complained to Symons. So ‘The Yellow Book’ had to be deleted, and the offending pert genital detail had to be doctored before publication was deemed possible. The second issue of the ‘Illustrated Monthly’ (April 1896), just as lavish, cost just 2s 6d for which the purchaser got not only Beardsley’s outrageous elongations and outré erotic fantasies but the dark poetic imaginings of Paul Verlaine too.
As Beardsley, his acolytes and cronies descended into the rarified atmosphere of an orchidaceous bohemian underworld, to some there was the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by the self-destructive indulgencies of their flirtations with the artistic dark-side. ‘The grotesque is the only alternative to insipid commonplace’ Beardsley declared, as he executed his art by night, in the concentrated illumination-pools cast by two tall candlesticks, the light of which he always prefered to that of crude gas lamps. The extravagantly talented twenty-year old ‘Dandy Of The Grotesque’ exulted in the idea that ‘beyond me, the rage of artistic London… I have fortune at my foot.’ Later issues include WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohn. ‘Savoy no.3’ (July 1896) features Beardsley’s poem “The Ballad Of A Barber”, and for no.7 (November 1896) he translated the Catullus poem “Carmen CI”. Beardsley provides all the covers, plus numerous lavishly embellished interior illustrations. Some of his lushly erotic line-drawn art fantasias accompany extracts from his unfinished erotic novel “Under The Hill” across the first two books (originally titled ‘The Story Of Venus & Tannhauser’). Each issue was a succulent feast of elegantly outré outrage and sophisticated invention, championing dangerously adventurous flirtations both literary and arty, ‘Savoy’ was a beacon that would illuminate all subsequent risqué publishing ventures.
A select aware audience appreciated and celebrated the assured draughtsmanship and luxuriant invention. A larger public indulged in its regular tryst of titillation and disapproval. While the reputations of the magazine’s creators – amplified by their links with the old sybarite Oscar Wilde, ensured that the respectable family firm of WH Smith’s would have no truck with such a reprehensible journal. After all, even what is now considered the classic literature of “A Picture Of Dorian Gray” had hit problems when first published in ‘Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine’ (June 1890). Already heavily bowdlerised by editor JM Stoddart it still provoked outrage.
The ‘Daily Chronicle’ first launched into the ‘Dorian Gray’ fantasy as ‘a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents,’ then going on to detect the ‘mephitic odour of moral and spiritual putrefaction.’ Yet the subsequently much-imitated, but seldom equalled Dandified Bohemianism it represents survived at least until Wilde’s scandalous trial. In his own detailed account of the events, written in prison and published as ‘De Profundis’, Wilde tells his own tale. Although tastefully edited by his literary executor, Robert Ross, for its initial publication in 1905, a more honestly explicit version appeared in 1949 in which Wilde forsees the germ of his own destruction in his assocation with Lord Alfred Douglas. ‘I discern in all our relations not Destiny merely, but Doom… I feel sometimes as if you had been merely a puppet worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue.’
His downfall came at the peak of his fame, by initiating legal action against the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. ‘A kiss may ruin a human life’ he cautions. When Oscar learned he was to be pitted against defence counsel Edward Carson – his old Trinity rival, he remarked ‘no doubt he will pursue his case with all the added bitterness of an old friend.’ He wasn’t wrong. Wilde already knew the dangerous power of what he termed ‘feasting with panthers’, those sessions with rough-trade working-class youths, but ‘every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us… the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ And Carson tracks down a long line of rent-boys willing to testify that he’d yielded to their temptation.
The case imploded, with criminal charges rapidly following. Wilde’s dramatic demise – ‘Reading Goal’, and Paris exile, forced the premature closure of an era with the ‘sudden shock (of) the prison-clock.’ Beardsley died of a haemorrhage, aged just twenty-five, after begging publisher Leonard Smithers ‘by all that is holy’ to destroy all his ‘bad’ and ‘obscene’ drawings. Thankfully Smithers did nothing of the sort, preserving Beardsley’s perverse brilliance to shock and delight us into the present day. Yet, just across the channel – through those same turn-of-the-century 1890s, ‘Le Frisson’ was already utilising the new half-tone technology to thrill its readers with the indecency of intimate revelations. Bodies both real, and illusory.
Technologies were copulating in order to spawn new wonders. For those with a lurid interest in the life-styles of the rich and the decadent, ‘The Illustrated Police News’ (dated Saturday 4 May 1865) was graced by a cover-splash portraying ‘Closing Scenes At The Old Bailey Trial Of Oscar Wilde’. For the price of a single penny the big central-spread had cartoon-frame oval inserts with artist-impressions of ‘Oscar Wilde as Prisoner’ and ‘The Sale Of Oscar Wilde’s Effects’. While across the Atlantic, the impact of the similarly strangely titled ‘National Police Gazette’, was grabbing readership figures that between the years 1845 and 1932, few popular weeklies could equal. Shock-Horror style ‘True Crime Exposés’ have always exerted their own grisly attractions. Think Fred & Rosemary West. Think Peter Sutcliffe. They are hardly unique in that respect. The vicarious thrill of atrocity, spiced with the forbidden lure of degenerate sexual deviancy. Legitimised by the serio-gloss of current social relevance. A combination as irresistible then as it is now.
The ‘Gazette’ was widely distributed in seedy hotels and saloons, but became most notorious as the ‘barbershop bible’ due its ready availability in such bastions of masculinity. Several other magazines were around at the same time trying to imitate and compete with its peak weekly circulation of 500,000 in the 1880s and 1890s, but none came close. Some of the rival magazines were ‘Last Sensation’, ‘Day’s Doings’, ‘Fox’s Illustrated Week’s Doing’ (the ‘spiciest dramatic and best story-paper in America’), and ‘Stetson’s Dime Illustrated’. Extending its brief the ‘Illustrated Day’s Doings and Sporting World’ offered the cavortings of ‘fly gothamites’ and ‘frisky females’ to its titillated readership in 1885.
But none could match the mystique and grisly allure of ‘National Police Gazette’. Although the gazette’s most active publishing years cover 1845 to 1920, even into the middle of the twentieth century it was still there, with such exclusives as a ‘Hitler is Alive’ cover-story into the 1950s. But its history is best seen in two distinct phases – before and after 1876. The former represents the period of its truly crusading – albeit sensational journalism. The latter – reflected in its switch from white to bright blue paper – is characterized by the addition of highly illustrated, purely exploitative stories of crime, sexual offences, violence, impropriety, debauchery, vulgarity, brothels, and the dregs of urban night life. This lusty list of subject areas is rounded out in 1879, when it begins adding sports – such as boxing, and calling itself ‘the leading illustrated sporting journal in the world.’
The ‘Gazette’ always included pictures (sometimes tied into the stories) of pretty actresses, dazzling burlesque queens and dancers in tights. These become – one could say, the official pin-ups of the day, though that term would not to be invented for many decades. In ‘The Right To Privacy’, a much-quoted legal review published 15 December 1890, Warren & Brandeis noted that ‘the press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and decency. Gossip… has become a trade.’
Around the same time, in London, the first issue of ‘The News Of The World’ appeared – 1 October 1843. It would survive on pretty much the same diet of mild titillation and salacious stories, until its abrupt termination on 10 July 2011, after 8,674 issues, due to a phone-hacking scandal. Its tone only changed to reflect the temper of the times. George Orwell commented on its presence as part of Sunday morning routine. As much loathed as it was loved. In the 1950s it specialised in revelations about the transgressions of vicars, largely because church policy forbade them from suing.
Yet I persist in believing that tolerance is no bad thing.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON