Fanny Hill

Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland

The first pornographic novel in England, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, later published under the title of Fanny Hill, is an important mark in English literary history. It was first published in 1748 and 1749, consisting of two parts. The novel is written in the first person singular from the point of view of the main character, Fanny Hill, a prostitute in the 18th century. Its explicit sex scenes, written with rich details, caused great furore at the time, even sending its author to prison for a while (more on that in the section About the novel).

Content

First Part (published 1748)

When Fanny Hill is orphaned at the age of fifteen, she goes to London to attain a post as servant. At the Intelligence Office she meets Mrs. Brown, who (as it turns out) is running a brothel, and offers the girl a job in her house. Fanny, an innocent girl, is first oblivious to where she ended up; her clothes and the little money she had are taken from her and she is put in fancy and sexy clothes to appeal to prosperous suitors. The rather unappealing Mr. Crofts is willing to pay a great sum for her virginity; just what Mrs. Brown had hoped for when picking Fanny up. Due to him ejaculating before the act can even commence, Fanny manages to keep her virginity. However, during her stay in the brothel, she becomes acquainted with the sexual act and physical pleasure through experience (with the bi-or homosexual Phoebe) and especially through watching others engage in it. She elopes with a youth called Charles who falls in love with her and she becomes his private mistress. Charles is the only man she will ever love, even though one day he doesn’t come back to the place he had rented for her. After eight months of almost daily visits from Charles Fanny becomes pregnant. Charles does not return to her one day and only through her landlady does she find out that his father found out about their (in his eyes unfit) relationship and all but abducted Charles to the South Seas to make his own fortune there. Grief-stricken about the loss of her love, Fanny miscarries and falls ill, only surviving through the constant nursing of Mrs. Jones, her landlady. Mrs. Jones, however, is another shrewd older woman like Mrs. Brown, who cares for Fanny only to make the girl obedient to her and healthy again so she will get the rent she missed over those weeks. She sets Fanny up with Mr. H. (his full name is never mentioned), who pays all of the debts Fanny has with Mrs. Jones. Fanny now considers herself “bought” (80) and him as her new “master” (81), so he is able to rape her without meeting any resistance (also, she is still too numb inside because of the heart ache Charles caused her). She goes on to live rather comfortably as his private mistress for a while. Though she isn’t emotionally attached to him, she gets jealous when she catches him with a servant girl and wants to pay him back by seducing Will, a page of his. After Mr. H. finds out about Fanny’s infidelity, he gives her money and sends her away.

Part Two (published 1749)

Fanny comes to live in the house of Mrs. Cole, who is of a very different breed to Mrs. Brown though still the head of a “House of Pleasure”. Here, Fanny becomes part of family consisting of Mrs. Cole and three young women of the same profession as Fanny. However, things run very differently in this house: for one, the brothel is disguised as a millinery shop in which all of the girls work during the day to keep the façade and secondly, the girls have to consent to pleasure the men who Mrs. Cole picks for them. Here, Fanny lives through a variety of sexual (and non-sexual) encounters: twice she is made to make the men believe she is still a virgin, one man only wants to comb her luxurious hair, sadomasochistic action and group sex. This part of the Memoirs is interrupted by a long passage in which the other girls of the house report on how they lost their maidenhead (121 ff.). The most shocking scene to the 18th-century readers, however, was the act of sodomy (188) that Fanny witnesses in a public house through a peep-hole. After Fanny leaves Mrs. Cole’s house, she goes to live by herself, as she has accumulated enough money to live from for a while “under the character of a young gentlewoman whose husband was gone to sea” (204) in Mary-le-bone. Here, on a fine spring morning during a walk, she meets her next ‘protégé’, a sickly bachelor of over sixty years of age (though she stresses the point that he looked no one day older than forty-five) with a vast fortune due to his merchant activities in his younger years. They have less than a year together before he passes away, leaving her all of his possessions. Fanny, not yet nineteen years old, is now an independent woman with a considerable fortune. It so happens that the story also has a “happy ending” to it, another thing that irritated the readership of the time: Fanny and Charles re-unite. He was unlucky in the South Seas and returned to England penniless. As Fanny has enough money to support a modest lifestyle for both of them and never stopped loving Charles in the first place, after all her experiences and adventures, she ends up in the arms and life of her first lover.

About the novel

Erotic writings were already circulating in France and Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the genre got to Britain fairly late and never took the liberties the continental erotica took in regard to explicitness, combination of sexual partners and sexual practices. Even though there already was erotic literature on the English market by 1748, Cleland’s was the first to be written in the form of a novel. The reason he went to prison for it is, however, not the innovative literary form he put his story in, but two facts about the novel that were not acceptable to the authorities at the time: the depiction of an act of sodomy and the fact that the prostitute gets a “happily ever after”, as this does not help a moralistic argument against prostitution. While in prison, John Cleland wrote to many of his prosperous and important friends, but none would or could help him. It has been suggested that he only got out through blackmail, warning to reveal the initiator behind the novel; as this person was attached to an important public family, this family pulled strings to free Cleland, buying his secrecy with it. The person implicated was Charles Carmichael, an old friend his from his days in India, where Fanny Hill was written. As Charles died in the 1730s and Cleland was short on money it only seems sensible that he used the sketchy manuscript of his friend and re-worked it into a publishable book. (For more details on this see article by David Stevenson)

Cleland casts a very positive, even healthy, light on the non-marital heterosexual act; as long as it is experienced in measure (there is the bad example of too much excessive engagement in sex in Mr. Norbert, a degenerate man of only thirty years of age and one of Fanny’s punters). The homosexual act however, is always described as being incomplete in its success to pleasure both sides: while the receiving young male in the public house does not orgasm (even though the giving party does), female homosexuality is described as being merely useful in initiation to the sexual realm, but not fully satisfying as there is no penetration of the male member involved. This points to the bourgeois values of the time, which become idealized (like so many other things) in the novel. Sexual initiation through an older, more experienced woman was not an uncommon practice at the time. It usually consisted of a discussion which then sometimes would lead to experimentation. However, the idea of “becoming a woman” could only be accomplished through defloration, so penetration of a male – these acts were usually described with involving a lot of blood, torn flesh and the like. There are not only detailed descriptions of the various sexual acts Fanny engages in or witnesses in the course of the book, but also of the various genitalia she sees in the course of her adventures (e.g. she gives a detailed and rapt description of her vagina on pages 101-2); this voyeurism is also a great part of the appeal the book had and still has for a lot of readers. One cannot help to compare the two characters of Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Cole while reading the book. Though both women earn their living in the same business, Mrs. Brown is the excessive, dominating “mother” of the brothel who fails to give the guidance a young girl like Fanny would need in this business, while Mrs. Cole is fully aware of her role as guide and mentor to “her girls”. In her house, Fanny learns to be modest and the importance of self-respect. An often raised point of critique is the positive picture that Cleland draws of the world of prostitution in the 18th century: the prostitutes are all young and beautiful, almost never get pregnant, or catch diseases and they not only dutifully, but wilfully do their work with any kind of man. All of these women seem to enjoy their job and like what they are doing; it is almost too easy for the men to get what they want and to get these women aroused. This leads to the assumption that the book was mainly written for a male audience that wanted to believe this picture to be the truth when visiting a prostitute themselves.

Novel-related trivia:

In c. 1796, Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, took with him nine copies of Fanny Hill when he went on duty to India, knowing that it was a popular gift amongst British officers far away from home.

Sources

Cleland, John. Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.

Fowler, Patsy and Alan Jackson. Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influences. New York: AMS Press, 2003.

Stevenson, David. “A Note on the Scotsman who inspired Fanny Hill.” Scottish Studies Review 2 (1) (Spring 2001), 39-45.

Weed, David. “Fitting Fanny: Cleland’s Memoirs and Politics of Male Pleasure.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31 (1) (Fall 1997), 7-20.