ABSTRACT
To his enduring shame and disgust, the eighteenth-century writer John Cleland was known during his lifetime for only one of the many books he produced over an authorial career of more than 40 years: the scandalous 1749 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more familiarly known today by the name of its first-person narrator, Fanny Hill. In that work's first edition, Cleland provided his readers with something no other pornographer or novelist of his day had the nerve (or the desire) to write, an explicit and soon-to-be-excised description of sex between men; and in doing so he was taking a considerable risk, as he would have been aware. In 1726, when Cleland, a Londoner, was 16 years old, three men convicted of ‘the heinous and detestable Sin of Sodomy’ were hanged after a highly publicised series of trials at the Old Bailey. 1 No author, of course, would have been subject to hanging for the mere act of writing about sodomy, but it was very likely this passage that led to Cleland's arrest for obscene libel later in 1749, and the pillorying to which conviction would have led was dangerous enough. 2
