Selling Sexual Knowledge

'This is revisionist history in the finest sense of the term. With far more depth than any previous study, it analyzes the business of publishing sexual literature in the nineteenth century. It challenges the myth of Victorian sexual ignorance, showing that erotic literature was far more available than we imagined. And it convincingly argues that Victorian censorship of sex was far from airtight.' Jonathan Rose, Drew University 'Bull skilfully connects Holywell Street pornographers, medical writers, and sex radicals in unexpected and wholly satisfying ways. She shows that Victorian medicine, sex, and obscenity were (dare I say it) often bedfellows.' Mary E. Fissell, Johns Hopkins University 'From the shady publishers of Holywell Street in the 1830s to the purveyors of 'semi-scientific' pornography in the 1890s, we are taken on a journey through the world of sexual and medical publishing, with surprising findings which radically recast our understandings of the obscenity debates in the nineteenth century.' Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford