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The Erotomaniac : The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee
Henry Spencer Ashbee seemed a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman. But his well-upholstered chambers in Gray's Inn concealed a shocking secret: a vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong.
304 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
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About the author
Ian Gibson
242 books96 followersIan Gibson (born 21 April 1939) is an Irish author and Hispanist known for his biographies of Antonio Machado, Salvador Dalí, Henry Spencer Ashbee, and particularly his work on Federico García Lorca, for which he won several awards, including the 1989 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. His work, La represión nacionalista de Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca (The nationalistic repression of Granada in 1936 and the death of Federico García Lorca) was banned in Spain under Franco.
Born into a Methodist Dublin family, he was educated at Newtown School in Waterford and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. He became a professor of Spanish literature at Belfast and London universities before moving to Spain. His first novel, Viento del Sur (Wind of the South, 2001), written in Spanish, examines class, religion, family life, and public schools in British society through the fictitious autobiography of a character named John Hill, an English linguist and academic. It won favourable reviews in Spain.
Gibson has also worked in television on projects centering around his scholarly work in Spanish history, having served as a historical consultant and even acting in one historical drama.
He was granted a Spanish passport in 1984.
Born into a Methodist Dublin family, he was educated at Newtown School in Waterford and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. He became a professor of Spanish literature at Belfast and London universities before moving to Spain. His first novel, Viento del Sur (Wind of the South, 2001), written in Spanish, examines class, religion, family life, and public schools in British society through the fictitious autobiography of a character named John Hill, an English linguist and academic. It won favourable reviews in Spain.
Gibson has also worked in television on projects centering around his scholarly work in Spanish history, having served as a historical consultant and even acting in one historical drama.
He was granted a Spanish passport in 1984.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 16, 2013
I'm absolutely staggered by the other reviews of The Erotomaniac posted on this website! Admittedly humour is subjective, but I can't help but wonder if any of the people who've described this book as 'dry', 'dull' and 'crap' are entirely human...
This beautifully-written romp of a biography is an absolute scream from beginning to end. Not only does Ashbee come alive on the page as a thoroughly agreeable Victorian rogue, but the summaries of his bibliographies and descriptions of various works of Victorian erotica had me howling with laughter. The book's memorable cast of characters, like the catchpenny publisher William Dugdale, the explorer Richard Burton and the shady Belgian Auguste Brancarte will stay with the reader long after they've put the book down and, not only that, the second half of the book contains the most compelling argument for Ashbee's authorship of the infamous Victorian erotic tour-de-force My Secret Life ever committed to print.
This book is, quite frankly, the funniest thing I've ever read. I've re-read it time and again and periodically return to its pages whenever I want a chortle. To my mind, Ian Gibson has written one of the most compelling biographies ever, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the relative sparseness of material about Ashbee's life. Don't believe the haters - if you have any interest in erotica, Victorian london or wonderfully eccentric Englishmen from yesteryear, you will absolutely adore this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough!
This beautifully-written romp of a biography is an absolute scream from beginning to end. Not only does Ashbee come alive on the page as a thoroughly agreeable Victorian rogue, but the summaries of his bibliographies and descriptions of various works of Victorian erotica had me howling with laughter. The book's memorable cast of characters, like the catchpenny publisher William Dugdale, the explorer Richard Burton and the shady Belgian Auguste Brancarte will stay with the reader long after they've put the book down and, not only that, the second half of the book contains the most compelling argument for Ashbee's authorship of the infamous Victorian erotic tour-de-force My Secret Life ever committed to print.
This book is, quite frankly, the funniest thing I've ever read. I've re-read it time and again and periodically return to its pages whenever I want a chortle. To my mind, Ian Gibson has written one of the most compelling biographies ever, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the relative sparseness of material about Ashbee's life. Don't believe the haters - if you have any interest in erotica, Victorian london or wonderfully eccentric Englishmen from yesteryear, you will absolutely adore this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough!
April 5, 2014
Disappointed. The author did everything right in that it was well written. He presented as much information as was available to him to create this book, but ultimately, it wasn't enough to elevate this to a "sex history" keeper book in my eyes because it doesn't give us an understanding Ashbee's 'secret life' at all. A life that led to him to collect over twenty years worth of erotic books. I didn't get a sense of who Henry Spencer Ashbee really was and what ultimately made him go down the path of becoming an erotomaniac because of so many unknowns. Most of this book bases its facts on Ashbee's own diary. Which is a problem because it was a very stingy diary that refused to convey the real Ashbee. I own MY SECRET LIFE and the massive three volume written collection of Ashbee's list of erotic books in history that he collected and catalogued and was fascinated by the idea of exploring who he was and why he was drawn to erotic books in an era when one could get arrested for the printing of such books. I didn't get that here, and again, it wasn't the author's fault as much as history just being lost. There were so many empty pages in Ashbee's diary and the reality is those massive gaps won't ever be filled by anything but one's own imagination. Ashbee hid too much of himself, even in his own diary, which won't ever give us any sense of his realities in the Victorian era or his "secret life". The book was well written, there were fascinating morsels worth nibbling but it couldn't deliver because of too many missing pieces. Sadly, history has once again silenced a fascinating tale and life we won't ever know about. Victorian prudery destroyed it. Victorians erased the most fascinating aspect of themselves AND history. *big disgruntled sigh*
December 31, 2016
A good, well written account of Ashbee and then an examination of who the mysterious 'Walter' was. The author asserts (unsurprisingly) that it was Ashbee. A conclusion I agree with. The problem arises with the next and most obvious question, was 'A Secret Life' written from life? The author argues that no; it is a work of fiction. This is where I depart from our previous agreements.
Alas, it is the points used in the argument for it to be fiction which actually to my mind show that parts of it very well be real. Unfortunately, the points used to argue the case show the own authors' lack of knowledge concerning female anatomy. Two specific examples spring to mind. The first is that 'Walter' clearly describes female ejaculation. Gibson has never been privy to this and states that female ejaculation is 'not real' therefore ipso facto the book is not real. More worryingly, Gbsons' lack of knowledge also extends to the very sad fact that rape survivors can experience an orgasm during the attack. Again 'Walter' describes this but not in the first-hand this time. Gibson uses this again to dismiss the premise of the book.
So rather curiously, his points actually suggest that parts, if not the entirety of 'My Secret Life' might well actually be real. It's a pity that there are whopping great inconsistencies in this biography which otherwise shines a light onto a very interesting area of Victorian society.
Alas, it is the points used in the argument for it to be fiction which actually to my mind show that parts of it very well be real. Unfortunately, the points used to argue the case show the own authors' lack of knowledge concerning female anatomy. Two specific examples spring to mind. The first is that 'Walter' clearly describes female ejaculation. Gibson has never been privy to this and states that female ejaculation is 'not real' therefore ipso facto the book is not real. More worryingly, Gbsons' lack of knowledge also extends to the very sad fact that rape survivors can experience an orgasm during the attack. Again 'Walter' describes this but not in the first-hand this time. Gibson uses this again to dismiss the premise of the book.
So rather curiously, his points actually suggest that parts, if not the entirety of 'My Secret Life' might well actually be real. It's a pity that there are whopping great inconsistencies in this biography which otherwise shines a light onto a very interesting area of Victorian society.
December 4, 2017
Read this because we have come across a whole lot of books in our library - not rude ones, I hasten to add - which came from Henry Spencer Ashbee's collection (they have the bookplates and the little leather spine label) and which are probably ones which the British Library redistributed as duplicates under the terms of his will. He is interesting to me as an autodidact, fluent in French and German, well-travelled and well-read, teaching himself the art of bibliography and becoming an expert on Cervantes, and also a book-collector of European literature and a connoisseur of decent bindings, an FRGS and a friend of such notable people as the traveller Richard Burton. I am not very interested in his sideline in porn, sorry, erotica, although how he managed to keep his activities separate and secret is intriguing, as is the history of clandestine publishing. The story of how his marriage eventually fell apart (actual reason unknown) and the way he treated his children thereafter is sad, and the jury is out on whether he is the author of "My secret life", a notorious anonymous smutty Victorian book (he could be, and it seems to be fantasy rather than a true memoir). Have to say I skipped some of the detail in the last part, which is a study of "My secret life" and the arguments for his authorship of it: it's not very edifying.
September 4, 2021
The first four chapters tell chronologically what is known of the life of Ashbee, Victorian businessman and bibliographer of erotica. The fifth and final chapter attempts to convince the reader that Ashbee was also the author of the voluminous work of Victorian pornography, My Secret Life.
What is perhaps most interesting about Ashbee is barely touched on in the book: the causes of his late-in-life alienation from his wife and all but one of his children and, suggested by the bequests in his will, the possibility that he had a second family beyond the one carefully documented by Gibson. Admittedly, the author seems to have come to dead ends in trying to delve deeper into these subjects, but it’s hard to believe that a diligent researcher could not have found more information that we are presented with about the lives of the named beneficiaries of Ashbee’s will.
Ashbee’s activities as the author of three catalogues of pornographic books, all evidently with copious commentary and excerpts, earned him a chapter in Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. “Walter”, the pseudonymous author of My Secret Life, received another two chapters from Marcus, so that, if Gibson’s attribution is correct, Ashbee would be the dominant figure in The Other Victorians, making him seem a kind of Professor Moriarty of Victorian porn.
In order to make his case, Gibson sets out to prove three things:
• That My Secret Life is, for the most part if not in its entirety, fiction. This goes against some earlier commentators on the book, including Marcus, and Gibson really doesn’t make a great case for its contents being provably fantasy. His claims about the limits of female sexuality seem as ill-informed as he claims Ashbee’s were, and, to the extent that he catches “Walter” making improbable claims, discounts the human tendency to see what one expects to see rather than that which is evident to one’s senses. Indeed, to me the non-variety of the encounters depicted, a sameness that I suspect most amateur novelists would try to avoid in creating imaginary incidents, seem to argue for the likelihood of a basis in real life.
• That Ashbee had the time and opportunity to write the book and get it published at his own expense. In the former category, Ashbee may well have had the time after having written his three porn bibliographies, but even those “secret” works left some trace in Ashbee’s “official” diaries and correspondence, but there is nothing to hint at his involvement beyond these works in the production and proofreading of a manuscript of thousands of pages. Certainly, though he had the opportunity, money, and contacts to have the work printed,
• That there is stylistic evidence indicating a strong likelihood of Ashbee’s authorship. Some of Gibson’s evidence in here is fairly strong and some pretty weak; certainly nothing he presents inclines me to consider Ashbee’s authorship highly probable, let alone almost certain. One telling omission: In the biographical section Gibson makes much of Ashbee’s obsession with flagellation as a sexual activity. If My Secret Life is a work of fiction in which the author gives his fantasy free rein, it seems unlikely that a devotee like Ashbee (certainly in fantasy, if not in fact) would give the subject such meager representation in spinning his sexual imagination out over thousands of pages and hundreds, if not thousands of imaginary incidents.
What is perhaps most interesting about Ashbee is barely touched on in the book: the causes of his late-in-life alienation from his wife and all but one of his children and, suggested by the bequests in his will, the possibility that he had a second family beyond the one carefully documented by Gibson. Admittedly, the author seems to have come to dead ends in trying to delve deeper into these subjects, but it’s hard to believe that a diligent researcher could not have found more information that we are presented with about the lives of the named beneficiaries of Ashbee’s will.
Ashbee’s activities as the author of three catalogues of pornographic books, all evidently with copious commentary and excerpts, earned him a chapter in Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. “Walter”, the pseudonymous author of My Secret Life, received another two chapters from Marcus, so that, if Gibson’s attribution is correct, Ashbee would be the dominant figure in The Other Victorians, making him seem a kind of Professor Moriarty of Victorian porn.
In order to make his case, Gibson sets out to prove three things:
• That My Secret Life is, for the most part if not in its entirety, fiction. This goes against some earlier commentators on the book, including Marcus, and Gibson really doesn’t make a great case for its contents being provably fantasy. His claims about the limits of female sexuality seem as ill-informed as he claims Ashbee’s were, and, to the extent that he catches “Walter” making improbable claims, discounts the human tendency to see what one expects to see rather than that which is evident to one’s senses. Indeed, to me the non-variety of the encounters depicted, a sameness that I suspect most amateur novelists would try to avoid in creating imaginary incidents, seem to argue for the likelihood of a basis in real life.
• That Ashbee had the time and opportunity to write the book and get it published at his own expense. In the former category, Ashbee may well have had the time after having written his three porn bibliographies, but even those “secret” works left some trace in Ashbee’s “official” diaries and correspondence, but there is nothing to hint at his involvement beyond these works in the production and proofreading of a manuscript of thousands of pages. Certainly, though he had the opportunity, money, and contacts to have the work printed,
• That there is stylistic evidence indicating a strong likelihood of Ashbee’s authorship. Some of Gibson’s evidence in here is fairly strong and some pretty weak; certainly nothing he presents inclines me to consider Ashbee’s authorship highly probable, let alone almost certain. One telling omission: In the biographical section Gibson makes much of Ashbee’s obsession with flagellation as a sexual activity. If My Secret Life is a work of fiction in which the author gives his fantasy free rein, it seems unlikely that a devotee like Ashbee (certainly in fantasy, if not in fact) would give the subject such meager representation in spinning his sexual imagination out over thousands of pages and hundreds, if not thousands of imaginary incidents.
January 5, 2023
Honestly shocked and delighted by how much I enjoyed this biography! It was funny and interesting most of the time, with only a section towards the end of his life that dragged when it was just pages of documenting every time he may or may not have had dinner with someone. But generally, this was a big success for me so I'm glad I tried it out!
July 10, 2018
Pensé que sería mejor en general. Le falta garra.
December 15, 2020
needs more smut
April 2, 2025
Dry as hell but it is objectively hilarious that the author's takeaway is "he clearly was the author of this book bc no one who actually had sex could have written it"
September 3, 2011
By all accounts Ian Gibson has taken apart a legacy of secrecy of which the revelation of its known identity must be sourced only in diary entries, historical records, authored artefacts, and limited correspondance and study, to have a crack at piecing together a case for the authorship of My Secret Life (A whopping 4,200 pages worth of debauchery) attributed to Henry Spencer Ashbee. Henry Spencer Ashbee was a wealthy Victorian business man who publicly was known as a scholar of Cervantes, travel writer and a bibliophile. His private life consisted of amassing an enormous collection of 'obscene' literature and penning three exhaustive bibliographies under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi on banned and erotic/lewd books from around the world.
Part One of The Erotomaniac sets up the inquisition of Part Two, which is vitally important. A thorough examination of Ashbee's diaries, acquaintances (Fellow bibliophiles, authors, publishers), friends, family (Particularly his son), and travels. Ian does so in order for the reader to grasp the sheer duality of Ashbee's double-life. It all concludes in a very Victorian scandal and reprise of Ashbee's identity as Pisanus Fraxi, which bases much of its testimony on Ashbee's will, which is featured at the end of the book in full.
Part Two is where Ian is heading, and through some quite skilful dissection between what is known of Henry Spencer Ashbee (Life, interests, references, dates, travels) and the penmanship of the fictional editor of the My Secret Life; Walter.
At first I wasn't sure what to expect as I followed Ian's extensively referenced mapping out of this seemingly ordinary Victorian businessman, but then when I delved into the second part, my own curiosity kept me chasing the mystery until the end. I thought Ian did a good job of researching particularly difficult material, i.e. diary entries that were at times infrequently entered and unrevealing, missing years, and a life that obviously wanted to be kept separate from the one recorded for the public.
A few missing links I would have chosen myself to reveal, such as suggesting that the mysterious scandal that befell family life for Ashbee might have been attributed to the work of My Secret Life (If discovered accidentally), and also the argument by Ian that My Secret Life was a work of fiction, which I think stemmed from a previous scholar's view that it was fact, I would ascertain that it was both - having felt that Ian might have looked at Ashbee's life too studiously at times, whereas I feel that Ashbee, like so many who live a duality, can live out their desires without a single soul ever knowing, or only those close in the fold ever knowing. Lastly some speculation on Ian's behalf that the author of My Secret Life had little actual knowledge of his expeditions - here the examples Ian gives, I would argue otherwise, as poetic license or those intrinsically immersed in sexual exploration would easily reach the same observatory tones when approaching experience as descriptive prose.
However, all said and done, The Erotomaniac is comprehensive enough to provide the reader with what must of been arduous research at times presented in a well thought out fashion about a man who is a curio of our times, living in a period of horrific conservatism and prudishness; cuckolded by fantasies that could only be nurtured in secret.
Part One of The Erotomaniac sets up the inquisition of Part Two, which is vitally important. A thorough examination of Ashbee's diaries, acquaintances (Fellow bibliophiles, authors, publishers), friends, family (Particularly his son), and travels. Ian does so in order for the reader to grasp the sheer duality of Ashbee's double-life. It all concludes in a very Victorian scandal and reprise of Ashbee's identity as Pisanus Fraxi, which bases much of its testimony on Ashbee's will, which is featured at the end of the book in full.
Part Two is where Ian is heading, and through some quite skilful dissection between what is known of Henry Spencer Ashbee (Life, interests, references, dates, travels) and the penmanship of the fictional editor of the My Secret Life; Walter.
At first I wasn't sure what to expect as I followed Ian's extensively referenced mapping out of this seemingly ordinary Victorian businessman, but then when I delved into the second part, my own curiosity kept me chasing the mystery until the end. I thought Ian did a good job of researching particularly difficult material, i.e. diary entries that were at times infrequently entered and unrevealing, missing years, and a life that obviously wanted to be kept separate from the one recorded for the public.
A few missing links I would have chosen myself to reveal, such as suggesting that the mysterious scandal that befell family life for Ashbee might have been attributed to the work of My Secret Life (If discovered accidentally), and also the argument by Ian that My Secret Life was a work of fiction, which I think stemmed from a previous scholar's view that it was fact, I would ascertain that it was both - having felt that Ian might have looked at Ashbee's life too studiously at times, whereas I feel that Ashbee, like so many who live a duality, can live out their desires without a single soul ever knowing, or only those close in the fold ever knowing. Lastly some speculation on Ian's behalf that the author of My Secret Life had little actual knowledge of his expeditions - here the examples Ian gives, I would argue otherwise, as poetic license or those intrinsically immersed in sexual exploration would easily reach the same observatory tones when approaching experience as descriptive prose.
However, all said and done, The Erotomaniac is comprehensive enough to provide the reader with what must of been arduous research at times presented in a well thought out fashion about a man who is a curio of our times, living in a period of horrific conservatism and prudishness; cuckolded by fantasies that could only be nurtured in secret.
January 12, 2014
[taken from my comments on another post]:
I finished this book only yesterday and found it fascinating as well as very tongue in cheek Victorian. The author's style, his often amusing and quite intentional overly meticulous lists, footnotes and mania for order created a wonderful mirror by which to understand Ashbee himself and the peculiar time in which he lived.
The first half of the book takes on far more meaning and significance after one reads the second half, which is (admittedly) more lively and often quite amusing. I was also impressed by the scope of the author's research, which included access to unpublished materials available from Ashbee descendants and (no small feat) an extremely close reading of ALL the volumes of the quickly tedious but also very funny epic My Secret Life. Gibson's argument that Ashbee was the author is very persuasive and thorough. I also found the author's speculations about Ashbee's character and personality to be honest, respectful, and in all cases well-supported by factual information.
This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the Victorian age and the sexual cognitive dissonance that is one of its most interesting features.
I finished this book only yesterday and found it fascinating as well as very tongue in cheek Victorian. The author's style, his often amusing and quite intentional overly meticulous lists, footnotes and mania for order created a wonderful mirror by which to understand Ashbee himself and the peculiar time in which he lived.
The first half of the book takes on far more meaning and significance after one reads the second half, which is (admittedly) more lively and often quite amusing. I was also impressed by the scope of the author's research, which included access to unpublished materials available from Ashbee descendants and (no small feat) an extremely close reading of ALL the volumes of the quickly tedious but also very funny epic My Secret Life. Gibson's argument that Ashbee was the author is very persuasive and thorough. I also found the author's speculations about Ashbee's character and personality to be honest, respectful, and in all cases well-supported by factual information.
This book provides a fascinating glimpse into the Victorian age and the sexual cognitive dissonance that is one of its most interesting features.
May 9, 2012
This book was so awful, I had to finish reading it halfway through. Gibson takes an intrinsically interesting subject matter (a Victorian collector and cataloger of the most explicit pornography he could find) and turns it into something insipid and dull. Full of references to semi-prominent Victorians most readers will likely never have heard of, with nary a word of explanation, and utterly lacking in background material on some of the main players, this book is quite simply a piece of crap.
May 27, 2015
Henry Spencer Ashbee deeded the largest ever collection of erotica to the British Museum. Who was he? What were his interests & experience?
The book is academic and dry and does not answer these most important questions. It presents a timeline of his life but not much beyond that.
The book is academic and dry and does not answer these most important questions. It presents a timeline of his life but not much beyond that.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews