The Private Case is a collection of erotica and pornography held initially by the British Museum and then, from 1973, by the British Library. The collection began between 1836 and 1870 and grew from the receipt of books from legal deposit, from the acquisition of bequests and, in some cases, from requests made to the police following their seizures of obscene material.
From its foundation in the eighteenth century, the British Museum acted as the national library of Britain. It was one of six legal deposit libraries in automatic receipt of all works published in the UK; this included pornographic or salacious material, seditious publications, those subversive of religion and works that could later be deemed by the courts as libellous. From the nineteenth century, the subversive and libellous material was separated into the Suppressed Safe collection while the erotica and pornography were placed in a locked cupboard known as the Private Case. Access to the material was restricted, and the catalogue of Private Case publications was not released to the library's general readership.
The contents of the Private Case collection changed over time, shrinking as works were declassified and put into the general collection, and growing when the library received bequests and donations from collectors. Some of these were large: the book collector Henry Spencer Ashbee's 1900 bequest contained 1,379 volumes of erotica; the anthropologist Eric Dingwall—an honorary assistant keeper to the department of printed books—donated several works during his lifetime and at his death; and in 1964 the bibliophile Charles Reginald Dawes bequeathed 246 works of erotic literature.
From 1964—and reflecting the increasing liberalisation of social mores of the time—the library began to liberalise its approach to works in the Private Case, revising the collection and moving items onto the general catalogue for general access, a process that was completed in 1983. There have been no new entries in the Private Case since 1990 and all new erotic or pornographic material is openly accessible and listed in the general catalogue. There is no restriction on access to the Private Case material, except for some items which are in a fragile condition. At its largest, the collection comprised some 4,000 works; about 2,500 volumes were still classified by the library as part of the Private Case.
Background
The British Museum Act created the British Museum in June 1753. The Act provided for the purchase of the collection of the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane and the Cotton library, assembled by the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton; the Harleian Library, the collection of the Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer. The British Library Act 1972 created the British Library on 1 July 1973. Into the new body were combined the library holdings of the British Museum—which provided most of the British Library's collection—the National Central Library and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology. The library later also incorporated the holdings of the British National Bibliography, the Office for Scientific and Technical Information, the India Office Library and Records and the British Institute of Recorded Sound.
The British Library is one of six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, and the only one to have a right to automatically receive a copy of every printed work published in the UK. In addition to books, this includes pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, sheet music and maps. Certain digital material is also collected under legal deposit, including some websites, e-journals and CD-ROMs. As a legal deposit organisation the works they receive include pornographic or salacious material, seditious publications, those subversive of religion and works that are potentially libellous. Historically, such works have been accepted by the library, but some were not released into their general access collections or were not included on the publicly accessible catalogue. As well as the legal deposit works lodged with the library, they would also receive private donations and posthumous bequests from collectors, including those who amassed works of erotica and pornography; these were also accepted, but not put in the general access collection.
History Nineteenth century
There are no records in the minutes of the British Museum trustees' meetings or within the records of the librarians regarding the opening of the Private Case, and no accurate date when it happened. Philip Harris, a former deputy keeper at the British Museum Library, records that in 1836 the Reverend Henry Baber—when he held the post of Keeper of the Printed Books—reported to a parliamentary select committee that young men should not have access to improper French novels, and that he had locked up such works, particularly those with illustrations, and they would only be released upon application to himself. This, Harris notes, was the beginning of what became the Private Case. Paul Cross, a member of staff of the British Library, puts the date of the case's opening at approximately 1841, while the library was under the leadership of Sir Henry Ellis and Anthony Panizzi was the Keeper of Printed Books. The process was continued by Panizzi's successor John Winter Jones, who did not inform the library's trustees or officials of the practice of withholding books from circulation. The historian Peter Fryer, in his study of the Private Case, considers the case began in 1856 or later; the cultural critic Gershon Legman estimates that it began operating between 1866 and 1870, based on the dates of the early accessions.
According to Cross and Harris, between the late 1830s or early 1840s and 1854 the collection grew to 27 books, then to 60 by 1860 and by 1864 the collection grew to 78 items. The collection included several works published pseudonymously, as was common at the time. These included works such as The Crafty Whore (1658) by the Italian author Pietro Aretino (translated by Richard Head from the original Italian); The Whore's Rhetorick (1683) by Philp-Puttanus (a pseudonym of the Italian writer Ferrante Pallavicino); A New Description of Merryland (1741) by Roger Pheuquewell (a pseudonym of Thomas Stretzer); The Natural History of the Frutex Vulvaria (1741) by Philogynes Clitorides; Teague-root Display'd (1746) by Paddy Strong-Cock; Matrimonial Ceremonies Display'd (1748); Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies (1788–1790); The Cuckold's Chronicle (1793); and Paradise Lost; or The Great Dragon Cast Out (1838) by Lucian Redivivus.
Some publishers of pornographic material did not forward their works to the British Museum Library. A boom in pornography was seen in the 1850s, much of it generated from the publishing houses in Holywell Street, London, which were known for their output of pornographic books. Some pornographic publishers, such as William Dugdale, never sent their works to the library, which meant they had to be acquired later by the library either through purchase or from a donation.
In 1865 the antiquarian George Witt gifted his phallicism collection to the British Museum; much of this went into the museum's Secretum—their room for items deemed obscene—with the printed matter going into the Private Case. One of the works was (1805) which was, like many of his works, personally monogrammed. By 1885 the catalogue for the Private Case had changed, with 108 former entries removed and 49 new works added. Although it is likely that the Private Case collection began as a lockable case, by 1890 the collection had expanded to fill 12 cupboards.
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
The bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee made a bequest to the library in 1900 of 15,299 volumes containing 8,764 works, of which 1,379 volumes were classed as erotica. The non-contentious works were entered into the library's general catalogue, and duplicates disposed of. Erotica was put into the Private Case; any duplicated works were destroyed. The remaining works included (1763); (1830); (1866) by "la citoyenne Raucourt"; (1873); The Romance of Lust (1873–1876); (1884); as well as several editions of Fanny Hill by the English novelist John Cleland, and the works of the French eroticist the Marquis de Sade. Also included in his bequest were three volumes of bibliographies of erotica he compiled; titled (1877), (1879) and (1885), Ashbee published them under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi.
In the early 20th century, the library split the segregated books into two collections. They placed the pornography and erotic literature in the Private Case—a lockable cabinet in the library's basement—with the shelf-mark P.C. The libellous and subversive works were given the name the Suppressed Safe collection and the shelf-mark S.S. They were locked in the cupboard of the keeper of printed books until they were moved into seven safes in the basement.
By 1913 the Private Case contained not just works of pornography or erotica, but serious works on sex, including the six-volume work Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1910) by Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex (1908); the latter was available in the general catalogues of several academic and public libraries, but confined to the Private Case in the British Museum Library. Other inclusions were some issues of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine—although most of the issues remained on in the general collection—as they contained articles about flogging girls. In 1920 David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford, a trustee of the museum, bequeathed over 200 works of erotica to the museum "for preservation or destruction at the discretion of the Trustees". The library destroyed the duplicated books and the remainder went into the Private Case.
In around 1934 the bibliophile and collector Alfred Rose was given permission to copy the internal catalogue of the Private Case. He took details of the titles present in the case and also included the works of other collections of erotica in major libraries. Rose published the book under the pseudonym Rolf S. Reade, an anagram of his name. Titled , it lists 5,061 works. By the time the book was published in 1936, Rose had died. On his death, Rose bequeathed seven works of erotica to the library, including The Bride's Confession (1917); The Festival of the Passions (1863); and The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea (1890) by Nicolas Chorier. According to Cross, the books donated are "of exceptional interest".
In 1950 the Private Case was expanded by the receipt of the Eliot–Phelips collection, formed by Edward Phelips, which had been held by the Guildhall Library, London. Among the 33 works they received were (1888) and (1889) by Henri d'Argis; Odor di Femina (1919) by Edmond Dumoulin; and (1923). The last of these was a French translation of the English novel My Secret Life, possibly written by Ashbee or William Haywood.
In 1946 the anthropologist Eric Dingwall was appointed honorary assistant keeper to the department of printed books of the British Museum, where he curated the Private Case. In 1967 he negotiated with the police to obtain what was described as "44 magazines and 15 other articles" they had seized in a raid in Brighton, East Sussex. When the police asked if the museum had particular authority to obtain the material, J. L. Wood, the assistant keeper of printed books, informed them that:
as the National Library, we have a duty to collect any material which will serve for study and research and we already possess a collection of material of the kind you describe in your letter, kept under conditions of special security.