On the map of Victorian adult literature, The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences has its own place. The novel was issued anonymously, in four volumes, by the publisher William Lazenby between 1873 and 1876. For adult readers tracing Victorian pornography it is a flagship of excess. It is not known for psychological realism. It is known as a catalogue of taboos the underground market would sell: a first-person story of sexual initiation, incest named as a theme, flagellation, and a repeating list of adult acts — sex with governesses, orgies, masturbation, sex between women, sex between men, oral sex, anal sex, and double penetration. The characters do not meet as people who think and feel. They work like interchangeable engines of appetite, a guided tour of every act the author could put on the page.
The narrator is Charlie Roberts, written with a large penis, a virility that does not flag, and an appetite that seems to have no floor. The book opens, “There were three of us—Mary, Eliza, and myself.” The characters are thin. That mechanical sexual world is what Steven Marcus later named, in The Other Victorians, a pornotopia: a place where “all men … are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for everything.” Flat feeling and endless readiness are how this multi-volume lust chronicle tried to prove the Victorian underground catalogue was “complete.”
Who wrote it is still open, which is typical of clandestine Victorian fiction. Anonymity covered the printer, the author, and the buyer at once. The names that come up most often are Edward Sellon and William Simpson Potter. Sellon wrote other erotic novels and a book on snake worship. Potter privately printed two volumes of letters on the Prince of Wales’s 1875–1876 visit to India. Comparing the prose of those Letters from India with The Romance of Lust, some readers favor Potter on style. Henry Spencer Ashbee instead treats Potter as the editor who assembled contributions from several enthusiasts. On that account the book is a collaborative lust project under one editorial hand, not one author’s secret masterpiece. Ashbee’s bibliography of erotic literature and the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books both record it among forbidden books.
The scholarship is limited and still does the locating work. Besides Ashbee’s Catena librorum tacendorum and Atkins’s Sex in Literature, Marcus in his 1966 study spends real space on how mechanically unreal the sex is. Couplings are choreographed like vectors, and the characters do not meet through feeling. Lisa Z. Sigel, in International Exposure (2005), discusses the related ground. Together those references keep The Romance of Lust as a cited pillar of Victorian erotic bibliography, not a pamphlet everyone forgot.
In 1968 Grove Press issued the first uncensored modern edition. That is the point where the text moves from a clandestine catalogue into the annotated paperback history of erotic classics. American and British publishers have reissued it since. Charlie Roberts’s four volumes stayed buyable long after Lazenby’s original market ended. The book sits next to the criticism now. For adult readers it is a milestone of Victorian lust on the record, sitting with the criticism instead of only under the counter.
