The Romance of Lust: Victorian Multi-Volume Erotic Novel

The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences is a Victorian erotic novel issued anonymously in four volumes between 1873 and 1876 by publisher William Lazenby. Henry Spencer Ashbee discusses it in one of his bibliographies of erotic literature, and the compilers of the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books list it as well—marks of how thoroughly this multi-volume lust chronicle entered the formal record of forbidden books. For adult readers mapping Victorian pornography, it is a flagship of excess: first-person initiation, incest, flagellation, and nearly every taboo the underground market would sell.

Content: Charlie Roberts and Insatiable Cataloguing

The novel is told in the first person by protagonist Charlie Roberts, gifted with a large penis, relentless virility, and a seemingly bottomless sexual appetite. It opens with the line “There were three of us—Mary, Eliza, and myself.” Charlie recounts sexual initiation as an adolescent “approaching fifteen,” then catalogs experiences including incest with his sisters Eliza and Mary, sex with governesses, and later exploits with male and female friends and acquaintances. Beyond incest, the book cycles through orgies, masturbation, lesbianism, flagellation, fellatio, cunnilingus, gay sex, anal sex, and double penetration. Taboo subjects such as homosexuality, incest, and pedophilia are common themes—Victorian underground erotica often stacked prohibited acts as proof of completeness rather than psychological realism. The result is less a novel of character than a guided tour of every act the author(s) could stage.

Authorship Contenders: Potter, Sellon, or a Circle

Authorship remains unsettled. Two frequent candidates are William Simpson Potter and Edward Sellon. Sellon wrote other erotic novels and a book on snake worship; Potter wrote and privately printed two volumes of letters on the Prince of Wales’s 1875–1876 visit to India. Comparing the prose of Letters from India during H. R. H. the Prince of Wales visit in 1875-6, from William S. Potter to his sister with The Romance of Lust has led some readers to favor Potter on stylistic grounds. Ashbee asserts that Potter acted as editor assembling contributions from multiple aficionados—making the book possibly a collaborative lust project under one editorial hand rather than a single author’s secret masterpiece. That uncertainty is typical of Victorian clandestine fiction, where anonymity protected printers, authors, and buyers alike.

Scholarly Attention: Marcus, Atkins, and “Pornotopia”

Dedicated scholarship is limited, though the novel appears in passing across histories of Victorian literature and pornography. Steven Marcus treats it at length in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966); John Alfred Atkins discusses it in his multi-volume survey Sex in Literature (1970–1982). Marcus’s approach is psychological and Freudian; he coins pornotopia for the sexual world of books like this—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.” Given the characters’ tireless libidos, the label fits. Because sexual acts and positions are often mechanically unrealistic, Marcus also uses the language of vectors for those choreographed couplings. He further notes emotional deprivation: characters do not meet one another as thinking, feeling persons so much as interchangeable engines of appetite. That critical frame still shapes how historians talk about Victorian porn’s flat affect and infinite readiness.

Publication History After the Underground

The first uncensored modern edition appeared from Grove Press in 1968. Since then numerous U.S. and U.K. publishers have reissued the work for erotic-classics shelves, keeping Charlie’s four-volume career available long after Lazenby’s original market. Modern reprints sit beside academic commentary rather than only under the counter—another stage in how Victorian lust texts migrate from clandestine catalogues to annotated paperback history.

Works That Comment Substantially

Beyond Ashbee’s Catena librorum tacendorum (1885), Atkins’s Sex in Literature, and Marcus’s The Other Victorians, Lisa Z. Sigel discusses related ground in International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (2005). Reference maps also include Gaétan Brulotte and John Phillips’s Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (2006), Patrick J. Kearney’s A History of Erotic Literature (1982), and Donald Serrell Thomas’s A Long Time Burning (1969) on English literary censorship. Together they fix The Romance of Lust as a cited pillar of Victorian erotic bibliography rather than a forgotten pamphlet.