Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – III
And so to Edward Sellon; libertine, atheist, orientalist, anthropologist, pornographer. For this post, I’m going to focus on Sellon’s pornographic productions and then will turn to his anthropological excursions in the next post. To some extent, this is a repeat of the approach I took in my first two essays on Edward Sellon (here and here) but I shall endeavour not to repeat earlier material too much.
Edward Sellon (1818-1866) entered military service in the East India Company at the age of 16 and rose to the rank of captain at the young age of 21. His ten years serving in India seems to have been not without incident, as he was arrested at one point and charged with “scandalous and infamous behavior” towards fellow officers in 1836. He was nearly discharged, but the president ruled that he was “insane” at the time of the offenses, and he was acquitted. Sellon’s own account of this incident is that he fought a duel with a fellow officer over a native woman.
In 1844 he returned to London and married Sarah Ann Wilds, the daughter of prominent Brighton surveyor and architect Amon Henry Wilds. The marriage, by all accounts, was not a happy one. Not only was Sarah not as rich as Sellon had initially supposed, but she also disapproved of his numerous affairs with other women, including his seduction of a parlor-maid and some of the pupils of a girls’ school where he worked for a while. The couple frequently broke up and made up, and had four children together. Sellon held down a number of jobs, including driving the London to Cambridge coach for two years and running a fencing school. The growth of the railways put his coach-driving out of business and the fencing school does not seem to have been a success either.
In 1848 he produced his first literary effort – Herbert Breakspear – a historical novel of the Maratha Wars. It does not seem to have been a hit. The influential literary journal The Athanaeum pronounced it “a tale excessively commonplace and excessively dull.”
Sellon’s Erotica
In 1860, Sellon left his family in the country and moved back to London, where he began writing erotica for William Dugdale. In a letter to Henry Spencer Ashbee written in 1877, James Campbell Reddie says that it was he who sold Sellon’s work to Dugdale:
“Towards the end poor Eddie was in desperate financial straits but I was able to help him a little by selling his memoirs to Dugdale. … I am sorry to say that he paid far less for the memoirs than for another of Eddie’s manuscripts I sold him a few years before, a novel that true to his practice he printed up as two separate works, one stated to be a sequel to the other.” 1
Sellon’s first efforts for Dugdale were The New Epicurean (1865) and Phoebe Kissagen (1866). Phoebe Kissagen is presented as a series of letters between the female narrator, and a series of unlikely characters such as the Earl of Cadland, Sir Felix Fuckington, Admiral Lord Soddington, Lady Pokingham and Mr. Hezekiah Birchem relating their sexual adventures – the seduction of young women; flagellation, and lesbian cross-dressing. Some of these characters, such as Lady Pokingham, are stock figures in Victorian erotica, turning up in journals such as The Pearl. Sellon also illustrated James Campbell Reddie’s homosexual novel, The Adventures of a Schoolboy.
His final work was The Ups and Downs of Life (1867) – an erotic autobiography – which he also illustrated. It is a chronological account of his search for sexual pleasure, beginning with his setting out for India at the age of 16, and his exploits with Indian women. As an autobiography, it provides a good deal of insight into Sellon’s perspectives on life. He hates his marriage, has no fatherly feelings for his children – seeing them as rivals for his wife’s affection.
Sellon is proudly atheistic and anti-clerical. He abhors any person or institution which places restrictions on his libertine – Epicurean – lifestyle, calling the Society for the Suppression of Vice “blasted humbugs”. There is a hierarchy of women within the text. Firstly, there are servants, Indian and European prostitutes who are simply fair game for the untrammeled enjoyment of the masculine libertine. Then there are women who represent the repressive forces of monogamy and respectability and attempt to curb the libertine’s freedom – notably Sellon’s mother and wife. Thirdly, there are women who Sellon respects as fellow libertines – women who are either married or independent but share the virtue of being economically well-off, who whilst maintaining the façade of respectability, lead their own life of pleasure.
Sellon, unlike some of his Cannibal Contemporaries, had no inclination towards same-sex love. In Ups and Downs he writes:
“Gentlemen, I leave such illicit pleasures to the clergy; as for me, I’m a mere fuckster. I like women, and I have them. Go along, you damned, old sodomitical b–rs, and have your boys; but in common honesty, leave honest men to fuck their women in peace, and be damned to you!”
As for ‘that most voluptuous Sapphic love’ he admits that as a young man he was initially prejudiced against it, but later came to ‘fully understand and appreciate’ it as a spectacle for male enjoyment.
Sellon’s principal motive for his erotic writing seems to have been as a way of making money – he seems to have been perpetually short of funds.
Sellon’s Suicide
In March 1866 Sellon agreed to accompany one of his “epicurean” friends – a man called Scarsdale, on a trip to Egypt as a paid advisor. The journey came to an abortive end at Vienna. Sellon, Scarsdale, and Scarsdale’s fifteen-year-old mistress were traveling in the same railway carriage. Scarsdale woke from slumber to catch Sellon in the act of seducing the mistress. Sellon parted ways with Scarsdale, and after remaining in Vienna for a while until what little money he had ran out, he returned to London. Taking a room at Webb’s in Piccadilly, he shot himself with his service revolver on the 17th of April 2. His suicide note ended, characteristically:
“Vivat Lingam/Non Resurgam’ – ‘Long live cock, I shall not rise again.”
James Campbell Reddie described the scene of Sellon’s suicide in a letter to Henry Spencer Ashbee:
“That was a dreadful event. The night before, which would have been sometime in April 1866 I think, Eddie wrote me a letter announcing his intentions, but by the time I received it the deed was done. I arrived at Webb’s [Hotel] in Piccadilly and went straight to his room and found him lying on the floor beside the bed. For some reason, the poor fellow had wrapped his pistol in a towel which presumably muffled the report and accounts I imagine for why nobody had found him before I got there. I don’t believe you ever met him, Ashbee, but it was a terrible shock to me to see his once handsome features so brutally destroyed.” 3
Reddie also claims that he paid the medical examiner, one Albert Styles (an associate of William Dugdale) to keep Sellon’s suicide out of the papers. The coroner’s report described Sellon as having ““no occupation, formerly in the Madras Army” and recorded the cause of death as “Pistol shot in the side, suicide when insane, found dead”. One of the witnesses at the inquest, a cousin of Sellon named Marmaduke Hornidge, described him as “a hot-headed, uncontrollable man.” 4
India as “pornotopia”
In Ups and Downs, India appears as a zone of sexual opportunity, not only due to the ready availability of native courtesans but the bored wives of fellow British officers that Sellon seduces, making it one of the few nineteenth-century pornographic texts to use India as a location. Although John Cleland, author of the infamous Fanny Hill (1748) spent thirteen years in Bombay working in the legal department of the East India Company, and William Potter allegedly wrote the bulk of Romance of Lust (1873-76) whilst in India 5 the subcontinent is not a favoured location for Victorian erotica. Henry Spencer Ashbee’s 1877 Index Librorum Prohibitorum (see previous post) – which acts as both catalogue and critique of pornographic texts of the period gives only four titles which relate to India: Sellon’s Ups and Downs and his 1865 ‘anthropological’ work Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus (more of which in the next post) plus Kama-Shashtra, or The Hindu Art of Love and, oddly enough, Karsandas Mulji’s 1865 History of the Sect of Maharajas (see posts tagged libel case for some related discussion on this latter). 6 Apart from Ups and Downs, these texts are treatises – possibly “obscene” but certainly, they could be read as reinforcing the widely-held belief that India was a hothouse of sexual perversity.
The section of Ups and Downs dealing with Sellon’s Indian exploits is set prior to the Indian Mutiny (1857) and evokes the image of Sellon having unrestrained access to the pleasures to be had from Indian women:
“The usual charge for the general run of them is two rupees. For five, you may have the handsomest Mohammedan girls, and any of the high-caste women who follow the trade of courtesan. The’fivers’ are a very different set of people from their frail sisterhood in European countries; they do not drink, they are scrupulously cleanly in their persons, they are sumptously dressed, they wear the most costly jewels in profusion, they are well educated, and sing sweetly, accompanying their voices on the voila da gamba a sort of guitar, they generally decorate their hair with clusters of clematis or the sweet-scented bilwa flowers entwined with pearls or diamonds. They understand in perfection all the arts and wiles of love, are capable of gratifying any tastes, and in face and figure they are unsurpassed by any women in the world.
It is impossible to describe the enjoyment I experienced in the arms of these syrens. I have had English, French, German and Polish women of all grades of society since, but never, never did they bear a comparison with those salacious, succulent houris of the far East.”
As Anjali Arondekar notes, 7 Indian males, when they do make a rare appearance in a pornographic narrative, usually do so as enablers or facilitators of Anglo-Indian encounters, but never as participants. In Ups and Downs, Sellon’s Indian butler assists him in arranging his assignations. After his seeming praise of the charms of Indian women, the rest of Sellon’s time in India is spent in his enthusiastic pursuit of the wives of fellow-officers.
Ups and Downs’ rather nostalgic portrayal of untrammeled sexual freedom can be contrasted with the post-Mutiny work Venus in India, or Love Adventures in Hindustan (1889) which recounts the sexual exploits of one Captain Charles Devereaux – a British army officer stationed in India. The act of travel entails the loosening of British self-control, and Devereaux’s passions are excited by some ‘French’ literature he purchases to relieve the tedium of his first railway journey across India. He is further tempted in Allahabad, at being offered the sexual services of a ‘very pretty little halfcaste’ although he demurs, remarking that “I felt no desire to see the pretty little half-caste! I put this self-abnegation down to virtue, and actually laughed, in my folly, at the idea that there existed, or could exist, a woman in India, who could raise even a ghost of desire in me!” Much of the travelogue is devoted to the Captain’s marathon-like affairs with English women. As with Ups and Downs, Indian men only appear as enablers or panderers. The captain’s servant, Soubratie prostitutes his wife to British troops for extra income, and sometimes advises Devereaux as to the availability of English women. Indian women are held up to be seductresses or corrupters of English womanhood. Mrs. Selwyn complains that “Children learn about things which girls sixteen and seventeen know nothing of at home.”
The specter of sodomy is raised on two occasions. Firstly, in learning that an Englishwoman – a Mrs. Searles – prostitutes herself for considerable sums of money, is told that her husband – Major Searles – has “the Persian taste for boys” after a long stay in Persia and that he tried to force these unnatural attentions on his wife. “he tried to get Mrs. Searles to acquire a taste for it herself, but she, like a proper woman, indignantly refused to comply. It might have stopped there, but one night Searles, full of zeal and brandy, actually ravished his poor wife’s—hem—hem—well!—bum! and from that day she hated him—quite naturally, I think!” Far more abhorrent though, is the shocking scene where two Afghan men, in an act of revenge for the rape of two Afghan girls by British troops, steal into the quarters of Colonel Selwyn, drug Mrs. Selwyn and her younger children, and proceed to rape the older girls – Fanny and Amy – both of whom Devereaux has designs on. Devereaux intervenes, and after finding one of the Afghans in the very act of buggering Amy, kills him. Indeed, Devereaux is threatened with the same fate by the Afghan, who cries out “I have fucked and buggered your sister—I will now bugger thee also!” Devereaux is relieved to find that Amy’s maidenhead remains intact – “Buggered she had been, but not ravished.” Devereaux eventually succeeds in seducing both the girls – a natural act in contrast to the unnatural propensities of the Afghans, who Devereaux remarks are “addicted” to sodomy – a fact widely attested by his fellow officers.
The Afghan’s act of horrific sodomy is literally unimaginable: “‘‘The Colonel did not wish to think of a daughter of his could be buggered, therefore she had not been buggered.’’
Pradhan (2019) points out that as a text, Venus in India is “keenly conscious of its cultural and racial contexts, and reaffirms many of the race, class, and gender hierarchies of Victorian England, of Britain’s empire in India.”
In the next post, I will examine Sellon’s contributions to the Anthropological Society of London and his influence on nineteenth-century theories of Phallic Worship.
Sources
Stefania Arcara The autobiography of a Victorian pornographer: Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life (Porn Studies, Vol 5, Issue 4, 2018).
Anjali Arondekar For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009).
Stephen Carver The 19th Century Underworld: Crime, Controversy and Corruption (Pen & Sword History, 2018).
Collette Colligan The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
Lavender Jones Here also lies the body… (Regency Review, Issue 20, February 2008).
Patrick J. Kearney (ed.) Five Letters from James Campbell Reddie to Henry Spencer Ashbee (Scissors & Paste Bibliographies, 2019).
Francis King Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (Citadel Press, 1974).
Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (University of Nebraska Press 2004).
Anubhav Pradhan ‘Raped, outraged, ravaged’: race, desire, and sex in the Indian empire (2019, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2019.1597639).
Florentine Vaudrez Venus in India, or Love Adventures in Hindustan, Volumes I and II (Duke Classics, 2012).
John Wallen The Cannibal Club and the Origins of 19th Century Racism and Pornography (The Victorian, Vol.1, Number 1, August 2013).
Online
Text of The New Epicurean
Text of Phoebe Kissagen
Dr Stephen Carver The Real Harry Flashman
Notes:
