Though at times these stories read like overwrought schoolboy tales, full of unbelievable occurrences and unlikely characters, there is a thread of literate wit running through the stories.
There are silly chases around the furniture, and ongoing debates between the man and woman as they take turns resisting the charms of the other (the man is frequently subjected to something like a job interview, wherre he is forced to argue his various skills and virtues before the woman will consider his application). Victorian erotica does not take itself too seriously: instead, it rather resembles those screwball comedies of the 1930's. Their sense of fun at being caught out doing something naughty proves far more appealing than much of the more lurid contemporary stories which work so hard at being shocking. One aspect of my fascination is that so many famous and seemingly proper Victorian gentlemen wrote the stuff. I was fascinated to find that those stuffy Victorians, whom I had until then believed to be very boring figures, had the most unboring licentious imaginations. The book turned out to be an anthology of Victorian erotica, much like the volumes now available in eBook format from places like Renaissance EBooks (listed below).
My pursuit of the erotic page began years ago when I discovered a slim volume with a pink cover squeezed onto a shelf in some otherwise forgetable chain bookstore. This list offers a variety of forms and formats, from sex advice pages which specifically discuss sexuality and disability to etext and eBooks with erotic content (if you need more information about accessible eBooks, go to my