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- Works by John Cleland at Project Gutenberg
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- Complete text of Fanny Hill
John Cleland | |
|---|---|
| Died | 23 January 1789 London, England |
| Resting place | St Margaret Lothbury churchyard, City of London |
| Occupation | soldier and writer |
| Alma mater | Westminster School |
John Cleland (c. 1709, baptised – 23 January 1789) was an English novelist best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him "a sly, old malcontent".[1]
John Cleland began courting the Portuguese in a vain attempt to reestablish the Portuguese East India Company. In 1748, Cleland was arrested for an £840 debt (equivalent to a purchasing power of about £100,000 in 2005) and committed to Fleet Prison, where he remained for over a year. It was while he was in prison that Cleland finalised Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The text probably existed in manuscript for a number of years before Cleland developed it for publication.[2] The novel was published in two instalments, in November 1748 and February 1749. In March of that year, he was released from prison.
However, Cleland was arrested again in November 1749, along with the publishers and printer of Fanny Hill.[3] In court, Cleland disavowed the novel and said that he could only "wish, from my Soul", that the book be "buried and forgot" (Sabor). The book was then officially withdrawn and not legally published again for over a hundred years. However, it continued to sell well in pirated editions. In March 1750, Cleland produced a highly bowdlerised version of the book, but it too was proscribed. Eventually, the prosecution against Cleland was dropped and the expurgated edition continued to sell legally.
None of Cleland's literary works provided him with a comfortable living and he was typically bitter about this. He publicly denounced his mother before her death in 1763 for not supporting him. Additionally, he exhibited a religious tendency toward Deism that branded him as a heretic. Meanwhile he accused Laurence Sterne of "pornography" for Tristram Shandy.
In 1772, he told Boswell that he had written Fanny Hill while in Bombay, that he had written it for a dare, to show a friend it was possible to write about prostitution without using "vulgar" terms. At the time, Boswell reported that Cleland was a "fine, sly malcontent". Later, he would visit Cleland again and discover him living alone, shunned by all, with an "ancient and ugly woman" as his sole servant. Josiah Beckwith in 1781 said, after meeting him, that it was "no wonder" that he was thought to be a "sodomite". From 1782 until his death on 23 January 1789 Cleland lived on Petty France, Westminster, "a few hundred yards from his childhood home in St James's Place".[4] He died unmarried and was buried in St Margaret's churchyard in London.
Cleland's account of when Fanny Hill was written is difficult. For one thing, the novel has allusions to other novels that were written and published the same year (including Shamela). Further, it takes part in the general Henry Fielding/Samuel Richardson battle, with Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded on one side and Joseph Andrews on the other. Furthermore, the novel's geography and topicality make a Bombay composition less likely than a Fleet Prison one. It is possible, of course, that a pornographic novel without vulgarity was written by Cleland in Bombay and then rewritten in Fleet Prison as a newly engaged and politically sophisticated novel.
Officially, Fanny Hill remained suppressed in an unexpurgated form until 1970 in the United Kingdom. However, in 1966 it became the subject of a US Supreme Court judgment A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, holding that under the US Constitution a modicum of merit precluded its condemnation as obscene. In fact, the novel is now regarded as a "stylistic tour de force"[5] and as a participant in the "making legible the bourgeois remapping of certain categories constitutive of 'woman', and then exposing that remapping as ludicrous" (Gautier x). It has an exceptionally lively style, contains profoundly playful and ironic questions about womanhood, and has a satirical exposition of love as commerce and pleasure as wealth.
The fact that the passionate descriptions of copulatory acts in Fanny Hill are written by a man from the point of view of a woman, and the fact that Fanny is obsessed by phallic size, have led some critics to suggest it is a homoerotic work.[6] That aspect of the novel, as well as Cleland's presumed offence at Westminster School, lack of intimate friends and unmarried status, have aided conjecture that he was homosexual, as has his bitter falling out with friend Thomas Cannon, author of the pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749),[7] the earliest surviving published defence of homosexuality in English (Gladfelder).
The authorised edition of Fanny Hill also contains a scene where Fanny (to her disgust) comes across two teenage boys fornicating.[8] The friendship of Cleland and Cannon was "volatile, verging on murderous", but in the opinion of Gladfelder, who rediscovered the Ancient and Modern Pederasty..., "It's no coincidence that they simultaneously produced the only two explicit accounts of male same-sex desire in English before the nineteenth century, published just a month apart in 1759." That may, however, simply reflect Cleland's knowledge of his friend's research and the opportunity to use it in a novel that had a rare explicitness for the time.[9]
