Erotomaniac, The: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (Hardcover)

This is a peculiar sort of biographical production, an unusual addition to Gibson's otherwise excellent list of books. It is certainly written and researched with care, and constitutes a genuine scholarly contribution to this little-studied aspect of Victorian life. But it is also oddly dispiriting to read--not because of Gibson's immaculate writing, but because of Ashbee's monomaniacal proclivities. Pornography, at the very least, should be sexually exciting; but only a very particular sort of individual will find much stimulation in the depressing array of flagellation and violence that crops up all through this material. As Gibson concedes at the end of his book, Ashbee is "sad--in, we assume, the traditional as well as the modern sense of the word: nobody with a reasonably happy affective life is going to spend years writing and collecting this sort of 'obsessive, reiterative' material". --Adam Roberts --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Synopsis
The life and times of a Victorian gentleman of irrepressible curiosity-and shockingly repressed desire. . Henry Spencer Ashbee (18341900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secretone so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dal, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashbee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cataloguing such risqu titles as Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes. And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible.

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