Author Anonymous 
My Grandmother’s Tale 

The Victorians may have attempted to show the world they were upright, strict and full of virtue but much of this thinking has been subverted by their erotic and pornographic writing. With a vast Empire to organise and rule Victorians authors also had a wealth of new locations in which to have their characters fornicate in their written erotic adventures. These purveyors of erotic literature were no slouches when it came to getting their materials into the hands and minds of others. They used one of the great tools of the day; the literary magazine. Engagingly in the great tradition of literary magazines who serialised many wonderful books the Victorians had their own pornographic magazine which ran for eighteen monthly issues from July 1879 to December 1880. That seems to be quite some enterprise when you consider just the business side of printing and distribution of it whilst one presumes the law was casting its beady eyes at you. On the literary side it managed to print six serialised novels with Miss Coote’s Confession or The Voluptuous Experiences Of An Old Maid being one of them as well as many short stories and a whole host of other minutiae including ballads, poems, limericks, jokes, witticisms, puns, ditties all in textures from refined to coarse. This Victorian erotica, as the title suggests, is initially recounted by May and starts with her loss of virginity to her tutor at boarding school at age 16, although she had already been sharing sexual awakenings with her girlfriend at school. Soon all three of them are sexually active together whilst at the school. Other young girls relate their stories which involve incest, flagellation and being sexually active at a much earlier age. May marries an older man who dies leaving her a fortune as well as a 9 year old girl who May’s lover plans to deflower. This is a bawdy tail with plenty of colourful details on a wide range of sexual practises aimed to please.