AustLit
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
My Secret Life, a voluminous sexual memoir written by an anonymous upper-middle-class gentleman who identifies himself by the name Walter, was first published in a very limited and private manner in 1888.
Banned in Australia
Censorship Agencies:
Literature Censorship Board
Decision:
18 Dec 1967
NAA Source:
C4226; 'My Secret Life' folder. C4129; Box 'M'. C4371/1; Box 1 Folder 8.
Censorship notes:
This book was sent to the board in 1967 because it is quoted in Steven Marcus' banned scholarly study The Other Victorians at length, and a new edition had been published in 1966. Richard G Fox in his 1967 history of the legal concept of obscenity in Australia notes that it was:'[u]ntil recently said to be the rarest and most expensive work of obscenity in the world. Only three copies of the entire eleven volume set were known to exist. However in 1966 the work was reprinted in the United States of America by Grove Press' (24). Fox cites Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausens' Pornography and the Law (106-25), which was itself banned in Australia from 1960-1968.
Censorship notes:
One of the censors noted: 'I do not consider the book suitable for general circulation: there is not a chapter without a string of indecencies; but it is a document of some importance for study of the social life of the period...'
Notes
-
The work was published anonymously but according to Legman's introduction to the 1966 edition the author may be H. S. Ashbee, a late Victorian collector of pornography.
-
Also see Henry Spencer Ashbee
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 7 Feb 2017 14:00:19
