Over the weekend, we were informed that Royal Holloway, University of London, has “banned” the novel Fanny Hill out of a supposed fear of causing offence to students. Royal Holloway was originally a ladies’ institution – no connection with the women’s prison. The founder was “Doctor” Holloway, a pharmacist who made a fortune out of pills advertising “an infallible cure for female complaints”.
Fanny Hill has an interesting history. John Cleland, a rakehell, wrote the novel in debtors’ prison in 1748. Denied his doxies, his imagination went into overdrive. But he boasted to James Boswell, himself no mean pornographer (see his London Journal), that he could write a sexually exciting story of “a woman of pleasure” without using a single “foul” word.
“Fanny Hill” is an anglicisation of the Latin mons veneris, mound of Venus. Work it out. And forget the foul words. Cleland’s serious motive was to contradict the joyless moralism of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. Fanny is a sex worker who, like Belle de Jour, enjoys her work and does very well out of it, thank you very much Mr Hogarth.
After the book was published, Cleland was prosecuted for “corrupting the king’s subjects”. He protested he wished the work “buried and forgot”. It was duly buried and went on to become a centuries-long underground bestseller, until the great Lady Chat liberation of 1960.
I well remember my first encounter with Fanny (note the capital letter) some years earlier. It was a wretched copy printed in Tangier. Having done the sixth-form rounds, the thumbed Fanny Hill was passed on to me by a pale-faced friend.
Many will have read the “Fanny is banned” story and thought: “Those millennial nervous nellies, whatever next?” My guess is that it is silly-season tosh. The book will be referred to, as necessary and instructive, but is not required reading. The professor who is alleged to have done the banning is Judith Hawley. I know her personally. She is the world’s leading authority on Tristram Shandy, a novel thought so improper even Cleland called its author, Laurence Sterne, a pornographer.
If Fanny Hill is now on Holloway’s index librorum prohibitorum, which I doubt, all you can say is many have tried to ban the book, but no one has ever succeeded.
