The Gentleman's Confession

INTRODUCTION

In our day and age of easy labels and quick stereotyping, we tend to imagine the Victorian era in England as something of a conservative and reserved time. It is an old observation that every generation thinks it invented sex, but no people in history are seen as having been quite so sexless as the Victorians, and especially the refined society of the Victorian middle and upper classes.

As so often with our preconceptions of history as we would like to understand it, the reality is actually very different. Every society has its underbelly, and the English especially have always had a host of hidden shames. Never more so than in the Victorian era. For all we may joke with our absurd urban myths about even table legs needing to be covered lest they appear overly risqué, the Victorian gentleman -- for indeed it is almost always the gentlemen -- was in fact quite an enthusiastic consumer of pornography.

Of course it is not true that every one of those top-hatted fellows had a collection of obscene magazines hidden away under his bed, but a great many of them must have done, as the amount of material produced, usually in London, in the latter half of the nineteenth century is quite extraordinary. From the erotic and perverse novels of the Streatham print-houses to the magazines that came out of Soho and particularly Whitechapel, every taste and fetish appears to have been catered for, albeit in some cases in somewhat embryonic forms.

The example that follows comes from a publication entitled The Discerning Gentleman's Weekly. This was one of the most popular periodicals to come out of the notorious press-house hidden under the bakery on Vallance Road in Whitechapel. As might be expected, tracing the history of such black market publications is a difficult and frustrating exercise, as precious few records exist and even archives of the magazines themselves are few and far between and usually extremely patchy.

Nonetheless, students of this extraordinary field were granted the most enormous boon when a collection of what seems to be almost the entire run of The Discerning Gentleman's Weekly formed part of a library material donated to the Sex & Sexuality Collection here at the University of South Gloucester in 1991. The name of the donor is known to the university, but as his ancestor -- who compiled quite an impressive library of pornographic material in the 1890s -- was a gentleman of some repute, it is best to maintain his anonymity for now. While we are always eager to find out more about who purchased this material, we have no wish to ruin any long-standing reputations so far after the event.

The Discerning Gentleman's Weekly seems to have been first published sometime in 1891, and ran from then right through until around 1899, although some publications in a somewhat different style but with the same name exist dated 1901 and 1902. The serialised story reproduced in this collection is by no means the most salacious material printed in the magazine's pages; some of the stories -- such as The Curious Misadventures of Sally Sweetheart -- would make even today's hardcore pornographers blush.

But our story -- The Gentleman's Confession -- is of particular interest because, clumsy and amateur though its prose is, it forms an attempt to tell a proper narrative story, and even delve into some of the psychology behind what we would these days refer to as sexual submission. This is the first time that it has ever been properly published in one volume, and I hope that the reader will find it a fascinating window into the hidden sexuality of a bygone age.

I am particularly grateful to Dr Stephen Lasher and Professor Amanda Gerrard for their thoughts on the text, and their assistance with the compilation of this edition. I must also thank Mark Starling at USG Press for his wonderful work scanning and assembling the text, and of course Clive Bach, Elise Longford, Julianne Barnes and everyone else at the University Library's Sex & Sexuality Collection -- without a doubt the finest body of work ever assembled in that field.

Professor Anthony P. Everyman. Department of Literary Studies, University of South Gloucester January 2008

"The Gentleman's Confession" -- Part One Originally published in "The Discerning Gentleman's Weekly" Volume IX, number 17 Issue dated March 18th 1896

I have no Earthly reason for beginning this journal. Surely no good can come of it. Its pages will, I have no doubt, be my undoing were they to be discovered -- the ruination of my reputation, and of my good family name. This is not a wise course of action, but the events my shaking hand sets out to chronicle weigh so heavily upon my soul that I cannot help but surrender to the urge to expunge some of my guilt by releasing the repressed narrative into a written form.

For who else can I tell? I am no Roman, and have no priest to confess to. My brother is long dead, buried deep, deep down to avoid the teeth of the rats in a hot and sultry Indian graveyard. My children are mere schoolboys, and my wife...

Oh God, my poor, poor wife. Were she ever to discover this journal it would be the end of her, my darling, beloved Annabel.

I know all of this. I know the sensible thing to do would be to fling this book with its fresh, virgin pages into the fireplace. To hang any thought of confession and revelation. But I cannot! I cannot! For if I keep this within me much longer I shall burst, so here I write, so frantically that even I can barely decipher my lines upon the page.

I am a weak-willed man, and must bend as the winds of fate see fit to guide me. I never thought myself thus until recently -- I regarded myself as a strong and able man in charge of his own destiny. A man of substance and respect in the world at large, a gentleman whom, I prided myself, not a few people looked up to and admired.

But if they knew! Oh, if they knew! For it is a sham, reader, a sham!

A man is the sum of his shame. The very best of men is only as good as the most base and debauched of his fantasies. There are some, perhaps -- a very few -- who can justly claim to be pure and above such thoughts, and I admire such individuals. But now, after all that I have learned about myself and my own desires, I come to wonder, can it be true? Are there really men whose thoughts are entirely pure, and are above such things? Are all the monks and vicars and philanthropists and fine and upstanding Gentlemen of all trades and descriptions merely putting on an act, a show? Is my guilty secret no more wicked than the rest of them? Are there others who are worse?

I believe it may be so. For I fear that all men -- every single one of us, to a man -- shares my guilt and my shame, and yet none of us will admit it. Perhaps you, unknown reader, know how I feel. Perhaps you can sympathise with my plight. Perhaps even now, you are nodding in understanding.

Or perhaps this is simply all so much waffle with which to attempt to justify myself. Out with it, man. You may be the most pathetic and broken of men, but you can at least face up to your fate, bite the bullet and proceed with the story.

Very well. This, reader, is my own personal shame. And all the greater shame is the fact that I delight in it, and it has given me the greatest, sweetest joys it is possible for a mortal man to know.

It began late last October. Perhaps, if you were at all familiar with London in the autumn of the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five, you may remember how particularly cold and foggy it became upon many an evening then. The fog clouded up the streets as if they had become blocked with bundles of wool, and the chill bit to the very bones of even the most practically-clothed.

It was upon just such an inhospitable evening, a Thursday, that I took a cab as usual to go and see the Colonel. Annabel had advised me not to go at all -- she had taken my hand and softly chided me, told me that it was freezing out and that I would do my constitution no good by being about in it. She had said the Colonel would understand my forgoing our Thursday night game at cards just this once.

Oh, how I wish I had paid her heed then!

But of course, being a foolish and arrogant man, I brushed aside her comments, told her I would be perfectly all right, and that I had no doubts about finding my way to the Colonel's new address. He had of late moved properties, and I had not visited him at his current abode -- however, I had the address, and saw no reason to doubt the sturdy London cabbie's ability to find his way there, even in the thick fog.

"Darling, are you sure?" Annabel asked me, peering out through the curtains into the gloom of the street. "It looks so awful out there. I am quite sure that the Colonel would understand."

"My dear, you worry so. It is no trouble! His new home is in any case closer than the old. I shall be back before midnight, I can assure you!"

I kissed her softly upon the forehead, brushing aside one or two strands of her silvery-blonde hair, and then took up my coat and went down onto the street, where our footman had already hailed a cab. The vehicle stood waiting, the driver rubbing his cold hands together while his horses stood implacable, their breath further clouding the air ahead of them.

"Number 11 Maple Street!" I called to the cabbie as my man helped me aboard, before wishing me a good evening. "Do you know the street?" I called, as the door was slammed shut.

"Like the back of my hand, sir," the man above assured me, before spurring his horses on and beginning our trek through the strangely-deserted streets of London town.

I had been going to the Colonel's house to play at cards almost every Thursday night for the past two years. He was not what you might call a sociable man, and not particularly clubbable, which was why he preferred to engage in what social activities he did partake in within the bounds of his own home.

We did not have much in common -- he was a few years older man than I, and limited his interests almost solely to the cricketing reports in The Times newspaper -- but he was a lonely all fellow and, for all his taciturn nature, I knew that he had been a good friend of my brother's in India. It was the Colonel, indeed, who many years before had brought home to us the news of my brother's death, killed by a native bullet in a nameless, sunbaked valley. The colonel too had known loss on the sub-continent. As a young man he had seen his extraordinarily pretty wife -- of whom a portrait still hung in his lonely home -- decay and succumb to fever there

Those who had known him that far back always said he had never been quite the same man since. Certainly, he had never forgiven the place for it.

So it was my pleasure so repay what kindness he had done my brother by keeping him company upon those Thursday evenings, and by from time to time acting in his interests in my capacity at Faunder & French, the bankers. I handled his account personally, and had often been in a position to turn matters of stocks and shares to his advantage, so despite my never having been a soldier -- he had contempt for most men who had no military background -- he treated me with a manner of gruff, reluctant respect.

Respect, I known now, I hardly deserved.

We made very slow time through those foggy streets that night, but that was only to be expected. By the time the carriage drew to a halt in what I was assured was Maple Street, however, it was already a quarter of nine, fifteen minutes later than the Colonel usually expected me. The fog was by this time so thick that one could barely see six inches in front of one's face, and I was somewhat dubious as to whether we had indeed arrived at the correct locale, so I drew the shutter down and spoke up to the cabbie.

"Have we arrived?"

"Aye sir, Maple Street, right enough. Number eleven just across the way, sir."

I looked at where I thought he had indicated -- it was so hard to tell in the fog -- and I could indeed just barely make out the shape of a house, one of a number in the new terrace that made up most of the street, a large building of light-coloured stone. There was a crescent of glass above the door, into which was set a coloured piece of typography denoting the number, which did indeed seem to indicate that we were standing outside of number eleven.

"Very well then."

I saw myself down from the vehicle, not wishing to incur any further delay. A tossed a sixpence up at the fellow in the driver's seat -- whether he could even see it or not in that weather I know not, but he did not protest or call out at all as I strode away from the cab, so I suppose he must have done. In any case, he trotted off into the distance and was soon swallowed up by the fog as I ascended the steps to the black door of the Colonel's new home.

The place was clearly quite well-to-do, as it had a pull for a bell mounted into a small recess alongside the door, in addition to the more traditional knocker so familiar to us all through the festive tales of Mr Dickens. I both pulled the bell-chord and gave the knocker a good thump to announce my presence, not wishing to be left waiting on the doorstep for too long. This was both because I had no desire to keep the Colonel waiting, and because it was damnably chilly out there in the open air.

That house could have been anywhere. It could have been floating at sea, it could have been in the middle of the countryside, it might have been on the plains of South Africa and I would not have known it in that fog. I fancied that had I had a knife about my person I could have reached out and sliced the atmosphere in two. These things we often read about in fictions, but I am here to tell you that it was as real as I sit here today. Perhaps it was portentous -- taking hold of the city as She was about to take hold of my life.

I do not recall now for how long I waited upon the step. A minute or perhaps two. Long enough for me to be shivering in the cold and to consider muttering a curse to the impromptness of his housekeeper, at any reckoning. I had even taken to walking up and down along the step in a vain attempt to keep some warmth within my bones, and consequently was not looking at the door when suddenly it opened, and the dim light of the turned-down gas lamps that lined the corridor within flowed out across the threshold.

I stood and turned and I do believe I stopped breathing for several seconds.

I had never seen such a beautiful creature in all my born days. She was such a young and slender little thing, nineteen if she was a day. Her smooth, shiny black hair flowed down like silk across her shoulders, which were covered by the velveteen material of the dark purple dress she wore, which in turn flowed and tumbled all the way to the thick-carpeted floor.

Her eyes were the most striking feature about her, however. They stood out like shining green gemstones against the pale white skin of her face. But it was not simply the physical features -- there was an essence, an aura to this girl -- no, this woman -- that had literally taken my breath away. The way she held herself, the slightly impatient, challenging, puzzled look upon her face, the unspoken questions of her eyes...

A quarter of a century in years and a gulf of unfamiliarity stood between this young Lady and I, but in an instant I knew that I should like to know her better. Without her even having said a word. I ached with the disappointed knowledge that I never would know her better, that I had arrived upon this Earth some twenty-five years too early to be any kind of suitor to her.

A suitor! Fancy it! The recollection of my darling wife at home came flooding back to me, and with it came the shame, but the shame was all the greater because I could feel a base, debauched excitement stirring within my loins.

"Yes?"

The question was impatient and clinical. Her accent was cut-glass English, the cream of the crop, and it was very clear from her speech and deportment that this was no housekeeper, nor any other kind of serving maid. This puzzled me -- the Colonel, so far as I knew, had no family who might fit her description. No daughters for sure, and no niece nor God-child who might perhaps be visiting. And in any case, why would such a person of distinction answer their own front door, never mind that of a house in which they were staying as a guest?

"I am sorry, Ma'am...." I bowed slightly as I spoke, and yes! Another thrill went through me as I dipped my head before her, sweeping off my hat and swooping it low in my hand. The thrill of subservience, of showing her that I deferred to her, even as I stood out in the cold and she at home in the warmth. Even though I was the Man of the World and she, supposedly as society might have it, the mere slip of a girl. Only ordinary polite behaviour, you might think, but it was the manner in which she looked at me with such dispassion and even contempt that stirred something deep within my soul.

Oh my poor, disgraced, sinful soul!

"Do you intend to complete that sentence, sir, or are you going to keep me waiting upon my doorstep with the cold coming into my house all night?"

The sharpness with which she directed those words at me, the tone in which she used the supposedly honorific 'sir' left me in little doubt as to the amount of respect I had managed to attain in her eyes upon this first, strange meeting. Instantly I was eager to make amends, desperate to try and find favour with this unknown Woman without knowing why I was so keen to seek her approval.

"I apologise most sincerely, my Lady, I fear that I may perhaps have the wrong house. I am looking for number eleven Maple Street. Would I be correct in assuming that this is not that address?"

I looked hopefully at her, optimistic that my repentant tone of words might have smoothed matters over, but the expression upon her face made me feel smaller and more worthless than ever.

"Well obviously not, you cretin," she told me harshly. "This is number twenty-two. I know the fog is thick out tonight, sir, but I cannot help but feel the numbers above the door might have been something of a clue."

I stood back and gaped up at the numbers. Sure enough, I realised that I had indeed been mistaken upon my first glance at them from within the carriage. Instead of two 1s, the stylised writing set into the glass above the door was in fact a representation of a double instance of the number 2. This was number 22, some way along the street from the address which I sought.

"Forgive me, my Lady," I said, bowing again, much more deeply upon this occasion. "I have made a more grievous error. This is indeed not the house for which I was looking. I hope you will forgive my error, and allow me to depart and return you to your repose."

The young Lady shook her head slowly. This was most unexpected. As was her stepping forward to stand mere inches in front of me, framed in the doorway, her eyes locked upon mine and her hands placed very carefully upon my hips. She looked me up and down, and then ran her tongue slowly across her pale pink lips in a manner that... In a manner that...

Oh it shamed me! I admit it! I admit all! I could think only of lust, of fornication. I was hers at that instant, I confess, so utterly hers.

"Erm... No, my Lady?" I asked. My mouth was very dry, and it was so difficult to speak. She smiled then, and I swear to you reader it was both the most wondrous and at the same time the most chilling expression I ever saw pass across a fellow human being's face. But what thrills it gave me! Why, I was almost trembling! And I am now, to think back upon it. I fear you shall have difficulty in reading my hand from this point on.

"I desire you to stay a while," she told me, her voice leaving no doubt at all that I had no option or say in the matter.