Memoirs of the life of Fanny Hill, or, The career of a Woman of Pleasure: Illustrated with Colour Plates

Publisher’s black textured cloth with the title to the upper board. Backstrip appears to have been relaid. Coloured frontispiece opposite title page which has the bookseller’s stamp of ‘Dorsan and Co’ of West Norwood in south London. (The only reference we can find to this bookseller is in relation to publication of a contraceptive guide in the early 1900s.) The book is printed on cheap paper which has browned uniformly, pp125, with eight coloured woodcuts. The text is divided into two parts, with a second title page, and apparently abridged from Cleland’s 1749 text - as expected from an anonymous edition like this. In truth, a very clean copy.

Fanny Hill was written while the author was in a debtors' prison and first published in 1748 and 1749. It is considered the first English prose pornography: Ashbee, H.S. Catena librorum tacendorum, v. 3, p. 70

OCLC: 50498943: Cambridge & UCLA, Illinois, Harvard, Princeton, Western