"oral sex" among the Victorians

[Jonathan Lighter]

Since OED can date "sex" as "sexual intercourse" only to 1929, one is skeptical of the Rev. Dodgson's using the term thus in 1882.

  Maybe the date is correct, but the circumstance reminds me of three other "too good to be true" cases, which turned out not to be true.

  1. The Mexican officer Jose Enrique de la Pen~a seems to have kept a diary before, during, and after the siege of the Alamo.  In it he records the capture and immediate execution of David Crockett. The manuscript diary came to light in 1955 and was subjected to rigorous tests.  Fifty years later, it's still not certain whether it's genuine.
  http://www.geocities.com/the_tarins@sbcglobal.net/adp/archives/documents/pena.html


  2. This book, http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1852276770 , while itself not a hoax, gives the details of the stunning discovery of a pocket watch once belonging to Jack the Ripper.  Into its case it are carved the names the Ripper's victims, etc. An incredible breakthrough if true, but it turns out that the watch itself is almost unquestionably a fake.

  3. This book :  http://www.ansible.co.uk/books/account.html.  A playful but extremely skillful hoax.  Langford pretended that he was editing the manuscript of a 19th C. relative that describes a Victorian  "close encounter"  with spacemen.  I have read that he went so far as to check his entire vocabulary against the OED so as to avoid any obvious verbal anachronisms.  (Certainly I couldn't find any ! )  The "author's" 19th C. attitudes and mannerisms all ring true, etc., etc. Langford frankly admitted the hoax later, observing that he'd left a big clue for anyone used to evaluating published "forgotten" manuscripts.  While he was careful to include a photo of himself pointing the hidden drawer in the old desk in which he supposedly found his relative's manuscript, he pointedly did not include any photos of the manuscript itself.  (The desk, the hidden compartment, and the relative, Mr. Loosley, were real, BTW.)

  Oh, yeah, there's Piltdown Man. the Vinland Map, and the Shroud of Turin. I forgot those.

  JL

  George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: George Thompson
Subject: "oral sex" among the Victorians
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other day I was looking at a history in Italian of pornographic
photography.

You may ask, perhaps, why was I looking at a history in Italian of
pornographic photography? You may indeed ask, and I may answer, or
maybe not. I think not. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The book includes reproductions of 8 or 10 pages of a remarkable album
purportedly given in 1882 as a wedding present to "Christine Horly",
an English prostitute, by Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson). The book
cites a diary kept by Horly as the source of Carroll's name, but does
not indicate the present whereabouts of either the diary or the
album. (p. 91)

The pages of the album are collages of decoupage, images and
ornamental letters cut from magazines (I suppose), and obscene
photographs. There are also words and
phrases written among the images, usually repetitively and in
patterns. Sometimes a phrase appears in mirror handwriting. One of
the pages includes lines from Jabberwocky. Whoever put this album
together was a bit odd.

But to our muttons. The OED's earliest citiation for "oral sex" is
1959, from the American Journal of Sociology. A page of this album
that holds 5 images, one, cut from some source, showing 2 fully
clothed people kissing, and 4 obscene photos. One of the photos has
been cut to remove all the background that had surrounded the
figures. A corner of the remaining image is outlined with the
words "oral sex", written 3 times. The phrase appears again a bit to
the left of the photo: an ornamental "O", the rest handwritten. Also
connected with this particular photograph is the
word "postillionage". (p. 107)

I'd be happier with more information about this album, and a sharper
reproduction of the page (purely for philological purposes, of
course). The association with Carroll requires further investigation,
to say the least. But the date certainly seems believable, or roughly
right, anyway.

The book is Storia della fotografia pornografia, by Ando Gilardi,
publ. by Bruno Mondadori, of Milano, 2002, in the series Sintesi.
It's available in better libraries everywhere. The author maintains a
website for a "Fototeca storica nazionale Ando Gilardi", open to
subscribers, but offering free one-week passes to visitors.
http://www.fototeca-gilardi.com/ I have not entered this site, but
note that the homepage includes a subsection "Erotismo". There is
other stuff on him in Google. He seems to have been publishing books
on photography since 1960.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.




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