The volumed book, extracting the key elements from the original magazine includes six serialised novels, limericks, poems, and songs, racking in at over 600 pages of material—roughly the length of British modernist classic Wolf Solent. As an underground magazine, the book was distributed by mail-order in an attempt to by-pass the strictures of British publishing, which maintained strict censorship laws. Erotica and pornography of every type was strictly forbidden, not just unpublishable, but criminally punishable in a court of law. Divorce was out of the question for most married couples in England as divorce was a costly and lengthy process, but to obtain a divorce, one had to go through parliament to have the marriage annulled up until 1857. The main citation for divorce was, in the 19th century, adultery. Homosexuality was a criminal offence, and would be for many years to come, with Oscar Wilde’s ‘indecency’ trial taking place fifteen years after the publication of The Pearl.

They had a limited printrun with only 150 copies of each magazine were printed for each instalment. Magazines, such as this, relied on the contributions to pack out the content with a variety of textual formats; from serialised novels to dirty limericks. It was also an expensive magazine compared to other, more widely available magazines at the time, selling for over £25—which adjusted to today’s inflation, is over £3,000! As such, it’s readership was targeted towards a narrower and ostensibly wealthier readership. Many of The Pearl’s narratives reflect its affluent audience, with the incense-laden boudoirs and expansive garden grounds of the immeasurably monied used as recurrent backdrops to the salacious contents held within its pages. Most, if not all, of the novels and lengthier narratives within the erotic compendium are situated in these ‘aspirational’ settings of the rich and powerful. This reveals much about the book itself, as well as the culture it was produced within. Unstitched from the monetary reality of the anguishing poverty that most Britons faced, the prosperous classes had the time to commit to adultery, ‘cuckoldry’ (a word used more often than I’ve ever seen before in my entire reading life within this one book), flagellation, and general sexual escapades of a Miltonian order.

But it isn’t necessarily the content that surprised me when leafing through this battered book; I have traipsed through other similar Victorian erotica in my time, and there was nothing within it—thematically or otherwise—that surprised me. I knew that flagellation and corporal punishment was a frequent object of fetishistic erotic desire within Victorian erotica, I knew about the frequent turn to exoticised, racist tropes of sexuality would become abound, I knew about the misogyny that no matter where you turn would saturate the pages of extinct erotica like oil to cloth. It was the form that left me, in those twilit moments when you lay your mind to rest and the sudden colours of the surface’s available to imagination burst forth in rays of light, and it is the form that compelled me to write this in the first place.

As a serialised book, a compendium of sorts, the book itself contains several novellas within it. The two that have fascinated me endlessly since I picked this beaten book up are: Miss Coote’s Confession and Lady Pokingham. Both of these narratives are intriguing to me beyond their thematic content, but for credences sake, I think it’s important to discuss them briefly. Miss Coote’s Confession is an epistolary style novel which recounts the eponymous Miss Coote’s experiences of flagellation at home from a male parental figure and at school, addressed to her younger maid. Lady Pokingham is stylised as a “found text” memoir, in which the Lady Pokingham (the name itself being a sexual innuendo) recounts her erotic encounters from her consumptive wheelchair-bound present. Lady Pokingham in particular is rife with tales of whipping, but also lacquered thick with queer under-and-overtones. As an interesting aside, it’s commonly thought that this novel was written by the Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, although most of this evidence is circumstantial.

If there is one major thematic through line that strings together the variegated texts within the book; it is that of flagellation. If you have ever delved anywhere near the world of Victorian erotica and pornography, then you’ll be well accustomed to knowing that flagellation (whipping, more colloquially), was one of the most common expressions of ‘deviant’ sexuality found within magazine and literary culture. Whipping and tight-lacing, notably, were mainstays in erotic divulging. This has always interested me. Flagellation, of course, is still a pretty common sexual practice. You can very much still find contemporary erotica focused on this form of sexual practice, from magazines to online BDSM video content. In Victorian England, contemporarily to The Pearl, the use of corporal punishment was a widely accepted practice in polite society. Whipping and flogging were common expressions of punishment, even for children. Most individual’s first experience with flagellation or spanking would have been as children, experiencing as a form of punishment from an authority figure such as a teacher or a parent. Corporal punishment in schools was not outlawed until as late as 1987 in the UK, and much later for the privately educated. It is perhaps relatively unsurprising, then, that so much of the Victorian stamp of erotic delight is rooted in corporal punishment. The constricting measures of that society, so welded to a rigidity in class and prestige, so thoroughly supremacist in its racism and exploitation of the world, that expressions of deviant sexuality re-contextualised the components of that society into erotic pleasure. What was once a tool of cruel punishment gets transformed, through that umbrageous force of time, into a thrilling exaltation of pleasure.

Sontag, in her essay The Pornographic Imagination, writes that ‘pornography is a theatre of types, not individuals’ that which ‘drives a wedge’ between ‘one’s existence as a full human being and one’s existence as a sexual being’. Erotica of this typology necessarily depends on an unfastening from a holistic sense of selfhood to a selfhood predominantly fixated on expressions of ‘extreme’ sexuality. In pornographic and erotic works, such as The Pearl, character’s selfhoods are presented through their individual sexual proclivities. Characterisations are replaced with specific sexual fantasies. Pornography becomes the realm of psychic representation, much in the way the inception of the novel throughout the 16th and 17th centuries aimed to divulge the inner world, pornography narrows this scope even further to exposing the inner world that births sexual desire. Sontag’s essay, found nestled at the end of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Bataille’s Story of the Eye, discusses how the literary expressions of the pornographic and the erotica trend towards expressions of extremity in erotic ecstasy, but also, how this extremity can be depersonalising in the wake of its sheer sublime power.

But it isn’t necessarily the content that surprised me when leafing through this battered book; I have traipsed through other similar Victorian erotica in my time, and there was nothing within it—thematically or otherwise—that surprised me. I knew that flagellation and corporal punishment was a frequent object of fetishistic erotic desire within Victorian erotica, I knew about the frequent turn to exoticised, racist tropes of sexuality would become abound, I knew about the misogyny that no matter where you turn would saturate the pages of extinct erotica like oil to cloth. It was the form that left me, in those twilit moments when you lay your mind to rest and the sudden colours of the surface’s available to imagination burst forth in rays of light, and it is the form that compelled me to write this in the first place.

As a serialised book, a compendium of sorts, the book itself contains several novellas within it. The two that have fascinated me endlessly since I picked this beaten book up are: Miss Coote’s Confession and Lady Pokingham. Both of these narratives are intriguing to me beyond their thematic content, but for credences sake, I think it’s important to discuss them briefly. Miss Coote’s Confession is an epistolary style novel which recounts the eponymous Miss Coote’s experiences of flagellation at home from a male parental figure and at school, addressed to her younger maid. Lady Pokingham is stylised as a “found text” memoir, in which the Lady Pokingham (the name itself being a sexual innuendo) recounts her erotic encounters from her consumptive wheelchair-bound present. Lady Pokingham in particular is rife with tales of whipping, but also lacquered thick with queer under-and-overtones. As an interesting aside, it’s commonly thought that this novel was written by the Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, although most of this evidence is circumstantial.

Here’s the element that has, since I first wandered into the realm of erotica over half a decade ago to the present moment of writing, fascinated me most about the formal contrivances of literary erotica. No matter the time period, no matter the form, no matter the espousal of whichever or whatever typology of sexuality, erotica finds itself time and time again explored primarily through the kaleidoscopic lenses of personal memory. Try hard as I might, search far and wide, and there are scant literary titles that attempt to encapsulate the present moment of pleasure or seduction or erotic ecstasy. Even The Story of the Eye, is orchestrated around the human drama of memory. Titles which are not explicitly constructed around memory, such as The Story of O, whilst not immediately concerned with memory in and of itself, are wholly concerned with representation and optics— staging human sexuality into the ‘theatre of types’. The opening of The Story of O recounts the same scenario from two different third-person perspectives. The font of written sexuality diverges into two main streams of textuality: memory and archetypes. Either literary erotica travels down the long-edged knife of an individual’s memory, or, it necessarily aims to produce a fractal mirror of human selfhood. The memorialised quality of erotica and pornography is the key to the Pandora’s box of human, fleshy, bodily sensuality. Describing the immediate, the pulse and lifeblood of the here and now, feels to most near impossible to articulate. In the throes of an exchange between lovers, language dissipates from our tongues and our minds, leaves our bodies through the sweat that builds up on our brows and clavicles. We are left only with our memories of the events of pleasure; the memories of the touch of skin, the smell of hair, the waves of pleasure rippling through the system. We are often left hollowed.

Perhaps this is why erotica finds itself so neatly seamed with the world of perfume. Perfume, for all its qualities, transcribes a certain secretive elegiac memory in its presence. We all know that the olfactory sense carries with it our unique ability to detect and trace our histories in its wake; the smell of a certain flower which reminds us of home, the smell of the other’s clavicle, the smell of a pastry that reminds us of our fragile and long-torn youth. Erotica also swallows the domain of memory whole. So many expressions of erotic desire and tension trend towards the elegiac memory to espouse the deeper meaning, the inner working, the secret philosophies of desire. Desire is both conscious and unconscious, intuitive and learned. If we were René Girard, we would say that desire is triangular, formulated through an unconscious need to mirror those that we envy, or those that we admire. If we were Byung-Chul Han, we would say that the otherness of the other is what fuels eros and love, and the dissolution of otherness leads us to replace eroticism with vapid consumption. If we were Anne Carson, we’d note that desire is almost always rooted in a searching, a reaching out for an other, a knowledge that we can never fully know what it is, or who it is, that we are reaching for. Eros’ death-knell lies in this constancy of otherness, of never truly knowing the mind, body, or soul of another. Without otherness there can be no eros and there can be no desire. Perfume is desire—and erotica’s—bedfellow for this reason. Perfume cultivates an aura of mystery, a piquing of interest. Our sense of smell, different from our other senses, as lucidly illustrated by Christos Karageorgos in Viscose Journal, is one of urgency. Your sense of smell is a device that is able to pick up in subtle changes in the immediate atmosphere. It’s for this reason that it’s near impossible to recall or define the smell of your own home. When exposed, over a long-period of time, to a specific aura of scent, your senses become cajoled into placability—but when something in this environment changes, as in when you light a candle, or spray some perfume, your senses are able to detect this change with a sense of immediacy. Perfume’s impact on our senses can, in this way, be described as a procedural eroticism. The smell of another, triggered in our senses through this production of difference, constructs a sense of desire. Scents that we find intriguing or sensual on another necessarily creates desire through the essential otherness that perfume creates, by altering your skin and senses. You have cultivated an air of urgency every time you douse yourself in fragrance. Every time you go to put on a specific scent, you invite the senses of others into the aura of your being. Think of when you’re walking through a busy street, and the cooking-smell of food wafts its way into the vaporous air, and without realising you were hungry your stomach begins to growl and twist and turn.

It’s in this way that perfume and erotica seem to stitch themselves together in such synchronous harmony. Smell is able to call back to distant memories that perhaps you thought you once lost, or rather, were not consciously keeping. I met my dear friend last week, and on giving them a greeting hug, the smell of their clothes instantly reminded me of my aunt. I did not realise that her smell had lodged itself into my memory until that moment. But there I was, in front of a museum I had seldom never been into although my daily walks take me past it, with a dear friend I had not seen in a while, taken back to my aunt’s little yellow bungalow on the far reach of the western Irish coast.

Erotica trends towards expressions of intimacy through the lens of memory. Embodied erotic memories filter through the entire lexicon of erotic writings; from the frenzied and mystical eroticism of John Donne to the Victorian tight-lacers and the contemporary trappings of sexuality put forward by Mary Gaitskill. Including the work in The Pearl, which frequently anoints the scaffolds of memory as the key to unlocking the depths of erotic desire. Even a work such as The Pearl, a literary pornographic magazine published over 145 years ago, expresses through its narratives, this explicit connection between expressions of sexual desire and the quality of human memory. Picking up this book now, leafing through its yellowed pages, gazing at the pink-script of the press’ membership access to the entire collection of Sade’s literature, I try to conjure the image of its first owner, I try to conjure the image of the faceless phantasm on the internet from whom I purchased it from, but I’ll never know. I’ll never know the faces of those people, or feel their hands the way I can feel my own, but I can imagine what they might have been dreaming of, reading those lines and feeling how it says something about us all, in the end.

Erotica’s use of memory calls to question the nature of desire as an ever-reaching and ever-out of reach construct. Memory is changing, subjective, volatile. It represents an ever-out-of-reach for the momentary and the now. It is difficult to articulate the pleasures of the flesh in their intimate and immediate moments, the fleeting raw edges of sensual experience are frayed by the immediacy of sensual contact. It is only through memory that we are able to put language to an experience that remains, in a certain way, necessarily unknowable to us. The unknowing is what draws us in, the otherness, the experience of the other. Perfume’s ability to amplify these elements of passion and desire is owing to its ultimately mimetic power.

The Pearl’s Lady Pokingham, bound to her wheelchair and disabled by the encroaching death of tuberculosis, etches through memory the past jolts of fervent erotic desire. It is only through her memories she can access the pleasures of the flesh. Perfume anoints the flesh and amplifies pleasure, leaving traces of your person wherever you go. In the flashes of erotic pleasure, fleeting and momentary, the memories of encounters are only bolstered by the lingering traces of scent, the sultry waves of pleasure layered on the skin that saturates the air. You can smell these moments of pleasures in random encounters with others, through the streets of the city or the sluices and fens of the countryside, picking up trace whispers of eroticism through an association of scent. The embrace of another can be felt in the air. Sensorial, passionate, othering—perfume’s sticky relation to erotica represents through scent, the way that erotica clings hopelessly to realm of memory—the realm of traces, of forgotten histories, of lovers lost and spent, of tears cried, of ecstasies fleeting.