They may have appeared uptight and respectable, but beneath the starched collars and long rustling crinolines, the Victorians were obsessed with sex. In fact, if Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac, the biography of Henry Spencer Ashbee, is anything to go by, what typified the era was an explosion of exploratory erotic writing in all its manifestations.
In 1900 an unusual offer was made to the trustees of the British Museum in London. A recently deceased rich Englishman had bequeathed his collection of books and illustrations of Don Quixote to the nation, but with a condition: that the museum also take and preserve for posterity his vast library of erotic books in numerous languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, even Latin.
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