Ian Gibson first made his mark with a biography of Federico Lorca, followed by another of Lorca's one-time friend and later traducer, the unpleasant Salvador Dali. Both were brilliant choices, especially since much of Lorca's life - especially his last days - was then still obscure and his homosexuality, while known or at least surmised, was not publicly discussed. In the present book, however, Gibson has moved from 20thcentury Spain to Victorian England, and to quite an obscure figure at that, Henry Spencer Ashbee. Among the legions of Minor Victorians, Ashbee seems anonymous and colourless, one more bearded face among the crowd. Only his erotic obsessions make him interesting, and it is on them that Gibson largely focusses.
Ashbee was born in London in 1834, the offspring of a long line of Kentish yeomen, though his father was the manager of a gunpowder factory. He was given a good schooling but did not go on to Oxford or Cambridge; instead, he launched into a business career, starting as an estate agent. His father was literary-minded and a self-improver in the Victorian style, reading aloud to his family everything from Byron to Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying - which did not prevent him from having a mistress and an unacknowledged second family. Young Henry travelled a good deal on the Continent, partly for pleasure and partly to learn foreign languages, including French, German and Spanish. He intermittently kept a diary of these trips, which shows a very English type of priggishness along with a curious mixture of almost lubricious sexual curiosity and conventional prudery.
His reactions abroad are fairly typical for a man of his class and background. Visiting Gibraltar, he writes: "What native of Britain can look at Gibraltar without feeling how great is his nation and without being thankful that he is an Englishman?" Yet he was enchanted by Spain, or at least by the gypsy dancers he watched in Seville - "what a strange people these gitanos and gitanas are, and how remarkable are their dances!" He disapproved of the Mannequin Pis in Brussels and was easily upset by lapses in social decorum, while at the same time recording appreciatively the semi-underground pleasures of bachelor life in Paris. At 28, Ashbee married a Hamburg Jewess whom he had presumably met on a professional trip abroad. She brought money with her and Ashbee, who had a natural business sense, went into the import-and-export trade and soon became a rich man as well as the father of a family.
His business often took him abroad, and it seems to have been in Paris that he first got the itch to collect erotic books and erotica in general. To keep them apart from his wife and relatives, he took a suite of rooms in Holborn where he and his similar-minded friends met regularly for erotomaniac get-togethers. There were plenty of them in Victorian London, including the poet Swinburne who was a regular patron of an establishment where resident ladies birched their clients, or alternatively were birched by them. (It is, in fact, a milieu of which we have had rather too much in recent years.)
Ashbee detested Victorian prudery and took French sexual liberty as his guide, but he kept his proclivities private and well away from his daily life. He worked secretly on a compilation which he called Index Librorum Prohibitorum - shades of the Papal Index - and had it printed in a small edition at great expense. It is, as could be guessed from the title, a list of erotic literature with commentaries added, and Ashbee, a competent Latinist like most Victorian public-school products, signed it "Pisanus Fraxi". It seems to have become, in its specialised way, a kind of underground classic. Ashbee was by now an erotomaniac on a European scale, corresponding regularly with cronies in Paris, Brussels and other cities.
A cultured man, he was a regular theatre-goer and concertgoer, as well as a collector of paintings with emphasis on the English watercolour school. The Pre-Raphaelites did not attract him, however, and he found Rossetti's paintings of women no more than "morbid affectation and unreality applied in one fixed and undeviating manner". In 1880, aged 46, he set out alone on a world tour which took him to Egypt, India, Ceylon, Penang, Singapore, Java, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Peking, Japan and, finally, the United States. His reactions were again fairly predictable: he detested the Chinese whom he found dirty and treacherous, he thought some Indian sculptures "lewd in the extreme", watched a kind of striptease dance in Tokyo, and found virtually everything in America brash, vulgar and tasteless. American women, in particular, he considered pushy and aggressive, and he developed a special detestation of American Blacks. A book on his travels was planned but never written, which is scarcely a loss.
Nevertheless, he was an erudite man who wrote learnedly on certain areas, including Cervantes and Don Quixote, for which he collected illustrations; and his knowledge of the subject was good enough for him to be honoured by the Spanish Royal Academy. Ashbee was also a dining-out friend of a number of literary men, including Sir Richard Burton, whose version of The Arabian Nights he reviewed favourably. However, his late years were soured by marital break-up, the details of which were obscure, though it seems that his wife Elizabeth decamped from his household, taking the children with her. Rumour had it that she had discovered the existence of a second, clandestine menage, but it is equally probable that her unbalanced worship of their eldest son Charles - who was homosexual - provoked a rift. At any rate, Ashbee took his revenge by cutting his family out of the bequests from his substantial fortune when he died, aged 66.
His books and paintings went to the British Museum, and the books in themselves caused a good deal of heart-searching, since they included many volumes of erotica as well as valuable editions of classics and rare items. Eventually, most of the erotic books were destroyed, the museum took what it wanted - including Peruvian vases - and handed back some unwanted Egyptian and other antiquities. Ashbee's paintings, mainly watercolours, were a windfall since they included works by Turner, Cox, Bonington, Rowlandson, Peter de Wint - in fact, all the great names in watercolour art. His cutting his wife and children out of his will, however, enraged or embittered many people and left a bad smell which lingered for years.
SO MUCH for Ashbee's life, which was successful but unremarkable - little more, in effect, than a footnote to the teeming panorama of Victorian intellectual and social life. However, Gibson has reserved his trump card to the end; he believes Ashbee was the real author of the erotic classic My Secret Life, for many years on the non legenda lists but now easily available in paperback. The narrator is a certain "Walter" whose real identity has been sought for decades, without success. The book is strewn with apparent clues, yet they do not add up to enough evidence to secure a conviction.
Gibson, however, believes that it is not autobiographical at all, but is really a work of fiction or sexual fantasy. Perhaps so, but does it matter greatly? Books like My Secret Life, once they become publicly available, quickly lose their mystique, and having tried a volume or two of it myself, in the end I found "Walter's" incessant copulation as monotonous as the biography of a stamp-collector. Admittedly, however, it does bring an extra dimension into Ashbee's otherwise rather colourless life and personality, which even a seasoned writer like Gibson has found it hard to resurrect.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic