Frances Wilson
Strange Rumblings in the Cannibal Club
Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
By Deborah Lutz
W W Norton & Co 336pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Pleasure Bound is organised around the lives and work of the most prominent members of two bohemian societies, the Aesthetes – which consisted of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite associates – and the Cannibal Club, a dining society founded by the explorer, sexologist and uber-male iconoclast Richard Burton. From these two bodies sprang, as Deborah Lutz puts it, ‘most of the sexually themed writing and painting … of the latter half of the nineteenth century’. The art of the Pre-Raphaelites gave us the eroticisation of death and melancholy and the blurring of genders, while the Cannibal Club, formed in 1863 as an offshoot of the Anthropological Society, brought together scientists, writers, intellectuals and pornographers – including Richard Monckton Milnes, previously a suitor to Florence Nightingale – to ‘encourage one another in personal and artistic investigations into the outer reaches of human sexuality’.
It is the collaborative nature of the work of these groups that interests Lutz. While sharing their houses, studios and women, the Aesthetes produced poems about one another’s paintings and paintings about one another’s
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw