Chapter 6, Branding Birth Control, examines how birth-controllers used claims about medical works’ vulnerability to destruction under the Hicklin test to distance contraception from immorality, frame its advocacy as a free speech issue, and generate publicity for the cause. Contraception pamphlets first published by radicals in the 1820s and 1830s had long been sold by both social reformers and pornographers. In 1876, a figure with feet in both domains was arrested for selling Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). The following year, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh engineered their own arrest for selling it. The chapter examines the selective publication history that Bradlaugh and Besant constructed to divorce Fruits from its associations with promoscuity and promote contraception advocacy as a respectable, progressive cause, and shows that birth-controllers went on to sell huge volumes of literature on contraception. Although they encountered relatively little legal opposition, they often claimed that selling such works was very risky. These claims operated as a way of generating further publicity for the cause, and branding it as brave, modern, and progressive.

Chapter 7, Be Careful about the Publisher, examines how the diverse sources, distribution networks, and audiences associated with sexology undermined Havelock Ellis’s attempts to frame his book on homosexuality with John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897), as a serious medical work, and led to its appearance in the obscenity trial R. v. Bedborough (1898). Authorities charged Bedborough aiming to break up a radical group, but sexologists and their allies framed the trial as an ignorant attack on scientific progress. Elaborating on strategies pioneered by birth-controllers, they argued that the censorship of “naturalistic” sexual expression had mired society in sexual ignorance, fostering “abnormal” sexual behaviour and an appetite for pornography, the rightful target of obscenity laws. In positioning their own work as vital to society and pornography as a product of sexual science’s suppression, they obfuscated ways in which early sexologists relied on pornographers and their products. By examining sexologists’ attempts to navigate these issues, this chapter further demonstrates how arguments about obscenity were used tactically to sanitize sexual knowledge and its producers.

While exploring how specialist medical publishers and regular practitioners worked together to publish and advertise medical works on sexual matters, Chapter 3, Publishing for Professional Advantage, shows that the boundaries between communicating knowledge, promoting expertise, and trading on medical eroticism were not just blurry in contexts of the pornography trade and irregular medical practice. They were also blurry in regular medicine. Works on reproduction and sexual health issued by medical publishers were often textually similar to those issued by pornographers and irregulars, worked up using similar techniques, advertised, and distributed to non-medical readers in similar ways, and, regular practitioners often argued, for similar purposes. The chapter explores how and why these overlaps aroused particular concern among groups that advocated radical reforms to the medical profession. Rather than seeking to discipline regular medical publishing, however, reformers initially took a different route: they launched campaigns aimed at stamping out irregular practitioners’ trade in sexual health manuals.

Chapter 2, Stereotyped Knowledge, examines irregular practitioners’ global trade in cheap manuals on venereal disease, sexual debility, and fertility problems. While previous scholarship has largely focused on these manuals’ lurid depictions of weakened male bodies, this chapter emphasizes their origins in respected publications: often calling themselves “consulting surgeons,” a term from hospital practice, irregular practitioners combined verbatim sections from textbooks and treatises aimed at medics with snippets from works in other genres to construct their own “popular treatises.” Some of these productions were issued in several different languages and circulated around the globe. At home and abroad, they offered readers an affordable means of acquiring modern information about sex reproduction, derived from the science of anatomy, and their authors a means of cultivating trust in their expertise and advertising more expensive products and services. Examining other medical practitioners’ responses, this chapter argues that these manuals and their makers were seen as both an economic and existential threat to regular medicine.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

The conclusion, Victorian Ignorance, places the history that Selling Sexual Knowledge has traced into conversation with the emergence of a new history of sexual knowledge at the dawn of the twentieth century. While considering how well publishing activities that the book explores would have served Victorian readers, it argues that the ways Victorians discussed their reading experiences evince what the historian Kate Fisher has called an “epistemology of sexual ignorance,” in which sexual knowledge is thought of as a set of facts that must be learned through interaction with an expert. It further argues that commercial and rhetorical practices explored in the book not only encouraged this way of conceptualizing sexual knowledge, but helped foster the emergence of a historical narrative about Victorian censorship that would serve as a powerful justification for sexual-scientific research and sex reform movements in the twentieth century. At the same time, this narrative would obfuscate the extent to which Victorians enjoyed access to sexual information in the new age of mass print.

Chapter 4, Obscene… in a Certain Sense, shows how charges of obscenity were used against pornographers and irregulars during the 1850s and 1860s, amid landmark changes to obscenity law. In doing so, it introduces one of the book’s major arguments: that allegations of medical obscenity were usually tactical, and became increasingly imbricated in projects aimed at contesting medical authority. The most influential anti-vice group of the period, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, led a crackdown on the pornography trade during this period, which brought medical works into the courtroom, and some were destroyed on the grounds that they were obscene. The chapter parallels arguments that medical works could be obscene in court with tactics in the medical press. With mixed success, campaigns against “obscene quackery” attacked irregular practitioners who treated sexual issues by arguing that their manuals’ low prices and wide circulation made them a threat to public morals. The chapter ends with the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test, a legal test of obscenity that affirmed that arguments examined in this chapter could justify the destruction of medical works.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.