John Cleland

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John Cleland (baptised September 24, 1709 – January 23, 1789) was an English novelist most famous and infamous as the author of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

John Cleland was the oldest son of William Cleland (1673/4 – 1741) and Lucy Cleland. He was born in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey but grew up in London, where his father was first an officer in the British Army and then a civil servant. William Cleland was a friend to Alexander Pope, and Lucy Cleland was a friend or acquaintance of both Pope, Viscount Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, and Horace Walpole. The family possessed good finances and moved among the finest literary and artistic circles of London.

John Cleland entered Westminster School in 1721, but he left or was expelled in 1723. His departure was not for financial reasons, but whatever misbehavior or allegation had led to his departure is unknown. Historian J. H. Plumb speculates that Cleland's puckish and quarrelsome nature was to blame, but, whatever caused Cleland to leave, he entered the British East India Company after leaving school. He began as a soldier and worked his way up into the civil service of the company and lived in Bombay from 1728 to 1740. He returned to London when recalled by his father, who was dying. Upon William's death, the estate went to Lucy for administration. She, in turn, did not choose to support John (and Cleland's two brothers had finished at Westminster and gone on to support themselves).

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[edit] Publication of Fanny Hill

John Cleland began courting the Portuguese to found a Portuguese East India Company, but he never got a commitment from them. In 1748, Cleland was arrested for an £840 debt (equivalent to a purchasing power of about £100,000 in 2005) and put in Fleet Prison, where he remained for over a year. It was while in prison that Cleland wrote and had published Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which was published in two installments, in November of 1748 and February of 1749. In March of that year, he was released from prison.

In November of 1749, Cleland was arrested, along with the publishers and printer of Fanny Hill. In court, Cleland disavowed the novel and said that he could only "wish, from my Soul," that the book be "buried and forgot" (Sabor). The book was officially withdrawn at that point. It was, therefore, never legally published again for over a hundred years. However, it continued to sell well and to be published in pirate editions. The official withdrawal meant that there was little authority over the text, so, when a pirate edition inserted a new, celebratory episode of male homosexuality, there was little to be done by the author. In March of 1750, Cleland produced a highly bowdlerized version of the book, but it, too, was prosecuted. The prosecution may have been, as Plumb suggests, for the pirated edition with sodomy in it, for the prosecution against Cleland was dropped, and the expurgated edition continued to sell legally.

[edit] Later writing

Cleland's obituary in the Monthly Review said that he had been granted a government annuity of one hundred pounds to prevent his writing further obscenity for pay. However, no record of this has been found, and it is frankly doubtful. It is more likely that the report was invented by his eulogist. However, Cleland was celebrated for the quality of Fanny Hill, even if the work was no longer for sale in a legal edition in its entirety. Cleland became friends with David Garrick, and James Boswell sought out his company.

Regardless of the power and stylistic accomplishment of Fanny Hill, Cleland's other works were poor or journeyman in comparison. After his release from prison and the prosecutions over Fanny Hill, Cleland became a hired author. He attempted two more novels, Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), which contains a parody of Mary Wortley Montagu as "Lady Bell Travers" that was much discussed, and The Woman of Honour (1768), as well as a collection of romance tales in The Surprises of Love (1764). None of these was particularly successful, either in literary or popular terms.

He attempted a tragedy, Titus Vespasian, in 1755 and two comedies, The Ladies Subscription (1755) and Tombo-Chiqui, or, The American Savage (1758), for the stage, but neither was ever produced. Cleland publicly accused David Garrick of sabotage. Although the men were reconciled, Cleland was savage in his disappointment.

Cleland also engaged in an idiosyncratic effort to prove that Celtic languages were the Edenic tongue from which all other languages were derived. He was himself of Scottish extraction and was fluent in multiple languages, but his philological works were nearly devoid of worth. He attempted to show that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were all derived from Celtic roots. He pursued this endeavor through three books.

His only popular work after Fanny Hill was an adaptation of a French original for Dictionary of Love in 1753. However, he wrote a verse satire entitled "The Times!" (1760 and 1761), a burlesque of Robert Dodsley's The Oeconomy of Human Life in the form of The Oeconomy of a Winter's Day (1750), a biography of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV of France in 1760, and a great deal of translation and review work. He contributed thirty reviews for the Monthy Review and over two hundred letters for the Public Advertiser between 1749 and 1787. In his later years, he also wrote two highly idiosyncratic and overly positive medical works and told Boswell that he knew more about nerves than any doctor in Europe.

[edit] Later life

None of Cleland's literary works provided him with a comfortable living, and he was typically bitter about this. He publicly denounced his mother before her death in 1763 for not supporting him. Additionally, he exhibited a religious tendency toward Deism that branded him as a heretic. He also accused Laurence Sterne of "pornography" for Tristram Shandy.

In 1772, he told Boswell that he had written Fanny Hill while in Bombay, that he had written it on a dare, to show a friend of his that it was possible to write about prostitution without using any "vulgar" terms. At the time, Boswell reported that Cleland was a "fine sly malcontent." Later, he would visit Cleland again and discover him living alone, shunned by all, with only an ancient and ugly woman as his sole servant. Josiah Beckwith in 1781 said, after meeting him, that it was "no wonder" that he was supposed a "sodomite." Cleland died unmarried in 1789 and was buried in St. Margaret's churchyard in London.

[edit] Fanny Hill and homosexuality

Cleland's account of when Fanny Hill was written is somewhat difficult. For one thing, the novel has allusions to other novels that were written and published the same year (including Shamela). Further, it takes part in the general Henry Fielding/Samuel Richardson battle (with Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded on one side and Joseph Andrews on the other). Furthermore, the novel's geography and topicality make a Bombay composition less likely than a Fleet Prison one. It is possible, of course, that a pornographic novel without vulgarity was written by Cleland in Bombay and then rewritten in Fleet Prison as a newly engaged and politically sophisticated novel.

Officially, Fanny Hill remained suppressed in an unexpurgated form until 1970 in the United Kingdom. However, in 1966 it became the subject of a famous US Supreme Court judgment 383 U.S. 413 A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, holding that under the US constitution a modicum of merit precluded its condemnation as obscene. In fact, the novel is now regarded as a "stylistic tour de force" (Sabor) and as a participant in the "making legible the bourgeois remapping of certain categories constitutive of 'woman,' and then exposing that remapping as ludicrous" (Gautier x). It has exceptionally lively style, profoundly playful and ironic questions about womanhood, and a satirical exposition of love as commerce and pleasure as wealth.

However, as Plumb delicately notes, Fanny is obsessed with phallic size (what one critic called "the longitudinal fallacy"). She dotes upon visual relishing of the male genitalia. When this is combined with the fact that Cleland wrote passionately about copulatory acts from the point of view of a woman, contemporary 18th century and contemporary 21st century readers have speculated that Cleland was himself homosexual. The presumed offence at Westminster School, the life alone, his inability to have intimate friends, and his unmarried status have also been used as speculative material. However, the single instance of homosexual male sex in the novel horrifies Fanny. She finds it physically revolting and deeply disturbing and wishes a curse upon the men involved. Further, the pirate edition's homosexual episode was without authority.

Cleland's close associate Thomas Cannon was author of Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749). After Cannon's arrest for obscenity, they had a falling out, with Cleland possibly fearful of the publicity. (Sodomy was a capital offense.) It resulted in Cannon taking out a libel charge. He claimed Cleland had nailed to his door a note which said "execrable, white faced rotten Catamite: His name is Molly Cannon".

[edit] References

  • Gautier, Gary. "Introduction". Fanny Hill or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
  • Plumb, J. H. "Introduction". Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. New York: Signet Classics, 1965.
  • Sabor, Peter. "John Cleland" in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. The Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 12. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Gladfelder, Hal. In Search of Lost Texts: Thomas Cannon's 'Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified,Institute of Historical Research, May 2006.

[edit] Bibliography

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:


  • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or, Fanny Hill (1749)
  • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or, Fanny Hill (1750) (expurgated, legal version)
  • Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751)
  • Titus Vespasian (1755) (unproduced play)
  • The Ladies Subscription (1755) (unproduced play)
  • Tombo-Chiqui, or, The American Savage (1758) (unproduced play)
  • The Surprises of Love (1764)
  • The Woman of Honour (1768)
  • other philological works, poetry, translations, periodical reviews and letters.

[edit] External links

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