Continente Americano

By 1700, half o f the arable land was already enclosed, mainly through private agreement and fi-om 1750’s onwards increasing amounts o f enclosure took place through Acts o f Parliament, a revolution which affected about 3000 English parishes.* The transformation was rapid if erratically dispersed and visually transformed the open heath and rough pastures to dozens o f miles o f flowering hedgerows and enclosed small fields.^ On his travels, Smollett declared, ‘I see the country o f England smiling with cultivation; the grounds exhibiting all the perfection o f agriculture, parcelled out into beautiful enclosures, cornfields, hay and pasture, woodland and com m on....’.*® Space was becoming cut up, fenced in and more enclosed.

* Peter Laslett, The World we Have Lost (London, Methuen, 1965); Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation 1700-1914 (London, Methuen, 1969); E. P. Thompson, The Making o f the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968); Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, Penguin, 1982),

^ W. G, Hoskins, The Making o f the English Landscape (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), pp. 177-210.

Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy (1766), Letter 36.

The reaction to enclosures can be seen in the changing attitudes to the English landscape which would, in turn, influence erotic themes. The fashion became to make one’s grounds look more the way nature intended. This lead to the augmented irregularity o f the gentleman’s estate in attempts to make it look more wild and natural.’’ The leaning towards a more natural look was summed up by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3*^^ Earl o f Shaftesbury in his The Moralists (1710),

I shall no longer resist the passion in me for things o f a natural kind; where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice o f Man has spoil’d their

genuine Order by breaking up the Primitive State. Even the rude

Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought G rotto’s and broken Falls o f waters, with all the horrid graces o f the Wilderness

itself, as representing NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a magnificence beyond the mockery o f princely gardens.’^

M an’s ideal landscape was no longer the manicured garden o f the sixteenth and seventeenth century but a more natural vision. Earlier styles had been o f geometric design, including high walls, clipped bushes and patterns o f low box hedges, an inheritance fi-om Tudor, Dutch and French traditions. From the 1720s and ‘30s, a leaning towards a more cultivated wilderness emerged, with classical temples an indispensable part o f the environment, often placed within w o o d s.S p ec ia lly -c re a ted grottoes became popular, and grounds became dotted with statuettes. This fashion led to the creation o f the erotic landscape echoed in sexual writings. The garden o f Sir Francis Dashwood would reflect this trend;’"’ WiUiam Kent’s favoured Palladian style, evident in its faithful interpretation o f ancient architecture, would be displayed in

For a history o f landscape and gardening, see Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700-1750 (London, Country Life, 1967); Christopher Thacker, The History o f Gardens

(London, Croon Helm, 1979); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. The English Rustic Tradition (B erkel^ and Los Angeles, California University Press, 1986); Tom Williams, Polite Landscapes. Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1995).

Anthony Ashley Cooper, The M oralists (London, 1709). Appendix [Figures 13, 14 & 15].

See below, pp. 189-192.

erotica. Indeed the erotic poem Little M erlin’s Cave was an homage to Kent’s garden project o f the same name. In fact, a whole badinage developed around Kent’s design and its title applying erotic connotations.'^

Simultaneously to the changes in landscapes at home, came the broadening o f the worldview. Accounts o f ‘new’ lands and colonies were published in avidly read travelogues and fictional adventures.*^ Ned Ward wrote up his adventures in A Trip to Jamaica (1698), a popular pan^hlet printed seven times in eighteen months, followed up by A Trip to New England (1699). Defoe’s New Voyage Round the World (1697), his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift's Gulliver’s Travels (1726) inspired many imitators. Utopian fiction fi-equently used the image o f an ideal society as a form o f social criticism, and particularly as a means o f focusing on progressive ideas. These writings often redesigned social relations and were seen as a threat to the status quo.*^ Botanists made extensive voyages in search o f botanical collections discovering new species o f plants, trees, bird and animals; Linnaeus, who undertook expeditions into northern Sweden established a complete new sexual hierarchical cataloguing system o f the animal and plant kingdom. Published travel journals also provided examples o f alternative views on sexual behaviour and conjured up exotic new utopian worlds as major travel expeditions were made to explore new countries and their inhabitants. Captain Cook explored uncharted territories in his voyages between 1768 and 1779

See The Designs o f Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent (London, J. Vardy, 1744) in which is depicted Kent’s design entitled ‘Merlin’s Cave’. A skit was written on Kent’s work in the erotic poem

Little M erlin’s Cave. The frontispiece o f M erryland D isplayed carries the picture M erlin’s Cave

which is repeated in Curll’s publication o i Poems on Several Occasions. See Appendix [Figures 16 & 17].

G eoff Ward (ed.). Romantic Literature. From 1790-1830 (London, Bloomsbury, 1993), pp. 235- 36.

Claeys states that such tracts were seen as ‘potentially corrosive o f the entire social order’. Damton

provides a French example, L ’An 2440 (1771), a futuristic utopian fantasy which plays with the idea o f a revolutionary upheaval; Gregory Claeys (ed.), Utopias o f the British Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. viii; Damton, ‘Utopian Fantasy’, The Forbidden Best-Sellers,

pp. 115-136.

sailing the Pacific Ocean fi’om the coasts o f New Zealand Eastern Australia and the South Pacific. Cook related his opinions o f the inhabitants o f Tahiti in A Journal o f A

Voyage Round the World In His M ajesty's Ship ENDEAVOUR in the Year 1768, 1769,1770 & 1771:

The women o f Otahitee have agreeable features, are well-proportioned, sprightly and lascivious; neither do they esteem continence as a virtue, since almost every one o f our crew procured temporary wives among them, who were easily retained during our stay.**

Travelogues, neo-classical revivalist publications, artistic depictions o f the classical world and erotica were all part o f the same cultural sphere. The Villas o f the Ancients

(1728) based partly on Pliny, and later James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities o f Athens (1762), were arguing in favour o f the original Greek form rather than its adulterated Roman style. The Pantheon temple in the gardens o f Henry Hoare at Stourhead appears to have been modelled on Claude’s picture. Coast View o f Delos with Aeneas}'^ Erotic books, such as The Worship o f Priapus, emerged as a direct result o f this interest in the classical world.

All these developments - changes in landscape, travel writing and explorations o f new worlds - had an obvious influence on developments in erotica. The extended agricultural allegory reflected a life steeped in a long tradition o f rural living, closely connected to nature,^® using metaphorical language already existing in literature and medicine. Explorations o f foreign terrain and its ensuing efiect on literature had an inevitable impact on the writing o f erotic material.^* Oceanographic and ethnographic scenic visions emerged to reflect developments in cartography, geography and ethnography. The authors o f erotica emulated and assimilated utopian literature and

Captain James Cook, A Journal o f A Voyage Round the World In His M ajesty’s Ship ENDEA VOUR in the Year 1768, 1769,1770 & 1771 (London, T. Beckett & P.A. Dettont, 1771), p. 46.

Ibid, p. 32.

Mikulas Teich, Roy Porter and Bo Gustafeson (eds.). Nature and Society in Historical Context

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jardine, Secord and Spary (eds.). Cultures o f Natural History.

Ward, Romantic Literature, p. 235.

travelogues into their narrative in an alternative portrayal o f socio-sexual relations between men and women, with analogies being made between the exploration o f new territories and medical explorations o f women’s bodies/^

Geographical locations for sex in erotica went through a range o f Wtematives to reflect the external environment. The earlier erotic landscape displayed the classical world o f Ovid, with their Arcadia o f nymphs and shepherds as seen in the tales o f New Atalantis fo r One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty-Eight (see below, p. 178). These utopias

reflected the earlier public reading tastes o f the English gentleman and his classical education. Newer developments saw the introduction o f the botanical garden, and reflected advances in science. By the late eighteenth century, the literary mode o f the Greek and Romans has stretched to incorporate the bourgeois novel assimilating the new tastes for the extending middle-class reading audience. This readership was increasingly urban and the setting for erotica was not only the outdoor world o f the pastoral but also the interior arcane world o f the metropolitan family. However, rather than a competing number o f settings, the emphasis was more on their co-existence with newer styles being enjoyed alongside older themes.