John Cleland - Composition of Fanny Hill and Later History

Composition of Fanny Hill and Later History

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.