About The Pearl

The Pearl

The Pearl was a Victorian erotic magazine published in London, England, between July 1879 and December 1880. Its full title was The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading, and it was issued monthly by the London publisher William Lazenby. In the space of eighteen months it produced eighteen issues, together with two Christmas supplements, before the authorities closed it down for publishing obscene literature. Although its life was short, The Pearl became one of the best known of the underground erotic periodicals of the Victorian period, and its contents have been reprinted repeatedly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Because it was published clandestinely, The Pearl was written anonymously and privately distributed to its readers. It belonged to a hidden world of Victorian publishing that existed alongside the respectable family magazines of the period, and indeed its very format has been seen as a parody of those family magazines: where a respectable monthly offered its readers serial fiction, verse and light miscellaneous pieces, The Pearl offered the same mixture in an explicitly erotic form.

Origins and publication history

The Pearl began publication in July 1879 under the direction of William Lazenby, an English publisher of pornography who was active in the 1870s and 1880s and who also used the aliases Duncan Cameron and Thomas Judd. Lazenby acted as the magazine's publisher and editor and also wrote some of its contents himself. The magazine appeared monthly, and over the following year and a half eighteen numbers were issued, supplemented by two Christmas supplements, one of which was presented as a Christmas annual.

The venture took place against a background of legal risk. Lazenby had already been prosecuted in 1871, and he was prosecuted again in 1881, the year after The Pearl ceased publication. The magazine itself was closed down by the authorities in December 1880 on the grounds that it published obscene literature. Its eighteen-month run therefore ended not through lack of readers but through official suppression, a fate common to the more successful publications of the Victorian erotic underground.

William Lazenby and his publishing business

William Lazenby, who died in about 1888, was one of the central figures of the London trade in erotic books and magazines in the later nineteenth century. Alongside The Pearl, his notable publications included the magazines The Oyster, The Boudoir and The Cremorne, as well as a substantial list of erotic books, among them The Romance of Lust, Randiana, The Birchen Bouquet of 1881 and The Romance of Chastisement of 1883. He was an associate of other publishers in the same trade, including Edward Avery and Leonard Smithers.

Lazenby followed The Pearl with two further magazines in a similar vein: The Oyster, which appeared in 1883, and The Boudoir. After the passing of the Post Office (Protection) Act 1884, Lazenby, together with publishers such as Edward Avery, Charles Carrington and Harry Sidney Nichols, moved much of his business to Paris, from where material could be sold into the United Kingdom by mail order. The Pearl thus stands at the head of a small family of successor periodicals through which its publisher continued to serve the same readership.

The format of the magazine

The general format of The Pearl was distinctive and consistent. Each issue carried three serial erotic tales running simultaneously. One serial was devoted to sex in high society, another to flagellation, and the third to related erotic themes, so that readers who bought the magazine for a particular interest could follow it from month to month. Around these serials the issues were filled out with shorter material: obscene parodies, poems, songs, ballads, letters, jokes and limericks.

This mixture was deliberate. The respectable Victorian magazine typically combined serial fiction with poetry and humorous miscellany, and The Pearl reproduced that structure faithfully while reversing its moral content. The result was a periodical that looked, in its arrangement, like an ordinary monthly magazine, but whose contents were entirely erotic. Later publishers who reprinted the magazine described it in similar terms, as a collection of erotic tales, rhymes, songs and parodies in magazine form.

The serial stories

The best remembered contents of The Pearl are its three long serials. They were Lady Pokingham, also known as Lady Pokingham, or They All Do It, a tale of sexual adventure in high society centred on a young noblewoman; Miss Coote's Confession, the first-person account associated with the character Rosa Coote, which dealt extensively with flagellation; and Sub-Umbra, or Sport Among the She-Noodles, a further serial of erotic episodes. These stories, issued in monthly instalments across the run of the magazine, were later detached from the periodical and circulated as works in their own right.

The serials illustrate the range of the Victorian erotic imagination that The Pearl served. The high-society tale played on the contrast between public respectability and private licence among the upper classes. The flagellation serial reflected a well-established strand of Victorian erotica concerned with corporal punishment in schools and households. Sub-Umbra added a further sequence of comic-erotic adventures. Together they gave the magazine a body of substantial fiction that distinguishes it from purely miscellaneous publications.

Poetry, parody and the Swinburne question

Alongside the serials, The Pearl published a large quantity of verse: erotic poems, bawdy songs, parodies of familiar pieces and limericks. Some of these poems have been thought to have been written by Algernon Charles Swinburne, the celebrated and controversial Victorian poet whose own work had a strong interest in flagellation themes. The attribution has never been established as certain, and the magazine's anonymity means that the authorship of most of its contents, including the contributions of Lazenby himself, cannot be assigned with confidence. The Swinburne connection nevertheless became a durable part of the magazine's reputation and is routinely mentioned in accounts of it.

The parodic element mattered to the magazine's character. By reworking songs, poems and familiar literary forms into obscene versions, The Pearl positioned itself as a knowing inversion of respectable print culture rather than a merely explicit one. Its humour, as later reprint publishers noted, was part of its appeal: the writing was described as lively and witty as well as frank, which helped it survive in reputation long after comparable publications were forgotten.

Closure and suppression

The Pearl's run ended in December 1880, when the authorities closed it down for publishing obscene literature. The closure brought the eighteen-issue run to an end, although the two Christmas supplements extended its presence slightly beyond the monthly sequence. Lazenby himself faced prosecution in 1881, and the legal pressure on the London erotic trade in these years pushed publishers first towards successor titles and then, after 1884, towards Paris-based mail-order operations.

Suppression had the paradoxical effect of preserving the magazine's fame. Because complete runs were scarce and the material could not be openly sold, The Pearl acquired the status of a classic of its kind, sought after by collectors of erotica, while its publisher's name became firmly attached to it in the bibliographical record.

Later editions and reprints

The Pearl refused to disappear. After its suppression, the eighteen parts were bound together into three volumes by the publisher Augustin Brancart, each part containing lithographs from the original publication, and the collection was issued in about 1890. A clandestine American edition followed in the twentieth century, published in New York in 1933 under the fictitious imprint of the Society of Vice dated 1880.

In the later twentieth century the magazine was reprinted openly for the first time. The Blue Moon Books edition of 1996, edited by James Jennings, reprinted the journal in its entirety in a single paperback volume of 644 pages, presenting all eighteen issues together with their short stories, poems, ballads, letters and limericks. The same publisher's Victorian erotica series, which also revived Lazenby's successor magazine The Oyster, sold collectively over half a million copies, according to the publisher, after an obscure edition of The Oyster was rediscovered in the 1980s and became a literary sensation.

Digital publication followed. In 2015 Locus Elm Press issued The Pearl in searchable electronic form, presented as originally published, in groupings of volumes that covered the whole run from the first four numbers through to volumes 17 and 18 and the Christmas special. Individual serials also continued to circulate separately, and in 2023 an expanded version of the Lady Pokingham story, incorporating a manuscript said to have been discovered in the 1980s, was published as a work in its own right.

Place in Victorian publishing

The Pearl occupies a particular place in the history of British magazines. It was not a marginal leaflet but a properly organised monthly periodical, with serial fiction, a consistent format and a recognisable editorial identity, applied to material that the law and respectable opinion of the day treated as criminal. Its eighteen issues demonstrate how fully the forms of mainstream Victorian magazine publishing had been absorbed even by the underground press.

For historians of the period, the magazine is evidence of the distance between the public image of Victorian Britain and the reading habits that flourished in private. Its contents, written anonymously and distributed discreetly, addressed readers in high society as well as about them, and its tales of flagellation, seduction and comic erotic adventure have been studied as part of the wider literature of Victorian erotica alongside the other works of Lazenby's list.

Legacy

The Pearl ceased publication in 1880, but it has never really been out of circulation since. Through bound volumes, clandestine reprints, the open reprints of the 1990s and the digital editions of the 2010s, its eighteen issues have remained available to new generations of readers, and its name is still the one most frequently cited when the Victorian erotic magazine is discussed. Few British magazines of any kind, respectable or otherwise, that were suppressed after only eighteen months have enjoyed so long an afterlife.