LAUSR

Published in 1966, Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians takes its place as the first sustained work of scholarship on Victorian pornography. Marcus argued that Victorian pornography expressed the unresolved psycho-sexual fantasies of a culture still in adolescence (286). He introduced a new literary sub-field along with a compelling, if unevenly developed, critical method. He also grappled with challenging source materials. Perhaps surprising, given his psychoanalytic critical framework, is the degree to which he thought materially about the pornographic sources he was uncovering. Marcus discussed their “circumstances of publication and collection” (54–55) as well as their “progressive mutilation” (66), with fleeting recognition that the conditions of these sources were as revelatory of a textual subculture as their content. With fifty years having passed since the publication of Marcus’s book, it is worth examining the material basis of his thinking about Victorian pornography. In the 1960s, Marcus was in a position far different from our own with respect to archival materials and academic mores, but his methods continue to have an impact on scholarship. Marcus’s lack of specificity about his bibliographical instruments, his construction of a particular pornographic canon, and his citational practices have resulted in some distortions and exclusions whose effects linger even as easier access to surviving materials along with comparative cross-border and cross-period research have led scholars to reshape historical understandings of the period’s pornography. In revisiting Marcus’s sources alongside more recent scholarship and digital discovery methods, my aim is to