By: Anonymous Publisher: Ballantine Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Ballantine Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 643 Publication Date: September 29, 1996 Release Date: September 29, 1996
Product Description: Among the first "Journals of Voluptuous Reading" to be spawned by the Victorians, this novel shows them as vastly different from their public image--beneath the facade of respectability and sexual repression there existed the strongest urge for sexual experimentation and enjoyment. First published in London in July 1879, it provided unrestrained erotica for every taste.
Alot of weeding through for the hype. I read about this book in several reviews and really don't see the draw. Sure, well before it's time but not a real page turner.
"Sub-Umbra, or Sport Among the She-Noodles" & So Much More! Readers Beware: This is NOT John Steinbeck's novel :) !
THE PEARL wasn't originally a book, but rather an underground men's magazine, the publication of which spanned the 18 months from July 1879 to December 1880, when it ceased publication. Considered the height of scandalous in its day, THE PEARL strikes the modern reader of erotica, densensitized by a deluge of visual images on the Net and by the open publication of "Forum"-type writings, as rather quaint in its restraint.
Still, THE PEARL is undeniably erotic, and must have had the upper-crust ladies (and a few of the men) of Victorian England blushing mightily and breathing hard as it was read by them or to them by their lovers and/or spouses.
What strikes the modern reader is the quality and the precision of the writing, which is topnotch, graphically imaginative, and designed to titillate. THE PEARL consists of a number of serialized novelettes (the aforementioned "Sub-Umbra" and the delightful tale retold in "Miss Coote's Confession" among them), random short stories, the obligatory letters from readers section, and ribald limericks and poems. If you need some new blue jokes, THE PEARL's a treasure-trove.
Much of this material has seen print in the "Ribald Classics" section of a modern major men's magazine and elsewhere over the decades. Both as an historical artifact and as an omnibus of classic adult entertainment, every serious adult reader should own a copy.
Get your mind out of the gutter... and let mine float by. As dirty books - or should I say "naughty books" - go, the Pearl has few equals. It's neither as pretentious as "My Secret Life", as twisted as "Justine" (De Sade, not Durrell)nor as overblown and plodding as "Fannie Hill." Regardless, this is not a book you take seriously. When my evil twin, Skippy, was a sophomore, cloistered in an all-boys prep school in the 1960's, one of his worldly classmates scored a copy of the Pearl in an "avant garde" book store in New York City, and smuggled it into school. Along with Robert Rimmer's "The Harrad Experiment" and Terry Southern's "Candy", he rented it out to his eager, reprobate adolescent peers for a dollar a week. Skippy read it cover to cover then, and again in college. It was better than comic books, he claimed - well, except maybe Fritz the Cat.
By today's "standards" (now *there's* an oxymoron), the erotica in the Pearl is pretty tame, almost innocent. However, most of it is carried off with a certain witty, genteel, Oscar Wilde-ian elegance to the whole enterprise that's sadly lacking in what passes for "erotic fiction" in the 21st century - stuff you wouldn't read with a haz-mat suit on. In the Pearl, you can see where Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence might have taken some of their "cues" for the "juicier" parts of their more literary novels. Some of the stories are sexist. But that's the way people evidently thought, then. We had to wait another generation or two before Anais Nin and, later, Erica Jong could speak for a freer generation of women. So from a purely historical perspective, the Pearl is worth reading, if not owning. It's a more of a "mile post" in many readers' careers, something one passes and soon forgets after a certain young age.
The collections of limericks interspersed between the serialized "stories" are actually the most entertaining part of the book.
The Pearl Well I did not enjoy this book at all. I could not say this is a good book. I usually enjoy almost everything but this is the first in "years" I do have to say FOR ME was awful. Maybe someone else will have better luck!
Best of the Victorian Era I've had a copy of this book for over 20 years, and I still go back to it from time to time when I'm looking to [have a good time with myself]. Of the Victorian erotica I've read (probably half a dozen books or so), this is the one I find most helpful, most appealing. I've even thrown it away a few times, only to repurchase it later because I missed it so.
The book contains quite a range of material, from short stories to serialized novels to poetry and limmericks. Perhaps half of the material here is S&M-realted (primarily involving people hitting each other with birch sticks), which doesn't especially appeal to me, but I've learned which stories focus more on what I'm interested in, and so the S&M bits don't distract me.
Most of the non-S&M stuff starts off with introducing innocent young women to the delights of sex. Some of the "young women" are teenagers, and some of the teenagers are barely teenagers. There are also many scenes that reinforce the Victorian stereotype of "women want sex, they just can't admit to wanting it." This results in numerous cases where women say "no, please don't." Of course, in the story they really do want it.... Anyway, if you're offended by stories depicting under-18s having sex, or of stories that involve non-consensual (or very nearly non-consensual) sex--you will want to avoid this book.
There are some bisexual scenes in the book. Most of these are female-female, but there are a small handful that are male-male.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
