My Secret Life Part Two Author:Anonymous "My Secret Life" was privately published in 11 volumes between 1882 and 1894; only six copies of the work were printed (one is at Yale and another at the Kinsey Institute). The books record some 40 years in the erotic life of an upper-class Victorian gentleman obsessed with sex and sexual detail. In his preface to the work, "Walter" (the narra... more »tor) maintains that he kept the diary because the male erotic life had yet to be chronicled. "I determined to write my private life freely as to fact, and in the spirit of the lustful acts done by me, or witnessed," he claims. "It is written therefore with absolute truth and without any regard whatever for what the world calls decency."
Here are volumes three and four of the 2,360-page work, in which Walter, now a young man, experiences misadventures with many willing partners. The women in his life number in the hundreds; there are girls of fourteen and married women, child prostitutes and servants, working girls and their mistresses. It is not clear exactly why Walter wrote his anonymous diary and paid handsomely to have it printed. Whatever the reasons, his honest and unsparing account depicts a society that, while very different from the traditional image of Victorian England, is unmistakably real.« less