My Secret Life

Preliminary remarks. • A dress-lodger. • Lucy. • Sweet seventeen. • An impudent demand. • A row. • The bawd. • My watch requisitioned. • Exit barred. • Bill. • Funking. • Determination. • The poker and window. • Vici. • Apologies. • A cautious retreat. • My revenge. • Lucy scared away. • Brighton Bessie. • Washing by fire-light. • Friendly intimacy. • The house in B.W Street. • Lascivious evenings.

I have read through the two volumes in print. There are typographical errors, the names of women and places are once or twice wrongly given or spelt, but the context corrects that, and it matters not. What is important is; that owing to the brevity with which some occurrences are told, they almost seem improbable; this is the result of not printing my narrative all through exactly as I wrote it. In the manuscript, items of conversation, and numerous details of the behaviour of myself and female partners in my amours, were written down just as they occurred, and showed how the climax was reached; how little by little man and woman inclined to each other, how one pressed, and the other yielded, how from modest talk and chaste kisses our chastity gradually was lost, how by touch and sighs and yielding to the swooning lust which coursed stronger and stronger through our veins, our genitals inflamed, swollen, and sweating, drove us to contact with each other, till the carnal coupling ensued, and prick and cunt revelling and wallowing in each other's juices, drowned both wants and senses in voluptuous oblivion.

These details also gave studies of character, and specially of my own character, and as I now read the narratives in print after the lapse of so many years they seem to me to be needed to explain myself, even to myself. It is too late. The manuscript is burnt, that printed in its stead must be taken as truth or not, as scepticism or faith prevails in the reader, if ever there be one but myself.

Nor can I less abbreviate even now and in the future I fear, for the full narrative would entail too much expense in printing, and prolong the time of completion. Yet what pleasure I had in the wordy veracities as I wrote them, childish, fantastic, ludicrous, as some of the doings and sayings now seem! How unlike the doings of the couples in erotic books which I since have read, books written with no other object but to stimulate the passions, — no object that of mine in writing this.

The narratives were written in the present tense, but in print have been altered to the past, which gives them an air of a studied composition, written as a man might write a novel; but the writing extended over well nigh forty years, and barely a word has been altered, excepting those due to omissions.

There are however a few remarks added here and there to explain the circumstances and connect the incidents; these are needful to explain lapses of time, and to show the continuity of the history, for all the amours were written separately; yet often I had two or three women in hand at the same period. So in arranging them chronologically a few additions and observations were needful to explain, and these are of them.

One muddy night in the Strand there was an exceedingly well-dressed and very short-petticoated (they all wore them then) girl of about seventeen years of age; her legs especially pleased me, they were so plump and neat, and her feet so well shod. After my offer had been accepted, we went to a house in a court just by Drury-Lane Theatre, and to a top-floor front-room very handsomely furnished. She lived there, and was a dress-lodger as I found afterwards. She was beautifully clean, had fine linen, and was no sham in any way; a fresh, strong, plump, well-made young girl with lovely firm breasts, and a small quantity of brown hair on her cunt. Cunt and breasts looked only seven-teen years, backside, thighs, arms, calves looked twenty. She stripped, and with but one feel and a stretch of her pretty cunt-lips, and a moment's glance I plugged her, and recollect now my enjoyment of her. Then I dressed, and so did she. Though so young, she was a well trained whore, had much pleased me by her freedom in manner, even to the way in which she washed her cunt and pissed after her fuck. I was not with her I should say twenty minutes if so long; my lust for her had been so strong.