John Camden Hotten
John Camden Hotten (12 September 1832, Clerkenwell – 14 June 1873, Hampstead) was an English bibliophile and publisher.
Hotten was born in Clerkenwell, London to a family of Cornish origins. He spent the period 1848–1856 in America and on his return opened a small bookshop in London at 151a Piccadilly, and founded the publishing firm later known as Chatto & Windus. He was a compiler of an English language dictionary of slang: first published in 1859 under the title A dictionary of modern slang, cant, and vulgar words,[1] the book was reprinted numerous times. He was also a collector, author and clandestine publisher of pornographic works such as The Romance of Chastisement, Exhibition of Female Flagellants[2] and the pornographic comic opera Lady Bumtickler's Revels, some in a series entitled The Library Illustrative of Social Progress.[3]. He was an associate of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne,[4] publishing his Poems and Ballads after Moxon and Co. rejected them.[5] However, Cecil Lang claims in his preface to Swinburne's Letters that Hotten had effectively blackmailed Swinburne into providing him with pornographic verse.[6]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hotten, John Camden at GetCited
- ^ Rachel Potter, "Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books", Modernism/modernity, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2009, pp.87-104 doi:10.1353/mod.0.0065 [1]
- ^ Thomas, Donald Serrell (1969). A long time burning: the history of literary censorship in England. Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 270.
- ^ Prins, Yopie (1999). Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press. p. 153. ISBN 0691059195.
- ^ Kendrick, Walter M. (1996). The secret museum: pornography in modern culture. University of California Press. p. 168. ISBN 0520207297.
- ^ Allison Pease, "Modernism, mass culture, and the aesthetics of obscenity", Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0521780764, p.203
[edit] References
- John Sutherland, "The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction", Stanford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0804718423, p.307.
- Simon Eliot, "Hotten: Rotten: Forgotten? An Apologia for a General Publisher", Book History 3 (2000) 61-93 doi:10.1353/bh.2000.0007
- Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Sidney Lee, ed. (1891). "Hotten, John Camden". Dictionary of National Biography. 27. London: Smith, Elder & Co. http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_27.djvu/430.
[edit] External links
- Oxford DNB entry for John Camden Hotten
- Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal By John Camden Hotten. 1874 ed. at Google books
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