During the 19th century, the traffic in pornography grew at an enormous rate and shifted from France, where it had been dramatically shaped by Sade, to England, where it would become highly commercialized.
Ironically, the morally severe Victorian Age yielded some of pornography’s most popular classics: The Romance of Lust, The Amatory Experiences of a Surgeon, and The Autobiography of a Flea, to name just a few titles. In a century characterized by its rigid moral codes and authoritarian controls, pornography evolved into a genre whose sole raison d’être was sexual arousal.
One popular novel in this period was The Lustful Turk by the prolific author, Anonymous. Although it’s considered a pre-Victorian novel with its narrative mode and prose style, its themes played out in much of the pornography that was to follow. The Lustful Turk is a good example of 19th-century pornography with Sadian overtones, particularly in its depiction of violent, aggressive sexuality. The plot of The Lustful Turk, as that of many other later works, was largely concerned with this sexuality of domination accompanied by elements of sadism: a reluctant virgin is raped and then herself becomes obsessed with sex. This particular fascination with deflowering virgins permeated much of 19th-Victorian pornography, and was an all-consuming passion in [Henry Spencer Ashbee's] enormous work called My Secret Life.