This project evolved out of my research for Selling Sexual Knowledge (CUP, 2025), which ended up involving a lot of work with advertising material to help me figure out what publishers and booksellers who left no archives were selling at different moments, how they sold it, and how they represented it to readers. Victorian pornographers’ advertising material isn’t studied a lot, even by historians of sexuality, but it’s a goldmine when you’re studying a trade where it was usual to work under a pseudonym (or multiple pseudonyms) and to publish books with false imprints and dates. It’s an amazing source of information, and offers a lot of insight into how a dedicated trade in sexual material developed over time.

Advertising Pornography, 1822-1870 is a package of two complementary datasets that tries to make it easier to work with that information. One of the datasets, Periodical Advertising, 1822-1870, contains information from 581 unique advertisements placed by around sixty-nine individuals in digitized periodicals available through the British Newspaper Archive. Its companion, Sales Catalogues, 1840-1856, contains information from sixteen unique sales catalogues issued by around eight of these individuals, and two duplicates with marginalia. (I’m hedging about the number of individuals because I haven’t been able to confirm all advertisers’ identities. My efforts led to another project, Obscenity Trials, 1800-1900). The package also includes an essay and other documents focused on my methodology for creating the datasets and dating and attributing the catalogues, which were often published anonymously.

The package has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication pending minor revisions at the Nineteenth-Century Data Collective. It will likely be available through NCDC and my GitHub later this year. A journal article discussing some findings from the research is under review. If you’d like a preview of some things you can learn from dataset, check out this interactive map, which illustrates addresses printed in advertisements catalogued in Periodical Advertising, who was using the them, and for how long.