This project evolved out of my research for Selling Sexual Knowledge (CUP, 2025), which involved a lot of work with advertising material. I became really interested in how to work with advertisements as sources of historical data, especially for studying sectors of the book trade that left no or very fragmentary archives (like the pornography trade). I created Advertising Pornography, 1822-1870 partly to test some ideas about how to make this work on a bit of a larger scale than I’d done in research for my book and partly to make nineteenth-century pornographers’ advertising material more visible and accessible to other scholars.

Advertising Pornography is a package of two complementary datasets. 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 that explain 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 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 this work, check out this interactive map, which illustrates addresses printed in advertisements catalogued in Periodical Advertising, who was using the them in advertisements, and for how long.