Last summer I discovered the National Library of Scotland’s Georeferenced Maps and had a lot of fun plotting addresses I found in my research for Advertising Pornography and Obscenity Trials. I soon found myself wanting a map that could effectively illustrate the changing geography of trade in ‘obscene’ material in nineteenth-century Britain, and sellers’ very different relationships with place. This map does a partial job of that, illustrating addresses printed in pornographers’ periodical advertisements between 1822 and 1870. The time spans under each seller’s name indicates what years they advertised using that address. For the first half of the century, these addresses were usually for shops where they worked. After mid-century, they were increasingly anonymous addresses used solely for mail-order retailing.

As you can see, there’s a reason that Holywell Street became synonymous with obscenity in the Victorian imagination, but the map makes it easy to see that people were selling the same material out of a lot of other places too! Crucially, though, many sellers (especially smaller-time sellers) didn’t advertise in periodicals. When Obscenity Trials gets nearer to completion, I’m planning to expand this map to include many of the defendants’ addresses, as the addition of those addresses not only illustrates that but also demonstrates some really interesting geographic trends as the pornography trade developed over time.

Thanks to the National Library of Scotland for this wonderful resource. Data and code for the interface are here.