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 advertisements as sources of historical data, especially for studying sectors of the book trade that left no or very fragmentary archives. I created Advertising Pornography, 1822-1870 partly to test some ideas about how to collect and use the data in different ways than I had done in research for the 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 and without publication dates.

The package was peer reviewed thanks to the efforts of the wonderful Nineteenth-Century Data Collective and is now available for download through its website. It’s also available for download through my GitHub. A journal article discussing some findings from the research will be published in Victorian Periodicals Review later in 2026. If you’re interested in the project, you may also want to check out this interactive map, which illustrates addresses printed in advertisements catalogued in Periodical Advertising, who was using them in advertisements, and for how long.