Dirty ditties

Claudine Van Hensbergen, an Oxford Don, has disinterred some early Georgian smut from a 1714 edition of The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon. The poems, found in a sub-section titled ‘The Cabinet of Love’, were added by the publisher, Edmund Curll, and are definitely not by John Wilmot, although I imagine he would have cackled along to the bawdy rhymes. Van Hensbergen told the Times (£):

“To my surprise, The Cabinet turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include Dildoides, a poem attributed to Samuel Batler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, The Delights of Venus, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and The Discovery, a poem about a man hiding in a woman’s room to watch her masturbate in bed.”