John Cleland

• Name — John Cleland • Born — 24 September 1709 • Birthplace — Kingston upon Thames, England • Died — 23 January 1789 • Place of death — London, England • Resting Place — St Margaret's, Westminster • Occupation — Novelist • Education — Westminster School

Little is known about the early life of John Cleland. He was born in 1709 in Kingston upon Thames to parents William Cleland—a government official, former army officer, and friend of Alexander Pope —and Lucy DuPass. He was educated at Westminster School from 1721 to 1723. From 1728 he operated as a soldier in the service of the East India Company, living in Bombay until 1740, by which date he had attained a position as secretary to the Bombay Council as well as working as a junior merchant. In 1740 he travelled back to England in a destitute condition, and from thence he travelled from city to city without having any defined employment.

John Cleland began courting the Portuguese in a vain attempt to re-establish the Portuguese East India Company around the year 1741. In 1748, Cleland was arrested for an £840 debt (equivalent to a purchasing power of about £100,000 in 2005) and committed to Fleet Prison, where he remained for over a year. It was while he was in prison that Cleland finalised Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The text probably existed in manuscript for a number of years before Cleland developed it for publication. The novel was published in two instalments, in November 1748 and February 1749. In March of that year, he was released from prison. However, Cleland was arrested again in November 1749, along with the publishers and printer of Fanny Hill. In court, Cleland disavowed the novel and said that he could only "wish, from my Soul", that the book be "buried and forgot" (Sabor). The book was then officially withdrawn and not legally published again for over a hundred years. However, it continued to sell well in pirated editions. In March 1750, Cleland produced a highly bowdlerised version of the book, but it too was proscribed. Eventually, the prosecution against Cleland was dropped and the expurgated edition continued to sell legally.

None of Cleland's literary works provided him with a comfortable living and he was typically bitter about this. He publicly denounced his mother before her death in 1763 for not supporting him. Additionally, he exhibited a religious tendency toward Deism that branded him as a heretic. Meanwhile, he accused Laurence Sterne of "pornography" for Tristram Shandy. In 1772, he told Boswell that he had written Fanny Hill while in Bombay, that he had written it for a dare, to show a friend it was possible to write about prostitution without using "vulgar" terms. At the time, Boswell reported that Cleland was a "fine, sly malcontent". Later, he would visit Cleland again and discover him living alone, shunned by all, with an "ancient and ugly woman" as his sole servant. Josiah Beckwith in 1781 said, after meeting him, that it was "no wonder" that he was thought to be a "sodomite". From 1782 until his death on 23 January 1789 Cleland lived in Petty France, Westminster, near his childhood home in St James's Place. He died unmarried and was buried in St Margaret's churchyard in London.

The fact that the passionate descriptions of copulatory acts in Fanny Hill are written by a man from the point of view of a woman, and the fact that Fanny is obsessed by phallic size, have led some critics to suggest it is a homoerotic work. That aspect of the novel, as well as Cleland's presumed offence at Westminster School, lack of intimate friends and unmarried status, have aided conjecture that he was homosexual, as has his bitter falling out with friend Thomas Cannon, author of the pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749), the earliest surviving published defence of homosexuality in English (Gladfelder). The authorised edition of Fanny Hill also contains a scene where Fanny (to her disgust) comes across two teenage boys fornicating. The friendship of Cleland and Cannon was "volatile, verging on murderous", but in the opinion of Gladfelder, who rediscovered the Ancient and Modern Pederasty..., "It's no coincidence that they simultaneously produced the only two explicit accounts of male same-sex desire in English before the nineteenth century, published just a month apart in 1759." That may, however, simply reflect Cleland's knowledge of his friend's research and the opportunity to use it in a novel that had a rare explicitness for the time.

John Cleland is recorded as writer, novelist, playwright and journalist.