I called next morning (only with the object of getting to the maid) with a bouquet for the Marchesa, and said I would give it to her maid. Alone with her a minute, I begged her to give me five minutes talk, and said I was mad, was dying to have her again, and I promised much. She told me the luncheon time of the servants, Yet he also tells of Yellow-Haired Kitty, insisting she was no prostitute but sold herself for “pies and sausage-rolls”; Camille, the quiet French prostitute who enjoyed telling him of lesbianism and sodomy; and every class of encounter from penurious alleyway gropes to persuasively lecherous travelling ladies. Walter considers any woman fair game. Now, in Collins’ Armadale, I can read into the hero’s wooing of Miss Milroy the same shadow of ruination that Walter senses seeing a woman drop her handkerchief in the street. Her Father, a smith by trade, and a W***e by name, had married a second wife, and Rosa and she didn't agree. Rosa had learnt stay-making, but grew tired of it, so went to service, grew tired of that also, or didn't like her place, and had been home a week doing nothing but help in their lodgings, and do needle-work. — A friend of hers and her sweetheart were going to a mu-sic hall, and Rosa with her father's consent went with them. There they met a young man of their own class in life, who paid attention to Rosa. All four had drink there. When they came out they had more drink at a public house. Her female friend suggested that the new acquaintance should see Rosa home, she going off with her sweetheart. All were seemingly a little screwed, and the couples separated in great jollity. I noticed that her dress was neat, and very respect-able for a girl of her class, but was rumpled, and that her bonnet had been flattened, and put somewhat into shape again. She looked what may be called draggled, and the vague idea I had formed at first from the been caught with a man in an equivocal position, perhaps has been tailed, I thought. Then I looked again, and she seemed to me handsomer than she had at first, and a lust for her sprang up, but it was mixed with pity, and a firm intention to help her if I could, yet with a curiosity to find out all about her. Some lament their ruination. Others strike up long affairs with him. Walter feels little compunction.

In the twentieth century My Secret Life was pirated and reprinted in a number of abridged versions that were frequently suppressed for obscenity. In 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing the first three volumes. Of Walter’s myriad encounters, some are pornographic and perverse. Some are sordid, but revealing. Many would today see him under investigation from Operation Yewtree. Kissing, coaxing, rubbing gently through thighs tightly closed again, on a scarcely perceptible clitoris, asking her all the time to come to the bed with me, and getting no reply, I again rose. — "If you won't, I shall go, for if you stay with me here all night, we are going to sleep together. If you won't, let us go, and I'll leave you where you like." — "Oh, don't — don't." — "Well, you can go home." — "I won't." — "What will you do?" — "Don't know, and don't care, drown myself," — said she in the same sullen, determined manner, yet with a sob as if choking with suppressed emotion. — "Don't be foolish then, and let me do what I want." Then I sat down again on the sofa, and without hindrance began frigging and kissing her as before. All was now quiet. At length voluptuous feeling came over her, as I knew by her manner (for I have frigged many women now), and that she was half way to a spend. "Come to bed love, take off some of your things. — We will sleep together tonight, and I will see what's best to be done for you tomorrow." She made no reply, nor looked at me even. Some time before the termination of my acquaintance with Sarah Mavis, with whom I was so desperately infatuated, the London public had a fit of virtue to which it is subject periodically. It commenced a crusade against gay women, and principally those frequenting Regent and Coventry Streets, and others in that neighbourhood. Many nice, quiet accommodation houses were closed, and several nice gay women whom I frequented disappeared. Indeed, for a time, the police I had to call on the Marchesa afterwards, and knowing I might see the maid, wrote on a slip of paper, a request to know where she would meet me. She opened it hurriedly, and whispered "I can't read." — So I was balked. — The Marchesa that day asked if I had a sitting room at my hotel, and seemed surprized when she heard I had not. "I can't call on you then." She evidently meant me to have her at my hotel. — SuchThe best guess as to who the author actually is, is Henry Spencer Ashbee, a book collector, writer, and bibliographer who was an expert on erotic books in his day.

I tried hard to get her to sleep out with me. She would ask leave to see her parents — say they were ill, and other lies I suggested. — But all her relatives were in the country, at first she said. Then either under the stimulus of the flesh, or my liberal offer, "I've got a sister married here, and she is just going to be con-fined I hear, perhaps I could get to see her, but we are not friends." After much thinking, and hatching of lies and excuses, she said she would if she could. - For an analysis of the original edition's production and Walter's methods of composition, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians. Next day I did not expect her, but the day after, not seeing her maid about, I walked past her room. A servant was cleaning it, I peeped in and saw no trunks. I did not see a tear. Then, she looked at me with a stoney stare. "Now, my good girl, listen to me, — go home, go home now, or you'll get into worse trouble." — "I shan't. I'd sooner drown myself," — she said fiercely. — "Can I help you? — If you are in trouble, I will." She answered not. — Again I advised going home — again came the enraged reply. — She'll go wrong somehow I thought, and as well with me as an-other, and then, — "Come home with me then." The identity of "Walter" is unknown. There is no scholarly consensus in favour of any of the candidates proposed.The girl scared out of her senses. "Don't Betsy, where am I to go to?" — "Go the Hell and buggery, go and shit yourself, I don't care a bloody fart where you go to." — The girl blubbered and sobbed out, — "I will then, I will let him." — "Hold your sniveling, and don't make that noise. — Someone's at the door perhaps, — let him do it to you, — if you don't — go — and you know. — You know what," — Betsy, tho slanging in the foulest way (and I have not told a quarter what she said), — did it all in a suppressed voice. But now I began to think of getting into her, for tho I could not make her out, I felt convinced she had got in-to some scrape about a man. — Has she been stroked, or hasn't she? kept passing thro my mind, and was answered variously. — Of course it was stupid of me to think so much about those possibilities, but at the moment, I felt exactly what I write. The chance came. — I had already twice dropped in-to the hands of the woman gifts about ten times the value of what an Italian would have given, when she had opened the door. The Marchesa was not rich, and only kept one man-servant in the house (a flat in a The intimate nature of Walter's erotic diaries and his portrayal of himself and his surroundings, place My Secret Life well outside the realms of Victorian pornography as established in publications like 'The Pearl'. Walter's mantra might have been adopted from Jean-Jaques Rousseau in his Confessions: “My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.' Like Rousseau's Confessions, My Secret Life is also noted for its detailed account of the author's more humiliating and shameful moments. I sat down, pulled the little one to me, felt her pretty breasts, her plump round little bum and thighs. She all the time kept her hand in front of her sacred split. I pulled her then on to the sofa, and got my hand between her thighs, talking baudy, and kissing her. — Betsy had got up, and stood naked with her arse to the fire looking at us letting out baudiness, and inciting the young one to comply with my wishes. — Then I pulled off my clothes to my shirt, and showed her my pego, stiff as a poker and like a burning coal.