Edward Sellon

Born in Brighton in 1818, Edward Sellon served in the British army in India before turning to writing. That experience shaped some of his nonfiction, including work on Hindu beliefs and ritual, and it also fed the memoir-like quality that appears in parts of his later writing.

Sellon is now best known as an English writer, translator, and illustrator of erotic literature. In his final years he produced books for the publisher William Dugdale, and his name has remained connected with the shadowy world of anonymous Victorian pornography as both author and illustrator.

He died in London on April 17, 1866. Though much of his work circulated on the margins, Sellon has endured as a striking example of how Victorian print culture could combine empire, autobiography, scholarship, and taboo subjects in one complicated career.