# The Romance of Lust: A Classic Victorian erotic novel

**Author:** Anonymous
**Tags:** Erotic stories
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 52
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95810

## Description

First published anonymously in four volumes between 1873 and 1876 by London printer William Lazenby, this notorious work stands among the most explicit erotic novels of the Victorian era. Narrated in the first person by young Charlie Roberts, the story follows his awakening into sexual experience during adolescence and traces an ever-expanding web of encounters with sisters, governesses, relatives, and friends. What begins as forbidden curiosity within the household soon spirals into a sprawling chronicle of desire that defies the outward propriety of nineteenth-century England. Authorship remains disputed, with scholars pointing to either William Simpson Potter or Edward Sellon as the likely writer behind the pseudonymous mask, while bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee helped preserve its place in the history of clandestine literature. Suppressed under obscenity laws of its time yet endlessly reprinted since, the novel offers a startling counterpoint to the prim public image of the Victorian age, revealing an underground world of unrestrained appetite. Frank, sustained, and unapologetically graphic, it remains a landmark of historical erotica, valued today both as a curiosity of literary censorship and as a strikingly candid document of hidden Victorian sexuality.