Author Anonymous 
Night in a Moorish Harem 

The Victorians may have attempted to show the world they were upright, strict and full of virtue but much of this thinking has been subverted by their erotic and pornographic writing. As the final years of both the Victoria’s reign and the 19th Century drew to a close our engaging hero, Lord George Herbert, became the main character of an erotic novella entitled ‘A Night in a Moorish Harem.’ It tells of a night spent by a shipwrecked British sailor who is secreted away in a Moroccan harem by nine concubines of different nationalities; Spanish, Persian, Italian etc. Each recounts her tale of previous adventures which, naturally enough, involves much sexual gratification. Lord George Herbert obviously then has to perform with each in turn. Although successfully prosecuted in 1923, with the jailing of two New York booksellers, by 1930 further prosecutions had failed and society was beginning to have a more mainstream view of erotic works as literature.