约翰·克列兰得

约翰·克莱兰德 （英语：John Cleland，1709年9月24日—1789年1月23日），18世纪英格兰小说家。其最为知名的小说《一个愉悦女人的回忆录》成为英语情色文学划时代的作品。

John Cleland (c. 1709 – 23 January 1789) was an English novelist best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him "a sly, old malcontent".

Early life

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.

Publication of Fanny Hill

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 The book was then officially withdrawn and not legally published again for over a hundred years.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.

Later life

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.

Composition of Fanny Hill and after

Cleland's account of when Fanny Hill was written is difficult. For one thing, the novel has allusions to other novels that were written and published the same year (including Shamela). Further, it takes part in the general Henry Fielding/Samuel Richardson battle, with Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded on one side and Joseph Andrews on the other.