Henry Spencer Ashbee

"The 'excessive education' of his daughters irritated him, his Jewish wife's pro-suffragism infuriated him, and he became estranged from his socialist homosexual son, Charles".

[citation needed] Ashbee was an avid book collector, with perhaps the world's most extensive collections of Miguel de Cervantes and erotica.

Influenced by a friendship with the Belgian diplomat Joseph Octave Delepierre, his erotica collecting proceeded with purchases in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris.

Ashbee's will left his entire book collection to the British Museum, with the condition that the erotic works had to be accepted along with the more conventional items.

A character based on Ashbee is central to Sarah Waters's award-winning novel Fingersmith (2002): a man obsessively collecting and indexing pornography and works about human sexuality, in an atmosphere of oppressive Victorian hypocrisy.

1 on Time Out's "Top 30 chart of London's rudest writers... the authors we feel have contributed the most to our understanding of the city's complex sexual psychology..."[20]