Kingston upon ThamesJohn Cleland (24 September 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.
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.
From 1782 until his death on 23 January 1789 Cleland lived in Petty France, Westminster, near his childhood home in St James's Place.
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.
However, in 1966 it became the subject of a US Supreme Court judgment A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, holding that under the US Constitution a modicum of merit precluded its condemnation as obscene.
It has an exceptionally lively style, contains profoundly playful and ironic questions about womanhood, and has a satirical exposition of love as commerce and pleasure as wealth.
[6] That aspect of the novel, as well as Cleland's presumed offence at Westminster School, lack of intimate friends and unmarried status, have aided conjecture that he was homosexual, as has his bitter falling out with friend Thomas Cannon, author of the pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749),[7] the earliest surviving published defence of homosexuality in English (Gladfelder).
[8] The friendship of Cleland and Cannon was "volatile, verging on murderous", but in the opinion of Gladfelder, who rediscovered the Ancient and Modern Pederasty..., "It's no coincidence that they simultaneously produced the only two explicit accounts of male same-sex desire in English before the nineteenth century, published just a month apart in 1759."