The Pearl (magazine)

The popularity of pornographic magazines like The Pearl was part of a trend that began in the 1860s of capitalizing on the profitability of writing about sex, which served to proliferate discourses about sexuality by the time of the fin de siècle in England.

The novels, six in total, were interspersed with limericks, hymns, odes, songs, facetious nursery rhymes, acrostic poems, parodies, faux advertisements, and fabricated letters to the editor.

The topics depicted in the novels and poems were wide-ranging, including women's suffrage, physical disability, sexual impairment, secret sex societies, bestiality, India-rubber dildos, slave rape, duels, mock crucifixions, Turkish harems, and prophylactic devices.

The story, entitled My Grandmother's Tale, depicts the brutal sexualized flogging of a black West Indian slave girl by an overseer of ambiguous racial background acting under the authority of a white plantation owner.

[9] The Pearl's serial novel Lady Pokingham, in which a consumptive invalid recounts her sexual adventures from a wheelchair, has been noted for its depiction of transience, bodily decay, and death, which thus provides counter-evidence to the idea advanced by Steven Marcus that Victorian pornography portrays a pornotopia.

[12] Greg Barns, the director of Australian Lawyers Alliance, noted that the conviction would imply criminality for possession of any number of works of art and literature, and media reports pointed out that HarperCollins had republished the magazine in 2009, and was currently available on Amazon.