Thomas Cannon: "Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd", 1749

In an article published in Eighteenth-Century Life,in 2007, Hal Gladfelder describes

a long-lost text, the 1749 Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd, a 'wicked lewd nasty filthy bawdy impious and obscene' celebration of male homosexuality by Thomas Cannon, which had disappeared from view for over 250 years until I found a transcription of the text in a legal document stored in the Public Record Office. In Cannon's text - the most explicit and extensive treatment of male same-sex desire in all of 18th-century literature - the term 'pederasty' is progressively dismantled, becoming a figure for the undermining of any stable distinction between 'natural' and 'unnatural' desire, and of any fixed gender position or role.

See: Gladfelder, Hal. "In Search of Lost Texts: Thomas Cannon's Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd

Eighteenth-Century Life, Volume 31, Number 1, Winter 2007, pp. 22-38

The article is followed by a transcript of the indictment which contains the Thomas Cannon text that was copied out for the trial.

Preview of the article:

The last page of the April 1749 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine was devoted, as was customary, to a "Register of Books" published in the preceding month. There, under the heading "Mathematical and Miscellaneous" . . . could be found this laconic notice: "14. Pederasty investigated and exemplified." Unlike the entries on either side of it, this one gives neither the author's nor bookseller's name. Such anonymity might have suggested to readers that the work in question was not quite respectable, but it is impossible to be sure, especially in the absence of any other advertisement or review. No copies of the work seem to have survived, either. Since it is unpreserved, unattributed, unrecorded apart from this register, it almost seems as if the pamphlet never existed: what evidence is there that the title was anything more than a compositor's error or joke?

In fact three other documents attesting to the existence of this work—whose full title, although only recorded in one of the three, was Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd—have been known about for years, but far from managing to bring the lost text to light, their effect has been, paradoxically, just to accentuate its lostness.

The first discovered was the last produced: a 1755 petition submitted by Elizabeth Cannon to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, asking that criminal charges against her son Thomas be dropped, as he stood accused of "the heinous Offence of Composing, as [John] Purser was of Printing and Publishing, a certain Tract or Pamphlet, containing the most detestable Principles of Impurity, not fit to be even remembered in the Title."

See the rest of the article in Eighteenth-Century Life.

References

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