Obscene Libel and the Language of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’

Summary

In his bestselling sermon for Rochester's funeral, Robert Parsons, chaplain to the Earl's mother, claimed that Rochester had made a last request that ‘those persons, in whose custody his Papers were’, would ‘burn all his profane and lewd Writings, as being only fit to promote Vice and Immorality’. Parsons' image of Rochester's shameful and blasphemous texts ablaze with the flames of Holy Religion is particularly apt in the light of their subsequent publication history. Part of the ritual of press control still current at this time was the public burning by the hangman of a symbolic copy of the banned book. In the gesture of Rochester's ‘last request’ this ritual erasure of difference and subversion intersects with those promiscuously-employed seventeenth-century metaphors, the flames of desire and the fires of venereal disease.

But as a practical request it was a futile gesture. Handwritten copies of Rochester's poems had been circulating round the town throughout the past decade. Several individual poems had been printed as pamphlets over the previous couple of years, and some handwritten copies had also fallen into the hands of opportunistic publishers of poetical anthologies. Moreover, even as the dying Rochester was (supposedly) consigning his writing to the flames, some enterprising London printers were busy preparing for an eager public the first collection of the Earl's poems.

Evidently, a manuscript collection of about 60 poems connected with Rochester and his court circle had fallen into the hands of these printers. These poems appeared in print as Poems on Several Occasions By the Right Honourable, the E. of R— within a month or two of Rochester's death in July 1680.