My Secret Life: The Complete Volumes 1 - 4

Banned for over eighty years in the west and still illegal in Kyrgyzstan, the anonymously written My Secret Life is as scandalous now as it was when first published in the 1880's. Edited and compiled into eleven volumes years after the author had died and decades after the diary had had its last entry, the sexual escapades of Walter, a privileged London gentleman is nothing less than astonishing. In raw descriptive accounts of a personal obsession with women, Walter takes us with him on his travels through the "baudy houses" of the slums, to musty European bars and to the servant quarters of friends and relatives (whilst not neglecting the company of those friends and relatives along the way); My Secret Life is a rare insight into the lives of peoples from opposite worlds. Walter fills in the gaps that Dickens left out and leaves us a rich understanding of the dreams and reality of Victorian Britain.