The 1748 erotic novel by John Cleland banned in the UK for obscenity into the 1960s was Fanny Hill.
Its formal title was Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Cleland wrote it while imprisoned for debt, and it appeared in two installments in London in November 1748 and February 1749. The novel follows Fanny, whose sexual experiences are narrated with elaborate euphemisms and considerable literary wit.
The book quickly attracted prosecution. Cleland and publisher Ralph Griffiths were arrested in 1749, and Cleland publicly disavowed the work. Unexpurgated editions continued circulating underground for generations. In Britain, an uncensored paperback triggered another obscenity case in 1964, even after the landmark Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial had signaled changing attitudes.
Fanny Hill was not legally published in an uncensored British edition until 1970. A common mix-up is treating it as merely a Victorian scandal: its original publication predates the Victorian era by more than a century. In the United States, the 1966 Supreme Court decision Memoirs v. Massachusetts helped end its legal suppression there.