Originally dedicated both to a prostitute and to an Archbishop with an insulting inscription (obliquely referring to Jesus Christ) below an erect phallus, the ‘Essay on Woman’ was both an erotic satire and a political attack on hypocrisy written at a time when such publications (however few) would ensure arrest and possibly execution.

Composed from ten chapters which detail the notorious Hell Fire Club, its membership and influence in the day, drawn from an immense number of original letters, pamphlets, drawings and private memoirs plus the only surviving fragments of the obscene and pornographic poem ‘The Essay on Woman’ composed by members of the Hell Fire Club and privately printed by them in 1763 in an edition of only 12 copies, one contemporary example is preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London whilst the second is at Cornell University in the United States.

The illustrated history here presented (by Andre Deutsch) was originally published forty five years ago. It is a superbly detailed and profusely illustrated account of the scandal that exposed the Hell Fire Club, its founder Sir Francis Dashwood and its members both in Parliament and at the Royal Court. Drawing deeply upon the political and satiric literature of the time, reproducing dozens of rare illustrations from contemporary pamphlets and handwritten sources this is the full and final account of that most damnable and disgraceful piece of literature ‘The Essay on Woman’.