“Dear Mr [Oscar] Wilde,

I thank you for your letter with its enclosed cutting of your review published in The Times on Tuesday last. Your comments about my latest work were an unexpected kindness and were no less welcome for being unsolicited. I fear my work must seem dry and uninspiring next to your own for I am a man of science and not a pederast...”

JEREMY SELMAN-TROYTT (1868-1916) was a (fictitious!) Victorian colossus, a pioneer of mental and physical sexual health and a tireless recorder of physiological changes within his own body.

His work was a catalyst for the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties, following a dark interregnum filled with austerity, sexual abstinence and international combat. Although he had no direct experience of intercourse (he was plagued with premature ejaculation, invariably climaxing weeks in advance of anticipated coition) he became an expert theorist, selflessly advising the gentry as to how congress could be negotiated with minimal shame and repugnance. Winston Churchill was an early disciple, whilst W.G. Grace never lost hope that Selman-Troytt might one day be instrumental in bringing his wife to orgasm.

THE SELMAN-TROYTT PAPERS is the first anthology of Selman-Troytt’s writing, and includes such masterpieces of prose and observation as “My First Nocturnal Emission” and “The Third Time I Soiled My Trousers”. It also features Selman-Troytt’s fascinating correspondence with Oscar Wilde among other luminaries of the late Victorian age, although he rarely if ever received replies to the thousands of letters he himself sent. And his distinguished family history (he came from glass putty stock) is revealed for the first time, illustrated with a wealth of fabulous portraits. A plethora of prefaces, forewords, introductions, prologues, pofaces, indices, appendices, footnotes and endnotes add a final layer of relish.