This Carcass breath'd

“In the morning I awoke about ten, perfectly gay and refreshed.”

Fanny Hill, the eponymous heroine of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic (many would say pornographic) novel, upon waking from her night with the older prostitute, Phoebe.

Phoebe, Fanny’s “kind tutoress”, is charged with sexually awakening new girls in the brothel, and “found, it seems, in this exercise … the gratification of one of those arbitrary tastes, for which there is no accounting. Not that she hated men, or did not even prefer them to her own sex; but when she met with such occasions as this was, a satiety of enjoyments in the common road, perhaps too, a secret bias, inclined her to make the most of pleasure, wherever she could find it, without distinction of sexes.”

The use of lesbisex to ‘break in’ a new prostitute and titilate the reader would become a staple of pornographic texts from the late 17thC, to the point that Henry Spencer Ashbee complained of its tediousness by the time he produced his Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) in 1877. (Ashbee, who wrote under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi, would become amusingly further linked with lesbiansm as the inspiration for Charles Read in Sarah Waters’ novel, Fingersmith.)

The above illustration is taken from a 1766 French edition. This text also includes an image of Fanny and Phoebe engaged in cunnilingus, despite the act’s absence in the novel itself.