Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis was the man who made it possible to discuss human sexuality in English without shame, euphemism, or prosecution — though prosecution is exactly what happened when the first volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex was published in 1897 and the bookseller who stocked it was tried for obscenity. Ellis spent thirty years compiling the seven volumes of the Studies (1897–1928), a work that treated homosexuality, auto-erotism, the sexual impulse, sexual selection, erotic symbolism, and the psychology of modesty with a clinical thoroughness and a humane sympathy that were without precedent in English-language science. He was not the first sexologist — Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld preceded him on the Continent — but he was the first to write about sex in English with genuine scientific objectivity, and his influence on the sexual revolution of the twentieth century, though often invisible, was immense.

Croydon and the World

Henry Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, Surrey, in 1859. His father was a sea captain, and at sixteen Havelock sailed with him to Australia, where he spent four years as a schoolteacher in the outback — an experience of solitude and self-examination that he described as formative. He returned to England, qualified as a physician at St Thomas’s Hospital, and never practised medicine, devoting himself instead to literary and scientific work.

His early career was primarily literary. He edited the Mermaid Series of unexpurgated Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists (1887–1889), a remarkable series that brought the uncensored texts of Marlowe, Massinger, Ford, and others to Victorian readers. The New Spirit (1890) was a collection of literary essays on Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, and Tolstoy that established Ellis as a critic of broad European sympathies.

Studies in the Psychology of Sex

The Studies were published in seven volumes between 1897 and 1928. The first volume, on homosexuality (Sexual Inversion, 1897, co-authored with John Addington Symonds), was the work that triggered the obscenity prosecution. Subsequent volumes were published in the United States and in limited medical editions to avoid British censorship.

Ellis’s approach was revolutionary in its method and its tone. He combined case histories, cross-cultural evidence, literary references, and physiological data to argue that the varieties of human sexual experience — including homosexuality, which he called “sexual inversion” — were natural variations rather than diseases or moral failings. He was the first English-language scientist to argue that homosexuality was congenital and not a vice or a pathology, and his work provided the theoretical foundation for the eventual decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

He was also a pioneer in the study of female sexuality, arguing (against the prevailing Victorian assumption) that women experienced sexual desire and were entitled to sexual satisfaction — a position that influenced the birth control movement and the feminist understanding of women’s sexual autonomy.

Other Works

Ellis was a remarkably prolific writer beyond the Studies. The Criminal (1890) was an early work of criminology. The Soul of Spain (1908) was a study of Spanish culture and character. Impressions and Comments (3 series, 1914–1924) was a collection of personal essays. The Dance of Life (1923) was his most popular book — a philosophical essay on art, religion, morality, and science as forms of the “dance” of life. My Life (1940), published posthumously, was a candid autobiography that described his unconventional personal life, including his open marriage to the writer Edith Lees and his complex emotional relationships.

Collecting Ellis

Studies in the Psychology of Sex (originally Watford University Press/F.A. Davis, Philadelphia, 1897–1928, 7 volumes) in first edition is the major collecting target. The first British publication of Volume I (1897), which triggered the obscenity trial, is particularly scarce. The Criminal (Walter Scott, 1890) is the early work. The Dance of Life (Constable, 1923) is the popular philosophy. The Mermaid Series (Vizetelly/Unwin, 1887–1889) is collected as a set. Ellis’s correspondence and manuscripts are held at the British Library and Yale.