My Secret Life, by "Walter", is the memoir of a gentleman describing the author's sexual development and experiences in Victorian England. It was first published in a private edition of eleven volumes, at the expense of the author, including an imperfect index, which appeared over seven years beginning around 1888. The work itself is enormous, amounting to over one million words, the eleven original volumes amounting to over 4,000 pages. The text is repetitive and highly disorganised and the literary quality is negligible, but its frank discussion of sexual matters and other hidden aspects of Victorian life make it a rare and valuable social document. According to Steven Marcus, it is virtually the only source for information on London's houses of prostitution, in which Walter spent many hours. It has been described as "one of the strangest and most obsessive books ever written". Publishing and bans The first edition was probably printed by Auguste Brancart, in an impression of only 25 copies. In the twentieth century My Secret Life was pirated and reprinted in a number of abridged versions that were frequently suppressed for obscenity. In 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing the first three volumes. In the USA it was finally published without censorship in 1966 by Grove Press, but in 1969 a British printer, Arthur Dobson, was sentenced to two years' prison for producing a UK reprint. It was not until 1995 that the work in its entirety was published openly in the UK, by Arrow Books. Authorship The identity of "Walter" is unknown. There is no scholarly consensus in favour of any of the candidates proposed. The most commonly suggested author is Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900). He was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer and, from the three volumes he published under his pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, the expert on erotic books in his day. Gershon Legman was the first to link "Walter" and Ashbee, in his introduction to the 1962 reprints of Ashbee's bibliographies, and the 1966 Grove Press edition of My Secret Life included an expanded version of that essay. Ashbee was also identified as Walter by a May 2000, Channel 4 documentary on British TV, Walter: The Secret Life of a Victorian Pornographer – and in 2001 Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001, ) provided a detailed review of circumstantial evidence arguing that Ashbee