Introduction
When Roger Charlton left the English literary scene, between 1783 and 1785, he left a void in an area of letters he had covered so well.
Other authors wrote novels and essays of their times, of the mores and morals of the England that was then, but none dared to leave the safety of the drawing room to explore the bed chamber as Charlton had done.
None, that is, until Andrew Miller appeared on the scene. His first known work appeared in 1789. like all the novels of Charlton, it, along with his later works, was privately printed.
The first thing that becomes clear on reading the works of Miller (this one was published in London in 1791), is that he has been tremendously influenced by Charlton.
During his lifetime and even after his death in 1832, the rumor persisted that he was, in fact, the mysterious Roger Charlton. To this rumor, we do not subscribe.
It was inevitable, of course, that their work be compared since they chose the same basic approach to the novel as a mirror of their times.
Who was the greater ? We decline to comment. Charlton showed a greater concern for political issues in some of his novels, but his commentaries of contemporary morality were not more perceptive or incisive than those penned by Miller.
Both shared a quality almost unknown among other novelists before and after. That quality was an understanding of the fact that women too could enjoy sexual activity.
Neither author hesitated to cast a female in the central role of a novel and to show with touching realism, the wants and needs and hungers of a woman. With the same incisive clarity, they describe the joys of sexual satisfaction in the female.
Both wandered far afield in sexual matters, as indeed, the people of the time did. In addition to what was and frequently is, termed "normal sexual intercourse", they used a literary camera before the invention of the camera to portray lesbianism, sadism, masochism, onanism, and many other diversions and/or perversions which were not given labels until long after they passed from the scene.
But what makes the works of these two authors authentic historic novels of stature, is that they refused to be carried away in flights of imagine into the area where men were capable of achieving a climax every ten minutes and women gushed like fountains when they achieved climax.
They wrote of real people with real motivations and frankly human determinations.
TAINTED TEACHER, published privately in London in 1791, is the first novel of Miller's we have presented. Others are now being edited into contemporary English for easy readability and will be published in the near future.
They will show, as this work does, that Andrew Miller was a novelist of stature, a recorder of history, and, perhaps above all, a man who used his pen to hold up a mirror before the eyes of England.
Because of what they saw in that mirror, many Englishmen condemned Miller as they did Charlton before him.
But like Charlton, Miller survived the book banners and burners and so did his works. And while the banners and burners are still active today, the reprinted works of men such as Roger Charlton and Andrew Miller are here too.
They serve as a reminder that literature will not be bound and caged, that it will, despite the efforts of lesser men to chain it, soar over the heads of such stunters of intellectual growth to reach the hands and minds of those who welcome them.
But in addition, the novels of Miller, like those of Charlton, perform the basic purpose of the novel. They entertain.