Oysters have always enjoyed an aphrodisiac reputation. And The Oyster - the hugely popular Victorian underground journal from whose pages this bumper selection is taken - certainly lived up to it. A Successor publication to The Pearl, it was even more bawdy and uninhibited than that organ. Even by today's standards, it is completely open in its robust descriptions of sexual pleasure.

Few copies of The Oyster survived into the later twentieth century. We are therefore indeed fortunate that an almost complete set was discovered a few years ago in a locked cabinet in the library of one of Britain's most famous stately homes. Here is writing that is often lovely and witty as well as gloriously explicit in its detailed celebrations of erotic adventure. The Oyster represents Victorian Values at their most upstanding.