AMID the tsunami of pornography that dominates the internet, it is now difficult to recall a period when such material was dangerously illicit. One of the few people to flout the rules was a Sheffield-born former solicitor called Leonard Smithers (1861-1907).

Moving to London with his wife Alice in 1891, he created a company called The Erotika Biblion Society of Athens, an erudite but fictitious name designed to throw the police off the scent. As he boasted himself: “I publish anything that the others are afraid of” – which much of the time involved pornography.

As they shared the same interests, he contacted the explorer Sir Richard Burton and the two men worked together on various texts, including One Thousand and One Nights. When Burton died, Smithers was forced to work with Burton’s widow, Lady Isabel. This unlikely pair – one striving for maximum erotic effect, the other desperate to bowdlerise her husband’s writings – managed to publish The Perfumed Garden and The Kama Sutra.

To minimise the danger, Smithers kept his pornographic stock in bags under the counter so that if threatened by a raid, they could be whisked away to a railway station and stored in the left luggage office. He toyed with the idea of putting a notice in the window: “Smut is cheap today!”

Oscar Wilde once said: “Smithers is so accustomed to bringing out books limited to an edition of three copies, one for the author, one for himself, and one for the police.”

Despite the risks attached, his business became so successful that Smithers was able to move his premises to the fashionable Royal Arcade in Old Bond Street and to install his family in a Bedford Square mansion.

Unfortunately Smithers’ Achilles heel lay in his love of literature. With the collapse of the Decadent movement in 1895 (following the Oscar Wilde trial), Smithers decided to support the embattled remnant. As well as publishing Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, he began a magazine called The Savoy to replace The Yellow Book, the Decadent quarterly recently abandoned by its publisher John Lane.

The artist Aubrey Beardsley suggested that Smithers should compete with John Lane’s Bodley Head by calling his new shop “the Sodley Bed”.

The new periodical had sterling supporters including Beardsley as art editor and such contributors as Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and WB Yeats.

The latter was to come into close contact with Smithers’ populist taste. Following the publication of the first edition of The Savoy in January 1896, Smithers held a celebratory dinner. Influenced by alcohol and determined to keep the party going, Smithers invited selected guests back to his house for more refreshment. A very reluctant Yeats was persuaded to come along.

When they reached the house, Smithers proudly unveiled his latest acquisition, a hurdy-gurdy piano, operated by electricity. Unconcerned by the failure of the electricity supply, Smithers insisted on cranking the machine by hand, exclaiming with delight at the ensuing racket. Yeats sat listening in a rictus of distaste.

In the midst of this performance, Aubrey Beardsley suffered a minor haemorrhage and sat spitting blood into a bucket. Yeats was distracted from this sight by Smithers’s wife Alice taking him to admire her new bamboo-covered walls. Oblivious of any problem, the sweating Smithers continued to grind out a tinny but thunderous version of Goodbye, Dolly Grey.

Next day, Yeats agreed to continue writing for The Savoy but only on the condition that he need never enter Smithers’ house again.

Smithers enjoyed the lifestyle of his new colleagues. One night in Paris in 1896, he accompanied Beardsley and the poet Ernest Dowson to Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s apartment in Montmartre, where Beardsley partook of hashish for the first time. The drug appeared to have no effect until later in a restaurant when Beardsley was overcome by irresistible giggling. He infected the rest of the party to such a degree that they were threatened with removal by the management.

By December 1896 The Savoy had folded. This fact and also his refusal to compromise over the extravagant production of uneconomic books threatened Smithers’ livelihood. Wilde commented ruefully: “The fact is, my dear Smithers, I really don’t think you are business-like: it is a painful thing to have to say of anyone: but in your case it is sadly true.”

By 1900, Smithers’ refusal to compromise combined with his reckless existence led to bankruptcy. Desperately he struggled to recoup his losses, swindling nearly every bookseller in London. After Beardsley’s death, when he began manufacturing forgeries of Beardsley’s drawings, even the last Decadents abandoned him. By 1905 he was reduced to housing the family above a tailor’s shop in Red Lion Street, Holborn.

As the family fortunes collapsed, Smithers and Alice took to heavy drinking, sending their son Jack out to pawn the last household goods, until finally even Alice had had enough and left her husband.
By 1907, Smithers was a drink and drug addled wreck, addicted to an opiate-based concoction known as Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. He died of cirrhosis of the liver aged 46 and his naked body, (even his monocle had been stolen), was found in a house in Fulham.

• Adapted from Neil Titley’s book The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip. For information go to www.wildetheatre.co.uk
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