UPDATE: Someone's finally scanned in a free copy of The Pearl. Many thanks to John Mehlberg for kind his gift to stingy nostalgiac perverts throughout the english-speaking world.
The Victim/Victorian series has generated more feedback than all my other writings so far combined. Most of the mail has simply been a sentence or two of praise or a request for particular scenes to occur in future chapters. Several people, though, have expressed curiosity about the story's influences and antecedents. This page is to answer those questions.
The biggest and most obvious of those influences is the legendary Victorian underground magazine The Pearl, which is available in Blue Moon and Carrol & Graf editions in the erotica section of most online and meatspace bookstores. Though copyright has long ago expired on the original work, I don't know of an online copy, unfortunately.
The Pearl contains several serialized short novels. Of these, Sport Among the She-Noodles probably flavors the prose and characters of Victim/Victorian the most. Flunkeyania displays a somewhat similar taste for ham-handed irony and self-concious dialogue & narration. My Grandmother's Tale may have contributed to my taste for nested stories as seen in Chapter 4.
Speaking of Chapter 4, the folktale in that portion is inspired by the wonderful (but clean) Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, the full text of which is available online.
A more obscure and perverse inspiration for Victim/Victorian was a novel I read years ago called The Adventures of Harry Temple, published I think by Carroll & Graf, which appears to be roughly Edwardian in setting. The protaganist's cavalier, snobbish, and often downright cruel treatment of the women he seduces or coerces into his bed made me long for an anti-Harry Temple, which would combine the period's charming language with female characters who can take care of themselves.
Another influence was the stories of Herb Grinder, which demonstrated a particular register of female sexual aggressiveness that I found both charming and arousing. Careful readers will notice several shameless swipes from that source in V/V.
It's not exactly an influence in the sense of the above works, but Part 2 benefitted greatly by a dunking in the Fishtank, an online erotica writer's group that anyone interested in the craft of sex fiction should take a look at.
Some other online writers have produced work similar to mine. Some of it is excellent, but none of it has had much direct influence on Victim/Victorian.
Oosh and Nick Urfé are both ASSTR authors who write lesbian erotic fiction set in the ninteenth century. Both are humorous and thoughtful correspondents, both are also better writers than I am (at least for now--I'm not saying I'll never catch up.)
Oosh's novel is the rather unfortunately-titled Pavlova's Bitches (I propose "The Sexual Sense" as an alternate ). It's a tale of sexual, emotional, and political awakening at a progressive girl's school. It starts out humorous, but draws the reader into some rather deep waters as it progresses.
Nick's work-in-progress, Indigo, is darkly playful throughout. Nick writes bracingly intelligent tongue-in-cheek stories, and has a love of the more exotic period vocabulary.
Unlike the fairly ambitious works listed above, Kitten Cream's Victorian Seduction is a straightforward pornographic romp. Her sense of period language and culture isn't as sophisticated, but the story is a fun, sexy read nonetheless.
The swell folks at Swell Audio feature a smattering of genuine Victorian pornographic stories for free download, as well as hosting copy of V/V (thus demonstrating their excellent taste).
If you know of other works that should be listed here, please let me know and I'll add them.