Photo Bits featured short stories and bits of comic
whimsy (as did Tit-Bits), photographs of attractive
women (invariably clothed, but with glimpses of underclothes
and skin), and drawings and paintings depicting naked or
partially naked women. The first three images here are taken
from a 19 September 2015 weblog page by Anthony Quinn
(magforum.wordpress.com/tag/photo-bits) that displays several
pages from a 1902 issue of the magazine. The captions under
the first two give a sense of its erotic spirit––urgent, but
comically light and constrained by contemporary mores of
marriage and public display. Below the cover image of a man
kissing a very compliant woman, there is some text beneath the
title "LOVE'S ANXIETY." She says, "Kiss me again." He
protests, "My dear, I’ve just kissed you seventeen times in
seventeen seconds." She replies, "(reproachfully)––Harold, you
love another!"
Thus assured that female desire is fully as pressing as their
own, male readers could feast their eyes on a pin-up page
displaying two fully clothed but unmistakably inviting women
gazing out at them. The text below the reclining one, titled
"SWEETS ON A SHELF," teasingly notes, "which any well-endowed
viscount (K of K not excepted) can enjoy with the assistance
of a wedding-ring and a brief but dignified ceremony at St
George’s, Hanover Square." (Quinn notes, "Quite why K of
K––Lord Kitchener of Khartoum––is referred to is unclear.")
The lower image shows an attractive woman scandalously and
quite happily kicking up a leg to reveal the frilly
undergarments beneath her high-hemmed beachgoing dress. Under
the title "ON BLACKPOOL'S SANDY BEACH," the text reads, "A
delightful memory of a week at the delightful Lancashire
watering-place."
Like the more daring photos and cartoons in Playboy
in the 1960s, these images invite the reader to imagine the
adventures that certain luckier men––most likely
aristocrats––are enjoying. In Penelope Molly appears
to express an impatience similar to what a wife in the 60s
would have felt if her husband had left copies of Playboy
lying around: "Im glad I burned the half of those old
Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that
lying about hes getting very careless."
Some pages of the magazine were also crowded with a mongrel
mix of ads. They were directed at both genders, but men appear
to have been the primary target. In addition to more
photographs, and some printed texts, the ads promised relief
from ailments, augmentation of physical attributes, and
satisfaction of sexual fantasies. Gifford gives some examples:
"everything from 'Aristotle's Works' to 'Flagellations and
Flagellants,' 'Rare Books and Curious Photographs,' 'Rose's
Famous Female Mixture...will Positively Remove the most
Obstinate Obstructions,' 'Bile Beans For Biliousness,' and
innnumerable books and pills that promised 'Manhood
Restored.'" The page reproduced on Quinn's webpage offers,
among other things, treatments for hernias and hemorrhoids,
diet pills, products for improving the appearance of
moustaches and beards, cures for flatulence and alcoholism, racy
photographs from Paris, stereoscope pictures,
advice on how to win a woman, advice for wives, and advice on
how men can avoid "weaknesses" and "premature decline."
These ads take center stage in Circe when the Nymph
first accosts Bloom: "Mortal! You found me in evil company...
I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to
disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and
bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with
testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the
married.... Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the
aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded.
Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful
chest exuber. My bust developed four inches in three weeks,
reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo." Bloom timidly asks, "You
mean Photo Bits?" The Nymph
replies, "I do."
In the early 1990s Tess Marsh examined every issue of Photo
Bits stored on microfiche in the British Library and
published an
article on the magazine's presence in Ulysses.
She notes that, in addition to the ads, the Nymph mentions
"highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular
generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty
shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of
the century." At least some of these details reflect images
commonly displayed in the magazine. "On page after page,"
Marsh observes, "readers are presented with pictures of
frilly-skirted highkickers, knickers on view, jokes about high
kicks, and instructions on how to achieve the greatest
agility. There are pictures, too, of girls wading, skirts held
up high, and some on swings revealing underwear. The
frilly-skirted highkickers and their audience are vividly
evoked in Nausicaa" (884).
The photographs of "highkickers," and men's masturbatory
responses to them, are replicated on the Sandymount beach:
"His hands and face were working and a tremour went over her.
She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and
she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back
looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when
she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like
that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to
hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because
she knew about the passion of men like that, hotblooded,
because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made
her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was
staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that
had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and
highkickers and she said he used to do something not very
nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed."
Photo Bits probably contributed also to the scenes in
Circe in which several women (notably Molly, Mrs.
Mervyn Talboys, and Bella Cohen) wear male clothes, raising
issues of cross-dressing, transsexuality, and female
domination. Marsh remarks, "Not only are there innumerable
pictures of famous leggy panto boys of the period, but
the daring practice of cross-dressing is presented in many
photographs of the models who were pushing forward the bounds
of convention at the turn of the century. The cover picture of
an early number, 17 September 1898, is one of several examples
of a handsome woman in men's attire. She poses in a male
stance, legs wide apart, left hand raised towards her face
holding a cigarette. She wears a jaunty hat, a fitted coat
with exaggeratedly large shoulders, knickerbockers, and boots.
The caption is 'A Bit Strong'" (888).
Starting in mid-1909 the magazine went further, depicting
strong cruel women dominating puny timid men. On the cover of
the 13 May 1911 issue, Marsh notes, "a large woman is seen
beating a man with a slipper," and the caption jokes about
"Those Dear, Athletic, Strenuous Wives!" (888). Bloom's
subservience to Molly, and his fantasized subjection to the
whoremistress Bella, clearly fall within the scope of this
cultural preoccupation. In these years Photo Bits was
moving closer to the hard-core themes of Bits of Fun, a
magazine with which it eventually merged. "In the latter
publication," Marsh observes, "extremes of sadomasochism were
presented in lurid special features such as ‘Fads and
Fancies,' 'Confidential Correspondence,' and 'Torture in all
Ages,' and the paper came under fire repeatedly from the
censors, as we know from Joyce's letters to Budgen" (891).
Marsh remarks that "the appeal to depraved tastes" in Bits
of Fun spoke to "a different kind of reader from those
who, like Leopold Bloom, subscribed to Photo Bits in
1904, where the emphasis was on naughtiness and saucy humor to
be enjoyed within the bounds of 'good taste'" (891). It is
true that Bloom's daylight thoughts never venture into such
dark corners, but the sadomasochistic fantasies that surface
from his unconscious mind in the whorehouse suggest that Joyce
may well have been paying attention to the stronger themes
emerging in the popular pornography of the 1910s. Circe
unquestionably explores the realm of "depraved tastes."
Marsh points to still other motifs in Ulysses that
may have been inspired by Photo Bits: music hall
artistes and songs, seaside girls,
affectations of classical Greek style, interest
in what the upper classes are doing, tableaux vivants
(quasi-theatrical staged scenes), Milly's association with
photography. Joyce could have been (and no doubt was)
exposed to these things through other channels, but
collectively they suggest how important Photo Bits was
to him as he wrote his great novel.
