John Cleland

John Cleland (1709–1789) was an English novelist. The son of a Scottish civil servant and a friend of Pope's, he was expelled from Westminster School, served the East India Company in Bombay for more than a decade and came home to debt and a debtors' prison, where in 1748 he wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the book known ever since as Fanny Hill. Prosecuted for it, he was let off, by one account, on condition of writing nothing of the kind again, and he spent the rest of his long life producing novels, plays, journalism and eccentric treatises on the Celtic origins of language, little read.