Good‐natur'd Dick's Gang Rape: Theorizing Consent and Disability in Fanny Hill

This article magnifies a fraught episode in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) in which a man with cognitive disabilities, Good‐natur'd Dick, is gang raped by two women sex workers. Fanny, the titular woman of pleasure, explicitly identifies the assault as an ‘attack’, and the anecdote reveals the novel's conceptual tensions among consent, gender, and disability. That Fanny's epistle later details Good‐natur'd Dick assaulting Louisa, the second sex worker, in what appears as potentially retributive violence, only further complicates the account in which assailant and survivor become subject positions uneasily exchanged among the three. By re‐reading this tense incident, this article seeks to theorize, through Fanny Hill , the co‐constitutive constructions of consent and disability in the eighteenth century, especially as they inform the new rape studies.