via NYPL

Readers and reading were sources of constant interest to artists in the Romantic period. The young woman shown here holds Matthew Gregory Lewis’s “terror-gothic” The Monk (1796). A phantasmagoria of murder, suicide, corruption, and incest, it is one of the few novels for which nineteenth-century disapproval might still seem justified, and it was blamed for considerable moral degradation. The subject of Comfort heats her posterior along with her imagination.

There ain’t nothin’ feel so good as a warm butt with a phantasmagoria