On one page Napoleon peeks through a set of curtains to spy on cavorting nudes. On another the Duke of York is in carnal embrace with his diminutive wife. A third depicts George III defecating into a hat. One of the droppings is Malta.

The bound volume of cartoons by James Gillray, the 18th and 19th century artist whose satirical etchings were the forerunner of modern political cartoons, was once considered so obscene that it was seized by police.

On Tuesday the pornography and obscenity team at the Ministry of Justice conceded that times have changed and handed it over to the Victoria and Albert Museum, The UK Times reported yesterday.

The cartoons were considered bawdy fun when they were first published individually in the late 18th century, but by the 1840s, when they were printed as a collection, they were sufficiently outrageous for the publisher to withhold his name from the title page. The police of the Victorian era agreed. They impounded the book and handed it to government officials.

It was rediscovered by David Pearson, a senior policy adviser at the Ministry of Justice. “I found it wrapped in a bin liner between a desk and a pair of filing cabinets,” he said. “The folio was carefully wrapped up alongside a collection of seized material that had been handed to the old obscene publications unit over the years. That material is fairly tame by today’s standards, but when I uncovered the folio it was clear that it was something a little out of the ordinary.

“We’re not a repository for anything seized, so at some point the police must have sent in examples of obscene material. Sometimes members of the public sent stuff in and said, ‘This is the kind of filth that is out there’.

“When I opened the book I recognised (Gillray’s art) because I’d seen his stuff before.”

Mr Pearson took the book to Bonhams, the auctioneers, which valued it at up to £1,500, before it was offered to the V&A.

Stephen Calloway, curator of prints in the word and image department at the museum, was delighted to receive the book because the collection had previously only contained Gillray’s inoffensive etchings. Henry Bohn, who reissued Gillray’s works in the 1840s, produced Gillray’s complete works in two volumes – a main volume containing safe material and a slim volume of naughty cartoons.

“If you asked for the main volume you could also ask for the supplementary volume, effectively under the counter,” Mr Calloway said. “It was very much the sort of thing a gentleman would keep in his library as an after-dinner amusement. Many of the political events that gave rise to the cartoons in the main volume have passed out of relevance, whereas these (naughty cartoons) remain funny today.”

Although only about a dozen copies of the smutty volume survive, some images have become widely known.

Arguably the most famous is Fashionable Contrasts, alternatively titled The Duchess’s Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot (1792). The image of a woman’s feet and dainty shoes astride a much larger set of legs in boots is a joke about the difference in physical size between Frederick, Duke of York, and his widely detested wife and cousin, Frederica.

Other targets for satire include Napoleon, whom Gillray always drew as a tiny figure. In one image he is lampooned for his infatuation with Empress Josephine and is shown spying on her and a French actress as they dance naked. Napoleon is also depicted waving a sword at George III, who responds by squatting over a hat into which he has dropped countries such as Malta, which Napoleon annexed in 1798.

Scatology is a common theme. National Conveniences contrasts the lavatorial habits of the English, Scottish, French and Dutch, while A Map of England and France shows the British Isles with George III’s head at one end and a shower of ill-defined objects raining on to France from the other.

Gillray also reflected public outrage with apparent moral corruption in France. In Ladies Dresses as it Soon Will Be he shows a woman in a skirt split to the buttock. Mr Calloway said: “This was thought to be a dreadful thing that was happening in France, and that it shouldn’t happen in England.”

Some cartoons are inoffensive to the modern eye, but contain references to pregnant women that may have been resonant at the time. In one, an elderly women tells a younger one: “Miss, I have a monstrous crow to pluck with you.”

The volume means that the V&A’s collection of Gillray is now complete. It acquired the main volume in 1869 from the Reverend Chauncey Hare Townshend.

The bawdy cartoons will go on display next year and will then be made available to the public in the prints and drawings study room.

Bridget Prentice, the Justice Minister, said that views on what is considered obscene have changed enormously since the volume was seized. “Even so, I think these pictures would better suit the museum than hanging in a ministerial office,” she said.