In his last great novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence makes liberal use of earthy Anglo-Saxon terminology in giving an explicit yet poetic account of an adulterous affair between an aristocratic lady and her husband’s gamekeeper. For this reason, for more than three decades after it was written in 1928, the complete novel was considered to be unpublishable in the country of the author’s birth.
Then, in 1960, Penguin Books decided to risk prosecution by publishing a full text of the novel in Britain. The trial that followed swiftly turned into a media jamboree. At its comical climax the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, solemnly asked the jury: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’
‘Whenever books are burned, in the end men too are burned.’
Heinrich Heine, 1821
Knee-deep in sexual filth The prosecution, brought under the recently revised Obscene Publications Act (1959), reflected the British establishment’s view that such frank material was likely to ‘outrage public decency’ and to ‘deprave and corrupt’ the minds of ordinary people. The kind of corruption envisaged in such legislation was made explicit in 1917 by a New Zealand magistrate, who surmised that public distribution of Maupassant’s A Spa Love Affair would allow the ‘literary hogs … to wallow knee-deep in sexual filth’, so opening up ‘that broad highway that leads to the mental hospital, the gaol, and the premature grave’. The jury’s verdict in the Chatterley trial in favour of Penguin was an indication that the British public was no longer prepared to tolerate such lofty paternalism; it no longer wanted (if it ever had wanted) somebody looking after its moral well-being. People, it seemed, wished to make up their own minds on such matters and gave notice that censorship – official curtailment of free expression in the (supposed) public interest – was no longer, or at least not always, acceptable.
‘If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.’
Benjamin Franklin, 1731
Penguin’s main defence in the Chatterley trial was that Lawrence’s novel had ‘literary merit’, a fact that E.M. Forster and a procession of other literary luminaries came before the court to corroborate. The idea that the literary or artistic quality of a book could be taken into account in such a case was new in the 1959 anti-obscenity legislation. However, the underlying principle – that the ethics and the aesthetics of art are two very different things – was a much older idea that also informed Oscar Wilde’s comment in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): ‘There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’
State control Those brought up in the traditions of Western liberalism are inclined to think of freedom of expression as an absolute right and hence of censorship as inherently objectionable. Such a view is naive in failing to recognize the extent to which such freedom is still and always has been significantly circumscribed. Indeed, until the principle of liberty and the rights of the individual came to prominence in the 17th-century Enlightenment, the common view was that society had a right and a duty to control the moral and political behaviour of its citizens by regulating the flow of information and blocking the expression of opinions that it deemed pernicious. In the Republic, Plato does not hesitate to recommend strict censorship of all artistic expression, and even in democratic Athens the philosopher Socrates was executed in the 4th century BC on a charge of not recognizing the city’s gods. Throughout history – until the present day in many parts of the world – imposition of religious orthodoxy has been taken to justify the most radical censorship. In the Catholic Church, for instance, the Inquisition was established in the 13th century to eradicate, often terminally, those holding or expressing heretical views. The Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum (‘list of prohibited books’) was set up by Pope Paul IV in 1559 and not finally abolished until 1966; its most illustrious victim, in 1633, was Galileo, ‘a prisoner to the Inquisition’, in John Milton’s words, ‘for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought’.
In his Areopagitica of 1644 Milton launches one of history’s most impassioned and articulate assaults on censorship. He attacks the government’s policy of licensing of books – in effect, pre-publication censorship, or what would now be called ‘prior restraint’ – and pleads to be given ‘the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’. In his Lives of the Poets (1779–81), Samuel Johnson, a perennial conservative, makes the opposing case. Fearful of the effects of the kind of liberty that Milton demands, he cannot see why it is ‘more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief’.
‘Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.’
Thomas Jefferson, 1786
‘Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against freedom of the press, it is the closing down of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.’
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1970
Liberty or safety? The liberal commitment to freedom of expression is most notably underwritten by the First Amendment (1791) to the US Constitution, which includes the provision that ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’. In practice, however, while there may be a presumption against any kind of prior restraint, there is a range of laws intended to punish those who abuse this freedom by publishing or otherwise expressing views that society regards as unacceptable. Laws against libel, obscenity, blasphemy and various kinds of incitement are all censorious in that they penalize those who cross the boundaries set in a particular jurisdiction. Every society thus condones some level of censorship. In certain circumstances such control may be regarded as relatively uncontroversial – if it is exercised in time of war, for instance, or in order to protect national security. Even then, however, there will be many who proclaim, with Benjamin Franklin, that those who ‘can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’.
the condensed idea
Protecting the servants