13 
Censorship
13 ELISABETH LADENSON
Literary censorship—the suppression of works either pre- or post-publication—is grounded in the conviction that books have the capacity to influence beliefs and behaviours. Political and religious writings have always attracted the attention of censors and would-be censors, and the depiction of sexuality—with its powerful implications for social and religious mores—has also consistently provided fodder for individuals, organizations, and government bodies interested in upholding a particular moral standard by suppressing the production and dissemination of books. Doubtless the most important events in the history of literary censorship were the invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the advent of widespread literacy beginning in the 18th century and continuing apace throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Books (including pamphlets and newspapers) have always been viewed as ideal vehicles for the circulation of potentially dangerous information and ideas, so that the greater availability of books themselves, and the means to decipher them, inevitably gave rise to efforts to limit their capacity for pernicious influence. Although systematic state-sponsored censorship measures are largely a phenomenon of the early modern and modern worlds, the history of literary censorship is nonetheless almost as long as that of literature itself.
The first sustained argument for literary censorship is to be found in Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC). Here, in one of the early signal ironies of a history replete with irony and paradox, Socrates, who was to be put to death (and indeed already had been at the time of publication) on charges of corrupting the young and offences against religion, argues that in the ideal republic the works of poets should be suppressed—on much the same grounds as those on which he himself, as it happened, was to be accused. By the same token, Socrates anticipates the arguments that were to be repeated at regular intervals by proponents of censorship in a large variety of cultural climates: youth, and especially future rulers, should be protected from the bad examples on display in the works of the great poets and their followers. Nor does he allow the idea that some stories are to be understood allegorically. Using logic that would be wielded to good effect by the French Imperial Prosecutor in the trial of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1857, to take one prominent example among many, Plato’s Socrates maintains that readers cannot be trusted to distinguish truth from fiction or figurative from literal representation, and must therefore be shielded from all possible ambiguity. He further establishes an argument that would hold currency until the mid-20th century: that literary merit should be seen as an exacerbating rather than an exculpatory factor in judging the potential dangers of a work. This point is made in Book III, in which he discusses Homer’s depiction of the underworld in the Odyssey (Book XI), singling out for particular disapproval the famous lines in which the shade of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be a field-hand in life than a king in the realm of the dead. Such passages, according to Socrates, are dangerous not because they lack poetic charm, but precisely because they are so rich in it: the beauty and pathos of Achilles’ speech rendering all the more persuasive its harmful message that slavery is preferable to death.
Many of the themes that would prove central in debates and censorship trials over the centuries are present in the Republic, articulated by a figure who has frequently been portrayed as a martyr to the very cause—freedom of ideas—against which he effectively argues here, in a work written by the most influential philosopher in the Western tradition. Among the elements of the works of Hesiod and Homer which Socrates identifies as representing pernicious influences on the young are the foundational myths of Uranus and Cronus recounted in the Theogony, since these stories depict paternal castration and paedophagy as the original methods of divine conflict resolution. Similarly, various episodes from the Iliad and Odyssey are cited as offering examples of unworthy behaviour, including quarrelling among the gods, and heroes ostentatiously lamenting the deaths of friends and relatives, rather than merely celebrating their valour and glory. Also singled out for opprobrium are representations of gods and supposedly worthy men alike engaging in various basic forms of unseemly comportment, notably laughing, weeping, and allowing themselves to be carried away by drunkenness, gluttony, and lechery. None of these forms of behaviour provides acceptable models for future leaders, nor, in consequence, can such depictions be accurate, as gods and heroes cannot have engaged in ignoble conduct. Portrayals of this sort by the great epic poets, along with those of the 4th-century tragedians, must therefore not be allowed in the ideal republic.
It should be noted that Socrates, or Plato, cites at length the offending passages in the Republic itself, its audience presumably deemed capable of reading or listening to them without undue harm. This too is characteristic of later arguments for censorship, one of the basic assumptions of which is that the putatively corruptible subject is generally conceived as being inherently different from both the author of the polemic and its target audience. Here, the immediate interlocutors are friends and students of Socrates, and the readership of the work would have comprised other philosophically inclined, educated citizens, while those to be shielded from harmful literary influences are the young, future ruling-class of a hypothetical ideal society. In France under the ancien régime, it was in a similar spirit that specially expurgated versions of classic works were produced ad usum Delphini, for the education of the Dauphin. Starting in the 18th century and continuing well into the 20th, however, the vast majority of censorship initiatives construed the vulnerable audiences as comprising women, children, and the working classes.
Plato’s own works, especially the Symposium with its drinking-party framework and extended discussions of same-sex love, were repeatedly expurgated and at times suppressed entirely, or else accompanied by commentaries asserting the allegorical nature of such passages, as for instance in the first complete translation by Marsilio Ficino in the late 15th century. In antiquity, literary works tended to be suppressed on an ad hoc basis rather than as the result of systematic policies as became the case in later eras. Julius Caesar, and his successor Augustus, did, however, add the category of famosi libelli (defamatory or libellous works) to the lex maiestatis under which crimes against the majesty of the Roman people—and thus naturally their leaders—were prosecuted, with sentences ranging from deportation and confiscation of property to execution. According to Suetonius, the emperor Domitian, known for his campaigns to improve public morals, not only had the historian Hermogenes of Tarsus (not to be confused with the later Greek rhetorician of the same name) put to death for certain allusions in his History, but had the scribes who had copied out the work crucified as well, to make sure its ideas would not be repeated elsewhere; the work itself was publicly burned. Pythagorean writings had already been burned by order of the Senate as early as 181 BC.
Doubtless the most famous censorship case in imperial Rome was the banishment of Ovid by Augustus in AD 8 to Tomis in Boeotia, by the Black Sea in what is now Romania. The reasons and circumstances for this event have never been satisfactorily elucidated. Ovid himself, who spent the rest of his life lamenting his exile and vainly trying to regain favour, attributes his banishment to carmen et error (a poem and a mistake). At least one element of his crime seems to have been the licentious tone of the Ars Amatoria, all copies of which were removed from public libraries; he may also have been implicated in an adultery scandal involving the emperor’s granddaughter. Following the spread of Christianity, the pagan literature of antiquity became a frequent object of expurgation and suppression, while works by Plato, Virgil, and even Ovid himself were (along with Hebrew scriptures) reinterpreted as allegorical anticipations of Christianity. More recently, in the 19th and 20th centuries, unexpurgated editions of certain Greek and Latin works viewed as licentious, especially Aristophanes’ comic play Lysistrata and the Satyricon by Petronius, were regularly seized as obscene material in the US and the UK, often in opulent bibliophile re-editions, along with such Renaissance standbys as Rabelais, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron.
During the Middle Ages, MSS were mostly copied out by monks and chiefly confined to devotional works (see 5). Control of the production and dissemination of books was therefore for the most part under direct control of the Church, the censor’s job to read and correct the work of scribes. This did not, of course, prevent some theological approaches from being deemed unacceptable by ecclesiastical authorities. In 1120, for instance, Peter Abelard’s Theologia ‘summi boni’ was found to be heretical by the Synod of Soissons and the book was burned in public. Once the printing press and movable type became widespread, the possibilities for dissemination of unorthodox ideas naturally aroused concern in the Church, leading to the establishment of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The first edition of this list was published in 1559, at the behest of Pope Paul IV. A more comprehensive Index, backed by the doctrinal weight of the Council of Trent, followed in 1564 and served as the basis of subsequent listings. The Index itself was eventually suppressed in 1966, by which time its identification of works forbidden to Catholics carried mostly symbolic weight, rather than the full force of censorship that had marked its beginnings. Its final version featured some 4,000 works dating from the late 16th century to the 1950s, written in Latin, Greek, Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hebrew. Consisting for the most part of theological treatises, it also included, in addition to the usual suspects such as Voltaire and Rousseau (39 and 5 titles, respectively): Spinoza, Descartes, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Also featured are some perhaps more surprising choices, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise, and Pierre Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Authors whose opera omnia were forbidden include Benedetto Croce, Anatole France, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Émile Zola; for others, omnes fabulae amatoriae are cited, for example D’Annunzio, Dumas (both père and fils), George Sand, Stendhal, and Eugène Sue. Balzac is present for his early corpus published under the pseudonym Horace de Saint-Aubain; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Salammbô appear, but not his other works, while his now-forgotten friend Ernest Feydeau is singled out for his works; Victor Hugo is represented by Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. The list features relatively few 20th-century works—although the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide were added in 1948 and 1952, respectively—but includes many 19th-century French novels, which the Anglophone press as well as the Vatican long held up as epitomizing subversive indecency. One of the last authors to be added to the Index was Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Mandarins and The Second Sex were prohibited by the Vatican in 1956.
The development of religious censorship was directly linked to the invention of movable type, and by the end of the 15th century papal authority decreed that all books should be submitted for approval before publication. Canon law provided for the two basic types of censorship: a-priori scrutiny of works pre-publication, and a-posteriori condemnation of published works. Throughout the early modern era, European governments employed both means of suppressing books, with the state often working in conjunction with the Church in Catholic countries. A-priori vetting was instituted by governments across Europe during this period, with particular vigour in Italy and Germany. Religious censorship varied from one country to the next, with France tending to be suspicious of papal decrees, for instance, whereas in Spain the Inquisition controlled the circulation of books from the 1480s into the early 19th century. In 1521, François I declared that all theological works were to be submitted for a-priori authorization to the University of Paris, and a further ordinance of 1566 stated that no new book was to be published in France without an official seal of approval. The eventual development of copyright may be traced in some respects to these forms of censorship. In England, pre-publication licensing was required from 1538; the Stationers’ Company was incorporated by royal warrant in 1557, and the 1662 Licensing Act, enforced by this guild, was enacted ‘for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’. In 1641, Parliament abolished the Court of Star Chamber, and John Milton published his Areopagitica in 1644 as a (vain) plea for greater freedom of the press. The Licensing Act was finally allowed to lapse in 1695, and was not subsequently renewed.
Despite the end of the licensing system in England, the 18th century saw frequent prosecutions of authors, printers, and booksellers, in Britain as on the Continent. Many of the great works of French Enlightenment literature as it has been handed down to us, including some of the major works of Voltaire and Rousseau, were able to circulate only in clandestine form during the 18th century—a thriving international illicit book trade characterizes this period. The best known of the royal censors under Louis XVI, Malesherbes, regarded the philosophes with a relatively indulgent eye, and even wrote a tempered argument for freedom of expression, Mémoire sur la liberté de la presse (1790) (after which he was guillotined for his defence of the king before the Convention). Throughout Europe before the 19th century, censorship, in both a-priori and a-posteriori forms, was directed mainly towards political and religious offences.
The word ‘pornography’ was coined towards the end of the 18th century, meaning literally ‘prostitute writing’; it was at the time mainly used for works whose salacious character tended to be masked by sociological enquiry into the lives and working conditions of prostitutes. (The French writer Restif de la Bretonne wrote such works under the pseudonym ‘le Pornographe’.) In England, the category of obscene libel was little used before the 19th century, the vast majority of prosecutions being reserved for seditious and blasphemous libel. There were, however, some notorious exceptions. Editions of works attributed to John Wilmot, earl of Rochester (e.g. Sodom: or, The Quintessence of Debauchery, 1685) and to the late-Renaissance Italian author Pietro Aretino, such as Sonnetti lussoriosi with its salacious illustrations, dating from 1527, occasioned repeated obscenity prosecutions. In Catholic countries, the celibacy of the clergy provided an irresistible target for writers who, especially in France in the late 17th century, produced many works neatly combining blasphemy with what would later come to be called pornography. A number of these books, especially Michel Millot’s L’Escole des filles (1655), Nicolas Chorier’s L’Académie des dames (1680, a Latin version having appeared some twenty years earlier), and Jean Barrin’s Vénus dans le cloître, ou la religieuse en chemise (1683), were quickly translated into English and became the subject of frequent criminal prosecutions in England and elsewhere. Despite—and also, obviously, because of—their clandestine nature, such works received a great deal of attention. In his diary in 1668, for instance, Pepys recounts his purchase, ‘for information’s sake’, of a plain-bound copy of L’Escole des filles which he duly burns after reading the ‘mighty lewd book’. The reading habits of Richardson’s heroine in Pamela (1740–1) include only pious and edifying works, whereas Shamela’s library in Henry Fielding’s 1741 parody prominently features a copy of Venus in the Cloister, along with ‘Rochester’s poems’; nonetheless, it was Richardson’s novel which figured on the Vatican’s Index. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, generally known as Fanny Hill, originally published in 1749, became perhaps the most often-censored book in English, capping its career with a 1966 US Supreme Court case. Although its initial appearance had resulted in warrants for the arrest of its author, publisher, and printer, the majority of proceedings against purveyors of the novel, pornographic in every sense of the term, took place long after its author’s death.
At the end of the 18th century in England, with governmental fear of spreading revolutionary fervour, Thomas Paine was the author whose works, specifically Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, printers and booksellers were most often prosecuted for disseminating, on the grounds of seditious libel and blasphemous libel respectively. By the beginning of the 19th century, pre-publication vetting of works by governmental bodies—censorship in the strictest sense of the term—had been abolished in many countries, leading to repeated declarations of complete freedom of the press by successive regimes, which has never, however, meant post-publication impunity. As Sir William Blackstone wrote in his 1769 Commentaries on the Laws of England, ‘The Liberty of the Press is indeed essential to the nature of a free State; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published’ (Blackstone, 151).
The 19th century turned its attention from blasphemy and sedition to obscenity and indecency, terms with ever-widening application and which tended to be deployed with deliberate vagueness. Women, children, and the increasingly literate working classes—servants in particular—were seen as being in need of protection from literary corruption. In addition to obscenity prosecutions, this period was marked by the publication of expurgated versions of classic texts dating from less fastidious periods, for family consumption. This process continues to be known as Bowdlerization after its most famous practitioner, the Rev. Thomas Bowdler, who explains in the preface to his 1818 Family Shakespeare that his intention is ‘to exclude from this publication whatever is unfit to be read aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies’, or a father to his family, without having to worry about ‘words or expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty’. Several plays proved impossible to expurgate adequately, however, with the result that Bowdler was forced to omit Measure for Measure, 2 Henry IV, and Othello, about which he wrote, ‘the subject is unfortunately little suited to family reading’. His final, posthumously published effort was an expurgated version of Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the original edition of which (1776–89) had elicited controversy for what were perceived as attacks on Christianity, and in which passages depicting the Empress Theodora’s wilder moments had been written in Latin—the six-volume work remained a mainstay of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Even before Bowdler began his expurgation campaign, Charles and Mary Lamb had already produced their Tales from Shakespeare for children (including decorous accounts of Measure for Measure and even Othello) in 1807. The 1830s saw publication of a multi-volume Family Classical Library, following Bowdler’s example and featuring ‘those Authors, whose works may with propriety be read by the youth of both sexes’.
The proliferation of volumes of tales from the Bible during the 19th century may also be seen as part of the same effort to provide palatable versions of works at once indispensible and problematic. The Bible presented a particular problem, since it could obviously be neither ignored nor suppressed, and yet a large number of the stories in the Old Testament contained material guaranteed to raise many a blush on the cheek of modesty. Moreover, direct allusions to the indecency of Scripture were themselves liable to accusations of blasphemy, as Matthew Gregory Lewis discovered in 1796 when he published The Monk. This novel in the tradition of Horace Walpole’s and Ann Radcliffe’s popular gothic tales featured such extravagantly sadistic variations on the genre (rapes in burial vaults, etc.) that it earned accolades from the marquis de Sade himself, who deemed it ‘supérieur, sous tous les rapports, aux bizarres élans de la brillante imagination de Radcliffe’ (Sade, 42). Contemporary commentators, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who, along with Jeremy Bentham, had supported freedom of expression in debates on the subject), agreed that the novel was obscene and unfit for public consumption. What earned their particular opprobrium, as well as threats of libel proceedings, was not so much the book’s obscenity per se as the blasphemous story of a mother who allows her daughter to read the Bible only in an expurgated version she herself prepares, because of her conviction that ‘Many of the narratives can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast: every thing is called plainly by its name; and the annals of a brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent expressions’ (Lewis, 206–7). Lewis was able to avoid prosecution only by quickly producing an expurgated version of his own book.
In 1822, a man named Humphrey Boyle, shop assistant to Richard Carlile, who was himself in prison for publishing Paine’s The Age of Reason and other deist works, was tried for selling a pamphlet alleging the Bible to be an obscene libel. During the trial he insisted on reading aloud passages from Scripture, starting with the story of Lot and his daughters; this was greeted with outrage and the courtroom was hastily cleared of ladies and boys. Despite (or, again, perhaps precisely because of) this convincing demonstration of his point, Boyle was sent to prison for eighteen months on a charge of blasphemous libel.
Many of the obscenity prosecutions from the early 19th century well into the 20th were instigated by various anti-vice organizations, starting with the Proclamation Society established by William Wilberforce in 1787, which succeeded the Society for the Reformation of Manners and was the first such body to be specifically concerned with the suppression of obscene and profane literature. The Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1802, became the best known and most effective of these organizations, along with the National Vigilance Association which superseded it in 1885. At its inception, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which became known as the ‘Vice Society’, was dedicated to a variety of laudable aims, including the prevention of cruelty to animals and the punishment of those who seduced women and children into prostitution, but it was not long before the pursuit of literary indecency had all but eclipsed its other causes. The Vice Society movement became powerful towards the end of the 19th century in the US, most notably with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded by Anthony Comstock in 1873, and, five years later, with the New England Watch and Ward Society. France had its own late 19th-century crusader against literary indecency, the Senator René Béranger, derisively known as Père-la-pudeur, as well as its own vice society, the Cartel d’Action Sociale et Morale, founded by Protestants in the 1880s and active in highly publicized prosecutions involving works by Henry Miller and Boris Vian in the 1940s, thanks to the efforts of its indefatigable president Daniel Parker.
The mid-19th century inaugurated an era of obscenity proceedings involving hundreds of books, many of them destined to become classics. In England, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell, concerned about what he memorably termed ‘a sale of poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine, or arsenic’, that is, the thriving London pornography trade then centred in Holywell Street, proposed what became the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. It made the sale of obscene materials a statutory offence, and was, Lord Campbell explained, ‘intended to apply exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind’ (Thomas, 261–3). In order to drive home this point, he brandished a copy of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias and assured his peers that, however repulsive he might find such works, they could only be stopped by the force of public opinion, whereas the target of his measure was gross pornography only. Lord Campbell’s emphatically stated intentions notwithstanding, the Obscene Publications Act ended up being used over the course of the following century precisely against a variety of books along the lines of Dumas fils’s novel about a whore with a heart of gold.
In 1868, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Campbell’s successor, in a case called Regina vs Hicklin concerning the appeal of a ruling about an anti-Catholic pamphlet, established a de facto definition of obscenity. Lord Cockburn declared: ‘I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’ (Thomas, 264). This standard, which became known as the Hicklin rule or test, remained the extremely broad criterion according to which allegations of obscenity were judged until it was finally superseded by the Revised Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The 1959 Act did not, in fact, substantially change the basic idea of obscenity as that which depraves and corrupts, so much as make it less absolute, decreeing that works must be taken as a whole rather than inculpated on the basis of passages taken out of context, and allowing for mitigating factors such as historical interest and literary merit.
Meanwhile, in France under Napoleon III, during the same year in which the Obscene Publications Act was passed in England, two of the foundational works of modern literature were put on trial. Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s first published novel, had appeared in six instalments in the Revue de Paris in the autumn of 1856. Maxime du Camp, one of the journal’s editors and a friend of the author, insisted on making cuts in the work, including the suppression of an entire scene, in an attempt to ward off censorship. Du Camp’s actions not only enraged Flaubert, but attracted the very governmental attention he had sought to avoid. The author, a Revue editor, and the printer were all charged with offences against morals and religion (outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs), under a law created in 1819 during the Restoration.
The Imperial Prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, argued that the novel contained no admirable characters, and presented no moral compass to guide the reader; because it was likely to be read by girls and women, what he characterized as its denigration of marriage and its glorification of adultery were destined to corrupt the morals of its vulnerable audience. Flaubert’s lawyer, also assuming that literature must be morally edifying, argued that the book was in fact highly moral, demonstrating as it did the very dangers alluded to by his opponent. The tribunal returned a verdict of ‘acquittal with blame’, suggesting that the defence of depicting vice in the service of virtue—the standard argument of similarly accused authors, at least since Boccaccio in the epilogue to his Decameron—was not sufficient, but that while the author was not entirely innocent, he was not entirely guilty either. The novel was then published in volume form, with the excised passages restored.
A few months later, the same Imperial Prosecutor argued against Charles Baudelaire for his collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal. With the (somewhat irrelevant) exception of light song lyrics by the Bonapartist Pierre-Jean Béranger, prosecuted under the Restoration, legal proceedings against lyric poetry were all but unheard of in France (whereas in England Shelley’s Queen Mab was repeatedly prosecuted, and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads was withdrawn by its initial publisher for fear of prosecution). As in Flaubert’s case, the accusations against Baudelaire included offences against religion, but the prosecution concentrated most heavily on his volume’s alleged indecency. Six poems, all of which featured female sexuality, were found to be in violation of the 1819 law; the publisher had to cut them out of remaining copies, in what Baudelaire described as a surgical operation.
In 1866 he and his publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had moved to Brussels to escape repeated prosecution, brought out Les Épaves, which included the six condemned poems as well as a number of new pieces, with a striking allegorical frontispiece by Félicien Rops; this volume occasioned further legal proceedings when it was imported into France. Baudelaire spent the rest of his life producing new poems, often more violently sinister than those that had been removed, for new editions of the Fleurs du mal. Although the collection, including the six offending poems, began to be republished during World War I, the condemnation was not formally overturned by a French court until 1949.
Both Flaubert’s novel and Baudelaire’s poems had been accused of excessive realism, casualties of the larger conflict raging throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. This continuing debate, fuelled by rapidly increasing literacy rates and the rise of the novel as a largely feminine genre, centred on the question of whether the proper aim of art is to provide uplifting moral guidance by example or, rather, to depict the realities of life, however sordid. The art-for-art’s-sake aestheticism which had filtered into French literary circles through German Romanticism was not an admissible line of defence in the courtroom, nor was the notion that artistic merit might be seen as a mitigating factor, and indeed this was not taken seriously until the mid-20th century, when obscenity statutes in various countries were finally modified accordingly. In Le Rouge et le noir (1830), Stendhal had likened the novel to a mirror carried along a road, noting that the mud and detritus thus exposed to view should be blamed not on the mirror but on those responsible for upkeep of the road. This perspective was not shared by the authorities in any country much before the 1950s, and the French realist novel in particular was the subject of countless obscenity proceedings on both sides of the Channel throughout the rest of the 19th century. In the late 1880s, an elderly London bookseller named Henry Vizetelly was repeatedly tried, and eventually jailed, for publishing obscene libel in the form of some of the first translations of a number of French realist novels, including an expurgated translation of Zola’s La Terre. Indeed Zola’s name came to be a byword for obscenity in England, supplanting that of Rabelais and taking its place alongside that of Sade.
Freighted with allegorical significance, Félicien Rops’ 1866 etching for the frontispiece to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Épaves (‘scraps’ or ‘jetsam’) provided some indication of the forbidden fruits that lay within the limited edition. Musée Rops
The 1920s and 1930s saw a great number of obscenity proceedings in England, many of them incited by the National Vigilance Association (an organization which was also adept at inciting publishers to withdraw books in fear of punitive lawsuits), and helped along by the moral zeal of Sir William Joynson-Hicks, known as ‘Jix’, who served as Home Secretary 1924–8. This period was marked most notoriously by the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in France (1922) and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Italy (1928), as well as the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in England (1928). The Well of Loneliness trial was notable for the magistrate’s refusal to hear testimony from the many prominent literary figures who had turned out to support the cause of what Virginia Woolf referred to in her diary (31 August 1928) as Hall’s ‘dull, meritorious book’. It also provided an exemplary demonstration of how literary censorship is meant to work. When Hall’s publisher lost his case and the book was suppressed in England, no further novels sympathetic to the cause of homosexuality appeared for several decades (meanwhile, its American publisher, also prosecuted, won on appeal and the book circulated freely in the US). As E. M. Forster had discerned when he refused to attempt publication of Maurice, written in 1914, during his lifetime, the world would not be ready to accept stories of non-pathological, non-suicidal homosexuals for a very long time (Maurice was finally published almost 60 years later, after Forster’s death in 1970).
The Well of Loneliness and almost all other books banned in England were immediately reissued in France, notably by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press, later taken over by his son Maurice Girodias who also founded the Olympia Press, which also published a heady mixture of written-to-order pornography and serious fiction unpublishable in English-speaking countries. (In 1955, Girodias was to bring out Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, causing an international controversy and paving the way for its publication in the US and the UK three years later.) During the 1920s and 1930s, writers such as Lawrence, Joyce, and Henry Miller turned directly to publishers like Kahane on the Continent for the books they knew could not openly be printed in England or America, causing something akin to a reprise of the 18th-century international trade in underground books. Ulysses, however, was published in America after eleven years of clandestine importation of the original edition, and Random House won its case thanks to Judge John M. Woolsey’s memorable finding that Joyce’s novel was not an example of ‘dirt for dirt’s sake’, its sexual content reassuringly ‘emetic’ rather than aphrodisiac. Judge Woolsey’s exoneration of Ulysses coincided with the repeal of Prohibition pronounced during the same week in December 1933, which allowed for the somewhat misleading conclusion that Americans were now definitively free both to read and to drink as they saw fit. While Joyce’s difficult novel was able to circulate freely in America and England from the mid-1930s, both Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with its frequent and detailed sex scenes and liberal use of four-letter ‘Anglo-Saxon’ terms, and Tropic of Cancer, with its exuberant stream-of-consciousness vulgarity and similarly ubiquitous profanity, continued to be banned in English-speaking countries for some 30 years.
Once the 1959 Revised Obscene Publications Act was passed, allowing for expert testimony and the consideration of literary and other forms of merit, the practice of censorship began to change quickly. The immediate effect of the revised law was that Penguin Books took the chance of publishing what had already become Lawrence’s most famous novel, occasioning the most publicized literary trial since the The Well of Loneliness debacle in 1928. Regina vs Penguin Books was an unequal match, during which the defence called 35 expert witnesses, including members of the clergy, prominent writers, critics, medical experts, and educators, while the prosecution called no witnesses, conceding from the start that Lawrence was a great writer and the novel held some merit. The jury quickly returned a verdict of not guilty, eliciting applause in the courtroom and ushering in a new era, as Philip Larkin observed in his famous poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’: ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three … Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP’.
The era of routine literary censorship in the West came to an end during the 1960s, a period which coincided not only with societal upheaval but, it should be noted, with the rise of television and the gradual eclipsing of literature as a major social force. In the US, Tropic of Cancer was published by Grove Press in 1961, leading to a host of local prosecutions and, eventually, a Supreme Court case in 1964 which found that the work had sufficient merit to be published. Remarkably enough, two of the last major literary obscenity cases in the West involved books dating from the 18th century. In 1966 the US Supreme Court heard a final Fanny Hill case, making Cleland’s woman of pleasure safe at last for public consumption. In France, after some 150 years of clandestine circulation in the country and elsewhere, an enterprising young publisher brought out the complete works of the marquis de Sade in 26 volumes, in a long-term project begun in 1947. Despite a court ruling that several of the books were indeed obscene, the publisher did not withdraw them, and Sade’s works are now widely available in various ‘classic’ editions including Gallimard’s venerable Pléiade collection, printed on bible paper.
W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769 (1979)
P. S. Boyer, Purity in Print, 2e (2002)
A. Craig, The Banned Books of England and Other Countries (1937; repr. 1962)
R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996)
E. de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1992)
Index on Censorship, www.indexoncensorship.org, consulted Mar. 2013
W. Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987)
E. Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (2007)
M. G. Lewis, The Monk (1907)
S. Marcus, The Other Victorians (1966)
C. Rembar, The End of Obscenity (1968)
D. A. F. Sade, Les Crimes de l’amour, ed. M. Delon (1987)
D. Thomas, A Long Time Burning (1969)
