An insight into literary censorship in the UK, c. 1951

I was recently re-reading William Cooper's Scenes from Married Life (1961), set in 1951. The narrator/protagonist, Joe Lunn, has significant similarities to Cooper, being a temporary Civil Servant in a department concerned with scientific research, and a novelist who has already enjoyed some modest success.

(I don't actually greatly recommend this novel, which is not on a par with Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life (1950) about a group of young people, yes, in the provinces, in the few months just after Munich.) 

One episode, of interest to the historian of literary censorship and pertinent to the question I raised here, occurs some considerable way into the narrative. Joe is thinking that, if his new novel earns him a bit of money, he and his wife might contemplate having children. And then he hears from his agent who has been told by the publisher, Courtenay, that 'He thinks it's wonder. But he can't publish it.... He thinks it's improper.'

This leads to Joe have a series of conversations with Courtenay and the firm's solicitor, which do rather suggest the kinds of conversations that took place. Courtenay explains, 'We've just  heard that the Home Office is going to start getting interested.... Apparently they're just about to open a new drive.... The Home Office, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, can set the standard more or less where they like. Since the was everybody's noticed that it's been going down. Now they're going to put it up.... It's got us publishers worried. Definitely worried.'

He recommends that Joe talk to the firm's solicitor about how to 'tone the thing down so as to get by with it'.

The solicitor explains the law of Obscene Libel (whether the tendency is to 'deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influence'). He suggests that Joe's novel, which depicts characters making love when they are not married and and with 'no likelihood of their generating children thereby' would produce a 'dominant effect' of  'shock, of outrage, in some persons who might read it'. However, he does concede that it is largely a matter of isolated passages that might be altered and that this accomplished, the book should be publishable.

What is notable is that this process takes place in conversation: over lunch with Courtenay, and in the solicitor's office. This makes one wonder how far this is something that one might even trace in publishers' archives, if it was happening as verbal hints, and possibly even meaningful expressions. 

Marketing Manhood

 I was moved, over 40 years ago, to commence the PhD which eventually turned into my first book, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900-1950, on discovering, initially via the letters from men received by Marie Stopes, how very less than confident in their own sexuality (how, indeed, uncocksure, if one might say so) numerous men were, at a period when men are popularly supposed to have been a rather more robust generation. 

This led down into rabbitholes of Victorian, Edwardian, and twentieth-century sexual quackery that have caused me, upon reading these articles ‘They’ve invented a spurious pseudo-disease’: why are so many men being told they have low testosterone? and The Growing Quest for Penis Enlargements to remark to myself that these are not new phenomena of modern C21st life but simply the latest iteration of something with a much longer history. Making money from worried men.

The Victorians (and indeed, pre-Victorians) were told that the threat to their manhood was masturbation, or if not deliberate self-abuse, involuntary seminal emissions. I have previously blogged apropos about the resurgence of similar themes in the 'No Fap' movement.

Quack pills and other patent devices were promoted as the remedy for debilitated men: Harness's Electropathic Belts, we observe, were as good for 'weak men' as for 'delicate women'.

Serge Voronoff put into practice his theories about implanting animal testicles in men to rejuvenate them - 'monkey-glands' became a theme in popular culture of the 1920s and 30s. However the results did not live up to the promises touted, except, possibly, via the placebo effect.

This is usually considered to be the reason for any benefits W. B. Yeats experienced from the Steinach operation (unilateral vasectomy) performed for rejuvenation purposes by Dr Norman Haire.

My attention has also been drawn to Vita Radium Suppositories for 'Weak Discouraged Men!'. (Not convinced that these would have actually contained any radium.)

But besides these fashionable 'cures' drawing on what appeared to be the latest cutting-edge scientific discoveries, the good old fashioned pills 'calculated to cure lassitude and debility', which were sent to Lord Peter Wimsey (and in this case, would have ended lassitude and debility for good and all: Gaudy Night, Ch 19) continued in surreptitious circulation. Also contraptions such as the Blakoe Ring.

Nor should the 'muscles-maxxing' pioneers Eugen Sandow and Bernarr Macfadden be left out of the story of male striving for self-improvement.

Fortunes have clearly been made, and are still being made, from these concerns.