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 a 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 war 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. 

It wasn't 'banned', and it's hardly rare

For some reason, a number of newspapers have been reporting, as if it were something unusual and exciting, the sale at auction of  a C18th copy of Aristotle's Masterpiece, with claims that this was a 'banned book'.

I am not sure what 'banned' means in this context: there was no context in the UK for 'banning' books but there were certainly titles that, at least in the wake of the 1858 Obscene Publications Act,  reputable publishers and booksellers might have been cautious about vending without provisos that they were for a restricted audience such as doctors and lawyers. Even so, prosecution only occurred if somebody made a complaint to the authorities.

However, the Masterpiece was not produced by mainstream publishers but as part of a low culture of ephemeral productions, and sold in a variety of venues including 'rubber goods shops', which also sold contraceptives, abortifacient pills, etc. It may well have got swept up in police raids along with other literature considered dubious and falling within the parameters of Obscene Publications Act, but there are no famous trials involving its prosecution (though probably because the dealers selling it considered paying the occasional fine part of the cost of doing business, rather than seeing the issue as a matter of principle, as with the Bradlaugh/Besant Fruits of Philosophy case).

The fact that numerous copies of various dates come up when searching Bookfinder and are held by a range of libraries featuring in COPAC suggests that for a supposedly banned book a significant number of copies were in circulation in the UK (including in Welsh) from the late C17th until at least the 1930s, when it is listed alongside the works of Marie Stopes and Theodor van der Velde in the mail-order catalogues of rubber goods firms.

Catching up on journal literature III

Martha Vicinus, 'The Gift of Love. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001), p. 241-265: wonderful article about Mary ('Minnie') Benson, wife of Edward White Benson, eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, who picked her out to be his future wife when she was 11 and married her once she was 18. This did not work out well, although they did have six children. Her affections for other women were well beyond the conventions of Victorian romantic friendship. This article shows how remarkably flexible Victorian marital and domestic arrangements could be, and is another important contribution to the recent research on the intersections between religion and sexuality in the C19th and C20th.

Philip Howell, 'A Private Contagious Diseases Act. Prostitution and Public Space in Victorian Cambridge' Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), p. 376-402. Useful article on the policing of prostitution in Cambridge according to long-standing traditional University systems of regulation, and for, in fact, similar reasons to the actual CD Acts - the bringing together of a significant number of unattached young men in one place. The University officers tended to believe that prostitution was an unfortunate necessity, but they did not want it flaunting in the public streets and offering open temptation and tried to confine it to the working-class suburb of Barnwell. The University was indeed operating something very like the CD Acts - with medical inspections and incarceration in the 'Spinning House', but Howell points out that far from being a modernising regime this was based on practices that had been in place for a very long time. The records do mean that one can get some sense of women's trajectories in the profession - many seem to have been arrested and incarcerated only once, others had lengthy careers, most were young but not all. One thing I didn't really see addressed in this article was the way that this problem was positioned as being about the undergraduates: at a period when college dons were still required to be unmarried, or had only just been permitted to wed, were they not a significant element in the potential clientele? (and might that not have led to embarrassing encounters?)

David Trotter, 'Some Brothels. Nineteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Poetics of Space' Critical Quarterly 44 (2002), p. 25-35, a rather short article looking at prostitute rescue philanthropy and the belief that the rescue worker had to go into the brothels, and the way they describe them. How this relates to urban spaces and public/private space confusions. Idea of the descent into places represented as filthy and abject as an intiation. (More to be done here?)

Richard Hornsey, 'The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-War London', Gender, Place and Culture 9 (2002),  p. 371-38. Libraries and what they should be providing to readers; rise of the paperback; the distinction between the austere and tasteful Penguins and  books with 'alluring and tawdry jackets' - 'railway bookstalls' and the move of sex-novelettes out of the backstreet 'magazine shop' into this liminal space. The tension between the reputation and perception of Penguins and the perceptions of Lady Chatterley's Lover leading to the trial. Where and how to read. Segues to discussion of books about homosexuality. Little difference in representation as 'tortured misfits' in medical and sociological works, and 'crude generic fiction'. Libraries were fairly okay with the 'serious' texts but the others were perceived as degraded bookstall fodder (often making quite misleading come-ons with the covers!). Orton and Halliwell's defacement of library books as a kind of queering performance art - presenting the unsuspecting reader who picks up one of them from the shelves with some new set of reading practices. (?'Matter out of place?)