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. 

Forgotten vs somewhat neglected novelists

I was recently brought up short during a re-read of Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Wimsey scans Ann Dorland's bookshelves: 'Dorothy Richardson—Virginia Woolf—E. B. C. Jones—May Sinclair—Katherine Mansfield—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they?' I think Richardson, Woolf, Sinclair and Mansfield would be familiar names to anyone with some acquaintance with women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century - but E. B. C. Jones?

In fact, Emily Beatrix Coursolles ("Topsy") Jones (1893-1966), has a remarkably substantial Wikipedia entry, which says her novels

focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the young "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties. She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals.

provides a useful biographical summary and plot outlines of the novels. She also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

I have managed to gain a sight of a few of her novels, Quiet Interior (1920), The Singing Captives (1922), and The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), well worth reading and would like to read the others.

I shall now be adding Jones to my webpage British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' along with some additional updates - I discover that there is interest being taken in Romer Wilson, and that Sarah Salt's Sense and Sensuality (1929) has lately been republished by Cutting Edge Books.

But considering these works and authors which can reasonably described as having been 'forgotten' at least for a signficant length of time, made me think of certain works and authors claimed to have been 'rediscovered' e.g. by Virago Press, but I wonder if they had ever been truly entirely lost.

There is a difference between a book which may have made a great sensation in the 1920s and then vanished, and other books which may never have gained enormous critical cred but have gone on not only being read, enjoyed and recommended, but continuing to be republished. Books which appeared in cheap reprint editions and in Penguin and later mass-market paperback formats (a substantial portion of my Winifred Holtby collection consists of the Corgi paperback editions issued, one suspects, in the wake of the success of the Yorkshire TV South Riding) - and also circulated in public libraries.

The popularity of certain works with library patrons led to the production by Cedric Chivers of Bath of New Portway Reprints, robust hardbacks specifically for libraries of works that librarians knew would be much borrowed. Paula Byrne notes in The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym that Pym was a little cheered during her years in the wilderness of publishers' lack of interest by reprints of four of her earlier books as 'Library Association reprints by Chivers of Bath'.

I surmise that there may be studies to be done on these books which are neither critically-acknowledged  'classics' nor perennially popular genre bestsellers but go on having what was perhaps a word of mouth reputation. 

Just possibly these might be what Stella Gibbons was alluding to as ' the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind'? (In My American, 1939).

 

More of a question (or questions) than a comment, re literary censorship

Have just been reviewing a new study of censorship in England, review forthcoming in due course in a scholarly journal, but it mentioned, as have previous studies, without really delving into, the role of publishing in gatekeeping. This work, and earlier studies, have emphasised the 'miasmatic' effect of the haphazard operations of the distributed nature of censorship in England from the mid-nineteenth century up to the later decades of the twentieth (the acquittal of Penguin books over Lady Chatterley's Lover did not usher in a free-for all) and that this led to a degree of caution amongst publishers as to what they were prepared to take on.

What has not, as far as I know, yet been undertaken is an exploration of publishers' archives (many of which are now available in various repositories) to see how far considerations of fears of difficulties over censorship led them to engage in dialogue with authors over what was and what was not prudent to express. (Before it came to the question of the difference between publishing in hardback versus a more generally available cheap paperback, a central issue in Regina vs Penguin Books.) There may also, perhaps, be a record of this kind of process among the papers of authors themselves. What were the compromises that were negotiated to enable publication to proceed?

I have also been given to wonder about the differing levels of what was permissable in different genres. In her memoir, You May Well Ask, Naomi Mitchison described the difficulties she had in publishing a novel of contemporary political and social life, We Have Been Warned (1934), in which she found that the freedom she had been accustomed to employ in her well-received historical novels in dealing with sexual mores met with entire horror. What had caused no problem when her characters wore 'wolfskins and togas' became potential matter for prosecution when they were clad in modern dress.

One also wonders whether the crime novel had certain liberties permitted.

On the more general question of who was an appropriate audience, I do not know if any work has been done on public libraries and either attempts to get potentially controversial literature onto the shelves for rate-payers' perusal, or protests by rate-payers that public money was being spent on noxious matter. A very anecdotal hint discovered when pursuing reception of the first Kinsey Report suggests some libraries had a system of certain tendentious items being kept 'in the Librarian's office' and only produced on request, with their approval.

Historical research, while answering some questions, will always tend to open up further lines of enquiry!

New Year message: The bizarre timescales of academic publishing

Last year I didn't have anything published, which makes it the first year in getting on for 20 that I haven't been able to add something to my bibliography by the year's end. However, I do currently have 2 journal articles, 4 book chapters, and a couple of fairly substantial encyclopedia entries somewhere along in the publication process, and indeed, one of the books in which I have a chapter should finally make its appearance, having been nearly 6 years in the pipeline, early this year.

I also recall that there is another chapter, in the proposed proceedings of an archives conference which took place in the spring of 2007, about which I have heard nothing for a very long time, and assume that the project has quietly expired. Not that one can always count on this; it is not beyond the reach of probability that there will be a sudden and urgent call for final editorial revisions due the day before yesterday, after which there will be another lengthy hiatus.

The year, however, when everybody started saying to me 'Wow, you are so prolific' was probably 2001, in the course of which I saw finally reach the light of day one chapter in a volume generated by a conference in the summer of 1994 (and fortunately there had not been massive advances in the historiography of the topic since then) along with other things which had been turned around in considerably less time. The apparent prolificness was entirely an artefact of the publishing processes involved and not because I had spent the previous 12 months madly writing.

What you see can be quite misleading.

Credit where it's due

I'm riffing off an impassioned post by Matt Houlbrook on the exploitation of historians and the invisibilisation of their labours by, for example, the media (as well as unattributed citation in the blogosphere). And like him, I could rant for a considerable time about 'media researchers' (and as an archivist I possibly encounter even more of these) who expect what is often a substantial amount of free labour which may not even come to anything ('we're thinking of developing a programme...').

But what this made me think about was the failure to give due credit even within our actual profession, by senior figures in the field who should know better. This is a rather different matter from the people who write novels or plays based on an incident or theme in history that they have discovered in some historical monograph, though one does feel that acknowledgements to source are due in an afterword, if not a preface.

Some years ago I went above and beyond any responsibility I might have as archivist looking after a particular collection of papers, by identifying for a well-known historian, who had only a short time to pursue research into what is a very extensive collection of correspondence, not thematically organised, a selection of  letters within it dealing with a particular topic, as I had published on this myself and was able to retrieve the information from my notes. When the work of which this formed an admittedly minor part was published, there was no citation to my work, a very strong implication that the author had found this collection all on their own, and interpretations applied which I felt possibly unjustified by spending a few hours consulting what was, after all, a small if hopefully representative selection. This was, looking at other references, not the only place where the existing historiography of the subject was glossed over; the impression the work in question gave was that the author had made startling new findings - which anyone who knew the literature of the subject would have known were already well-established.

Books by well-known names, published by trade presses, tend to get reviewed in the general press, not merely the scholarly journals, usually (in my experience) by people who lack any background in the field and thus take as revelation matters which are hardly new to the historian.

I could think of other instances of lack of collegiality in failure to acknowledge assistance given, or indeed to make due attribution to precursors in the field. I don't think this kind of bad behaviour is universal, in fact it is sufficiently contrary to usual good practice that it is perhaps the more shocking when it occurs, but I wonder if the media-isation (as it were) of history puts pressure on historians (or their publishers) to claim that their work is sui generis and a wholly new revelation about some historical matter, rather than part of the ongoing collective process that history actually is.

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.

Not quite the positive year-opener I'd intended

Over the Christmas/New Year break I was reading a book that had been sent to me for review, published by the press of a fairly distinguished university.

I was driven to google 'X University Press' to ascertain that this was, indeed, the publishing arm of 'University of X', because I wondered if we were in the realm of the 'Watford University Press' of Havelock Ellis's publishing misadventures with Sexual Inversion, or one of those 'open access' academic publishing enterprises which send out spammy emails soliciting contributions in a particularly untargetted way.

But no, this appears to be the Print on Demand and digital press operation of the University of X.

What they don't appear to have is editorial staff (the only staff member I could locate on their website was a 'business manager', not terribly encouraging). The book as received looked as though somebody had just put into print the kind of unfinished, unpolished draft one might send on spec to a likely publisher for consideration. The references - where there were any, because there were quite a lot of places where there were no citations to material quoted - were all over the place and in various inconsistent forms (some as footnotes; some in brackets after the quote; and some I think the reader was required to match up themselves by going to the bibliography at the back - which was incomplete). If it had ever received the attentions of a copy-editor, the individual in question should be sacked for incompetence.

It seems unlikely that the work had been sent out to external reviewers for comment before publishing, which might have eliminated a few bloopers.

I have read self-published works in which the necessary editorial work has been much more conscientiously done and which have perfectly acceptable scholarly apparatus.

Reading this book was a depressing experience of potential wasted. Its issue in  this condition did no service to the author, to the potential audience, or to the press itself and the institution of which it is a part. Is this the way university presses are going?