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!

A ‘gross and barbarous operation’: when Baker Brown featured in the Divorce Court

The phrase ‘hidden from history’ is often very loosely invoked, so it is perhaps testimony to the omertà of the British medical profession that the name and activities of Dr Isaac Baker Brown were concealed from view for nearly a century after his death in 1873. One might have anticipated that his views on the deleterious effects of female masturbation and his proposed remedy of clitoridectomy would have featured in the writings of late nineteenth and early twentieth- century sexologists, but even Iwan Bloch, that tireless and uncritical snapper-up of sexual curiosa, fails to mention the episode. Oddly, Havelock Ellis cited the views of one of Brown’s opponents in his account of Auto-erotism in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897) without mentioning the context in which the opinion that female masturbation did not cause insanity was expressed.

The topic was first rediscovered by a Professor of Gynaecology, J. B. Fleming, after encountering a passage in the works of Lawson Tait ‘so full of mystery that it stimulated an investigation to be made into the circumstances which surrounded the fall of Baker Brown’. The results of his investigation were published as ‘Clitoridectomy—The disastrous downfall of Isaac Baker Brown, F.R.C.S. (1867).’ Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire 67 (1960): 1017–34.

It took some time for these findings to percolate more generally into knowledge of the period – although Alex Comfort had touched on the matter in The Anxiety Makers: Some Curious Preoccupations of the Medical Profession (1967), Ronald Pearsall, in The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (1969) made a reference to ‘a doctor named Baker Brown [who] performed a mysterious operation on her, unknown to her husband’ (p.156). It is not quite clear where Pearsall acquired that information, since the case was very extensively reported and the nature of the operation revealed, along with Baker Brown’s negligence over obtaining her husband’s consent.

The Hancock-Peaty case of early 1867, in fact, if perhaps rather beyond what the sensation novel of the period could contain and still be acceptable to the circulating libraries, strikes one as possibly the basis for a rather noir neo-Victorian novel, or possibly TV drama.

It was not, technically, a divorce case. Mr Peaty wanted to stay married to his wife, the former Miss Hancock, but her relatives were claiming that her mental condition meant that she had been incompetent to consent to matrimony. The fact that she had, subsequent to the marriage, inherited £3000, may have had some bearing on this. Previously, one suspects, the family had been happy for their cousin, who had been wishing to marry her for some while, to take on the responsibility, and after all, medical men had expressed the opinion that marriage might be beneficial for her ‘hysteria’ – a term which hardly encompasses the extreme eccentricity manifested by the lady in question.

At some point during the marriage, the wife’s sisters took her to Baker Brown, who performed what Peaty’s counsel referred to as a ‘gross and barbarous operation’, without seeking Mr Peaty’s consent. He subsequently took her to St Luke’s Hospital, in order to preserve her from further surgical interventions. Dr Ellis, of that establishment, considered that ‘the surgical operation known as clitoridectomy would be a most improper one in her case’, while conceding that it was currently a subject of debate and controversy within the profession. The subject was also discussed by other medical witnesses.

The extent to which this controversial, ‘barbaric’ procedure thus obtained newspaper coverage through reportage of courtroom testimony contrasts remarkably with the very discreet way in which the expulsion of Baker Brown from the Obstetrical Society was dealt with by the mainstream press. While the meeting was covered in all its heated detail in professional journals, only brief paragraphs alluded to the event in newspapers intended for the general public. The case is hardly mentioned at all in the historiography generated around Baker Brown from the late twentieth century onwards

A question which arises is whether – allied to the controversy over Baker Brown’s book On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (1866), the argument with the Lunacy Commission conducted in the pages of The Times over his claiming to treat lunatics in an institution not licensed by the Commissioners for that purpose – appearing by repute in a high-profile case in connection with ‘barbarous operations’ repudiated by the medical witnesses, added further weight to the scales leading to his expulsion from the Obstetrical Society.

Lawson Tait’s obituary of Baker Brown, quoted in extenso in the Fleming article, hinted at developing mental problems. A curious report in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 December 1867, would suggest a certain erraticness of behaviour manifesting. In the course of a case in which Baker Brown was suing a music-hall singer for unpaid charges for professional attendance, the defendant claimed that the surgeon had asked him to make introductions to ‘young ladies’ connected with the music-hall.

 

 

 

 

She was Chloe, or maybe Olivia

 Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together. . .’ I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia

A famous line from Virginia Woolf's famous essay of 1928, A Room of One's Own, describing the imaginary novel, Life's Adventure, by the equally fictitious novelist, Mary Carmichael.

And yes, these are both fictitious and not rather poor covers for the 1928 novel by Marie Stopes under her pseudonym of 'Marie Carmichael', Love's Creation. Chronology alone would suggest that Woolf could not have encountered this work while preparing AROOO. The novelist's name fits in with the other Marys in the text, who echo the 'Ballad of the Queen's Maries' - 'Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance'. I discussed this misapprehension and the unlikeness between the imaginary novel and Stopes' work in my chapter 'Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the narratives of marriage in the 1920s' in Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 edited by Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai, University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The fact that Chloe and Olivia are mincing liver to cure pernicious anaemia surely identifies them with Janet Vaughan, daughter of her friend and relative Madge Vaughan, who devised that pioneering treatment - recently mentioned in a 2019 article in The Lancet by Patricia Fara, 'Battling for life: the wartime work of Janet Vaughan', The Lancet, 394(10202), 910–911. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(19)3209. Fara makes this same identification, and I briefly mentioned the Woolf-Vaughan connection in 'Chloe, Olivia, Isabel, Letitia, Harriette, Honor and many more: women in medicine and biomedical science in Britain, 1914-1939', in This Working-Day World: Women's Lives and Culture(s)in Britain 1914-45 edited by Sybil Oldfield, Taylor and Francis, London, 1994

(I was led to think about this by reading something which rather underplayed Vaughan's significance in another context - she had one of those varied careers that perhaps do not lead people to make cross-connections they might.)

 

The great yellow golliwog panic of 1961

The golliwogs in question were (or would have been if they existed at all) little handmade yarn dollies from scraps (we made our own entertainment in those days, but  I see that there are still instructions available on how to make these).

But, anyway, in the summer of the 1961 there was a panic about schoolgirls wearing yellow golliwogs as badges, which had sinister import. This first appears to have surfaced in a speech at the British Medical Association Annual Representative Meeting, 17 July 1961, by Dr R. G. Gibson, a member of Council, who averred that 'at a girls' school in England' (unnamed and not more specifically located, no indication of who might have been his informant) a yellow golliwog pinned to a girl's chest 'indicated to [her] fellow pupils that [she] had lost [her] virginity'. And this was a sign of the loss of moral discipline that was sweeping the country. He went on to advocate a return to corporal punishment instead of all this soft psychiatry. (Supplement to the British Medical Journal, 22 July 1961, p. 48)

This was quite immediately taken up by the press - e.g. 'Doctors discuss loose living: Moral Problem of the Yellow Golliwogs', Birmingham Post, 18 July 1961, p. 4), and a question raised in Parliament: 

The newspapers this morning contained a terrible indictment of the kind of society in which we live. Girls in one of our schools are now putting yellow golliwogs on their tunics to show that they have lost their virginity.  (William Hamilton, Fife, West:  Hansard 18 July 1961)

A question that springs to mind is, had anyone, at this point, ever actually seen a schoolgirl wearing a yellow golliwog, or were these entirely chimerae of fevered minds? 

Nonetheless, this was a moral panic with traction, a trope about moral decline as embodied in those perennial figures of concern, adolescent girls. In a letter to The Times in September of the same year, the Rev Leslie D. Weatherhead (a veteran writer of sexual advice from a religious angle), wrote expressing his anxieties over the alleged rise in venereal infections among young people, the increase in teenage single mothers, and the claim by the unnamed headmistress of an unidentified 'large girls' school in London' that not one of the sixth-formers was a virgin (paging Dorothy Parker: 'How could she tell?') ('A Nation in Danger: Need of Moral Challenge: To The Editor of The Times', 20 September 1961). 

The announcement of a 'searching and enlightening enquiry' by the Sunday Times - 'Your Teenage Daughter: Dilemma of the Middle-Class Parent', opened by invoking 'the much publicized yellow golliwog on the gym-slip... a sad little badge of non-chastityamong young British schoolgirls' (The Times, 8 December, 1961).

Leading one to wonder whether, whatever the truth of the original sightings of the yellow golliwogs, they did in fact get taken up by schoolgirls wishing to seem in the swing of things? (Whether or not they signalled actual sexual experience.)

The trope went muttering on and being invoked for several more years, although, a rather more realistic and cynical note was injected a couple of years later at a conference of sixth formers by an actual schoolgirl: 'Yellow golliwogs do not necessarily mean that the wearer has had an affair: only that, not wishing to seem different, the wearer wishes other people to believe them unchaste' ('Sixth Form View on Chastity', The Times, 18 February, 1963).

And the consequence was: the X-rated  movie The Yellow Teddybears (aka Gutter Girls) 1963: 'embarrassingly inept' (Daily Herald, 13 July 1963, p. 6) - 'mediocre entertainment' (Sunday Mirror, 14 July 1963, p. 23).

Were there ever yellow golliwogs?  Were they ever sighted being sported pinned on a gymslipped bosom?

However, maybe younger generations turning out attics and old boxes wonder what this old faded yarn dolly of granny's was and why she kept it... Any findings, please report!

Part of a concealed tradition

When I read the article The great sperm heist: ‘They were playing with people’s lives’ in The Guardian recently it was a shocking story but one that did not entirely surprise me. The activities of Dr Boyd fitted in to a broader story of doctors in or around Harley Street, or generally in the supper reaches of discreet private practice, providing services in the sexual/reproductive areas which most medics shied away from, but which could be extremely remunerative. 

Boyd himself cropped up in the notes I had made from the archives of the British Sexology Society (held in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin). He seems to have been quite active in the Society during the 30s, which presumably provided him with connections and a certain amount of publicity. He gave lectures to the Society, and from its correspondence it appears that they gave enquirers referrals to him, both generally in the field of 'genito-urinary complaints', and more specifically, on  'the "Steinach" operation'. The Steinach operation was intended as a male rejuvenation operation and was, in fact, that performed on the poet WB Yeats by Dr Norman Haire. 

Haire was a particularly obvious example of a doctor who was committed to an agenda of sexual reforms, while providing somewhat shady services to desperate individuals, and also doing financially well out of this. While the expurgation of his papers by his executors means that little direct information survives, it is still possible to trace evidence of his activities. Although he was by no means popular with other members of the birth control movement of the interwar years, they nonetheless were prepared to refer women seeking abortions to him. His friend Ethel Mannin complained that although he was prepared to fit the long-term intra-uterine contraceptive the Gräfenberg ring, he charged so steeply for this it would be cheaper to travel to Berlin and be fitted by Gräfenberg in person. He would also perform sterilisations.

It had been recognised in the profession for decades that there had been some doctors prepared to perform abortions (even though illegal) as a remunerative practice, well before the allusion in AJ Cronin's 1936 novel The Citadel to a fashionable Harley Street society doctor making a good deal of his income from 'curettage'. There is a particularly good account of how this was working immediately before the 1967 Abortion Act in Paul Ferris's 1966 The Nameless, in which he indicates that the request to be paid in cash was not only to preserve discretion for the patients but a handy tax evasion device for the medics involved.

In an area which was already considered part of an ethically murky fringe, a 'twilight zone' where people were desperate and desirous of discretion, it's perhaps not altogether amazing that the practices of doctors providing AID turn out to have been dubious.

 

What I've been up to during my blog hiatus

Wasn't as busily publishing academically as in some previous years, but haven't been entirely inactive.

Open Conspirators Seek Similar: The Inspiration of H.G. Wells’s Utopian Dreams: in The Wellsian, 40, 2017 (from my keynote at: Anticipations: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions, H.G. Wells Conference Centre, Woking, 8-10 July 2016); and now The Wellsian is finally online (we think he would have approved), my earlier piece in the  special 'Ann Veronica' issue, Vol 34, 2011 An Ambiguous Idol: H. G. Wells Inspiring and Infuriating Women is now also available.

This one, which was being given in various forms over a period of years in assorted venues, was finally published: ‘"Sons of Belial": Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies', in Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea (eds), The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (2018.

This was in the pipeline for a considerable while, but it was part of this huge project covering a vast period: 'Movements to separate sex and reproduction', in N. Hopwood, R. Flemming and L. Kassell, Reproduction from Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 2018.

'The Bedborough Case, 1898: "A Curious Gonfalon Round Which to Fight"', in David Nash, Anne-Marie Kilday (eds), Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940: Microhistories of Justice and Injustice (Bloomsbury, 2020)  - on the prosecution of Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion.

Entries for Dr Norman Haire (2020), and for Eden and Cedar Paul (2018), in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Provided a Foreword, to Jessica Borge, Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business (McGill-Queens UP, 2020).

Assorted reviews, including this essay review, 'Abortion in the Contemporary United States' Journal of Women's History, Volume 32, Number 4, Winter 2020.(And I thought that was depressing...)

A contribution to the Layers of London project on the 1820 satirical print of Lady Strachan and Lady Warwick, 'Love a la mode, or Two Dear Friends' - an episode I'd still like to find out more about.

Women’s rights to sexual pleasure: an essay commissioned in connection with an exhibition that didn't in fact get used, now added to my website.

Also added to my website, the text of my George Hay Memorial Lecture of the Science Fiction Foundation, at Eastercon 2012,  Invisible Women: The Scientists People Don't See.

My website in general continues to get updated and I draw particular attention to the ongoing updates to Victorian Sex Factoids and Literary Abortion. 

Hoping to start posting here again, if only with the odd weird thing I've encountered as a side-issue in other researches. 

 

A rare update: some website updates

Recently added to my website, downloadable pdfs of the text of my 2014 Roy Porter lecture, Healthy Lives/Healthy World: the utopian visions of interwar British progressives
and also the paper I gave at the Eugenics @UCL Event, 10 Oct 2014, somewhat revised for the prospect of publication in an online journal along with the other papers: Eugenics and Gender.

Also various updates to Bloomsbury Women’s History Walk, Literary Abortion and British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s – the ‘middlebrows’, as well as the usual updates to information on conferences etc.

I have also retired the former Register of Historians of Sexuality, which was set up at a time when there were far fewer ways for historians in the area to discover others working in the field, and has become pretty much redundant.