Legal Prudery: The Case of Ulysses

The publication of James Joyce's work prior to Ulysses had already encountered numerous problems with censorship, or to be more precise, with the wary and fearful attitude of his would-be publishers and printers. ² They feared being prosecuted for defamation by means of the printed word, considered a public libel tending to produce evil consequences to society when blasphemous, obscene, or seditious. Public libel was a tort actionable without proof of special damage, punishable by a fine and imprisonment, according to the Libel Act 1843, section 4, "If any person shall maliciously publish any defamatory libel . . . shall be liable to be imprisoned . . . and to pay such fine as the court shall award." ³ During the first part of the twentieth century, cultural censorship was especially awkward in Britain. ⁴ The authorities were much concerned with avoiding the weakening of public morality in a period of growing apprehension for the decline of a British international political role.

The moral climate was so fraught and uncertain that James Joyce's Dubliners could not be published in 1905 or for a further five years because the publisher feared prosecution for indecency and Asquith's government ignored a joint parliamentary committee's recommendation in 1908 that books of literary merit should be exempted from prosecution for obscenity. ⁵

One after another, publishers and printers refused to produce Joyce's work unless corrections were made in the original texts, something that Joyce systematically refused to do. On 8 July 1917, in a letter to James B. Pinter, his literary agent in London since 1915, to inform him about his problems with the publication of his work, Joyce wrote about Dubliners:

The type of the abortive first English edition (Dublin 1906) was broken up. The second edition (Dublin 1910) was burnt entire almost in my presence. The third edition (London 1914) is the text as I wrote it and as I obliged my publisher to publish it after 9 years. ⁶

When the book was finally published, this fear proved to have been unnecessary since no prosecution was brought against Dubliners. Censorship acted differently with Ulysses, however, in that during its publication in periodical installments, it entered into direct conflict with the legal authority.

The first legal confrontation took place in the United States, where several episodes had been published in the American magazine The Little Review. ⁷ By the time prosecution for obscenity started against Ulysses, twenty-three installments, comprising almost half the novel, had already appeared between March 1918 and December 1920. These installments included the first thirteen episodes and part of the fourteenth. Four of the installments were seized by the United States Post Office: "Lestrygonians" in January 1919; "Scylla and Charybdis" in May 1919; "Cyclops" in January 1920; and, finally, the "Nausicaa" issue of July-August 1920. Thereafter, the situation was clearly difficult for the publication of Ulysses in the United States as, according to its laws, a publication found to be "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" fell under Section 480 of Postal Laws and Regulations of 1913 (Section 211 of the Criminal Code of the U.S.).

The first prosecution followed a complaint to the District Attorney of New York County from a prominent New York lawyer, whose daughter had received the issue ofthe Little Review containing the "Nausicaa" episode. The District Attorney passed the complaint on to John Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice. In September 1920, a warrant was issued against the Little Review's publishers, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who were defended by attorney John Quinn. The Society had been brought into the case by the District Attorney of New York, rather than the reverse.

The preliminary hearing was on 21 October 1920. The trial began four months later, on Monday, 14 February 1921, before the Court of Special Sessions. The court was crowded with reporters from several New York daily newspapers. The trial...