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  • Victorian Vice
  • Patrick J. Kelly* (bio)
Nicola Beisel. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. x + 268 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $35.00.

Anthony Comstock enjoyed a long and singularly successful career as a moral reformer. In a campaign that stretched from the years following the Civil War until the first years of this century, he played a central role in defining erotica as pornography, thus making its circulation through the mails a federal offense, criminalizing abortion and contraception, and organizing a crusade against gambling. His influence on American life and politics in the Gilded Age was so pervasive that federal anti-obscenity legislation passed in the 1870s, legislation which he helped draft, was known as the Comstock Law. By the end of his first decade as an anti-vice crusader, sociologist Nicola Beisel reports, Comstock had arrested ninety-seven people for “advertising or selling abortifacients or indecent rubber articles, including contraceptives,” and seized 202,214 obscene pictures and photographs, 21,150 pounds of books, and 63,819 contraceptive devices, abortifacient instruments, and instruments used to enhance sexual pleasure (p. 45). And his legacy remains with us. The Communications Decency Act, passed overwhelming by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, adopted language from the 1873 Comstock Act, making it “a felony to transmit ‘indecent’ information, including information about abortion, over the Internet” (p. 201). Precious few moral reformers can claim to have left such an enduring mark on U.S. society.

Despite his accomplishments, Comstock is not remembered fondly. His heavy-handed censorship and his fight against reproductive choice, ridiculed as Comstockery, is abhorrent to many, if by no means all, late-twentieth-century Americans of both the right and left. Online opponents of the Communications Decency Act routinely referred to its sponsor, Senator James Exon (D-Nebraska) as the modern Comstock, and the libertarian Cato Institute posted a position paper entitled “New Age Comstockery: Exon vs. the Internet,” lambasting Exon and his brand of government intervention. 1 Comstock, then, surely one of the most remarkable men of his age, has [End Page 717] evolved into another garish Victorian figure whose life and work seem, to modern eyes, more cartoonish than real. Yet, Beisel argues in her valuable and fascinating study, Comstock must be taken seriously, as the success of his moral reform efforts offers important insights into the interrelated processes of family and class reproduction in the United States.

Given her disciplinary interests, Beisel is less concerned with Comstock the historical actor than with Comstockery, the movement. Readers seeking to find a detailed narrative account of Comstock’s life and work must look elsewhere. His activities after the 1890s, including his legal crusade against Margaret Sanger, go completely unmentioned. In addition, Comstock shares the stage with moral reformers from Boston and Philadelphia. Beisel’s objective is to uncover the links between moral reform movements and the “role of families in creating and reproducing social privilege” (p. 217). What is the connection? Beisel argues that a significant portion of late-nineteenth-century urban upper and middle classes supported Comstock because they believed that vice, or at least what Comstock declared as vice—erotica, both written and visual, gambling, abortion, and contraception—undermined the child’s ability to master the “values and habits” essential for productive adulthood (p. 5). By corrupting children of the upper class, vice imperiled the reproduction of a family’s wealth and status into the next generation. By corrupting children of the middle class, vice imperiled any opportunity for advancement in class status. Since Beisel contends family reproduction is also class reproduction, moral reform movements were thus at the center of the creation, defense, and reproduction of the cultural and economic hegemony of urban elites. By linking Comstock’s moral reform crusade with class formation, Beisel offers scholars an original way of understanding anti-vice efforts in Victorian America.

Anthony Comstock’s meteoric rise from Manhattan dry goods clerk to a nationally known moral reformer started in 1868. That year the New York legislature passed a law restricting the sale of erotica. Comstock, using an entrapment tactic that soon became characteristic, bought a...

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