George Moore and Literary Censorship: The Textual and Sexual History of "John Norton" and "Hugh Monfert"

"Just as I believe that the worst of all sins is bad writing," George Moore is reported to have said when questioned about his habit of rewriting, "so I believe that the highest virtue is found in corrections, in an author's revisions. If you wish to estimate the true value of an author's art, study his revisions."¹ While this valorisation of the redrafting process could be seen as evidence of Moore's concern primarily with style, this essay suggests that, for Moore, rewriting or reworking an earlier version of a text constituted an attempt to reconcile his artistic vision with a form of self-imposed, though often unacknowledged, literary censorship. As Moore was an obsessive rewriter, to understand his art it is essential that the textual history of a particular work also be understood. For this reason, we will focus attention on Moore's rewritings, from the 1880s to the 1920s, of his psychological dissection of an ascetic Catholic aesthete, called John Norton in the early narratives, rechristened Hugh Monfert after the turn of the century.

As a result of extensive processes of revision undertaken over the course of forty years, the original narrative undergoes a profound transformation in both its sexual and textual configurations. Presented as a naturalist case study of psychosexual aberration in the early novel A Mere Accident (1887) and in "John Norton" (1895), the central, novella-length story in Moore's collection Celibates, the text becomes a tale of expressly homosexual repression in the two versions of the story "Hugh Monfert" (In Single Strictness, 1922; revised edition, 1923). Moore's revisions provide an illuminating insight not only into his writing practice, but also into his conflicted engagement with the concept of censorship. By placing his rewriting of the Norton story into the context of his anticensorship polemic Literature at Nurse, Or Circulating Morals (1885), it is also possible to examine Moore's troubled relationships with both the reading public and his personal ideals.

On 10 December 1884, a young and then relatively unknown novelist published in the Pall Mall Gazette an attack on the power and moral authority of the circulating libraries. The article, which was to be only Moore's opening foray into the contemporary debate on literary censorship, grew out of his personal affront on discovering that his first novel, A Modern Lover (1883), which had been published to some acclaim but also much criticism,² had been removed from library circulation because of the views of "two ladies in the country"³ who had objected to a particular scene involving the nudity of a female character as she posed for the artist protagonist. Focusing largely upon the fact that the circulating libraries were businesses run by tradesmen who had no understanding of and therefore no right to interfere on matters of artistic taste, Moore's stance towards censorship was unequivocally dismissive:

At the head, therefore, of English literature, sits a tradesman, who considers himself qualified to decide the most delicate artistic question that may be raised, and who crushes out of sight any artistic aspiration he may deem pernicious. And yet with this vulture gnawing at their hearts writers gravely discuss the means of producing good work; let them break their bonds first, and it will be time when they are free men to consider the possibilities of formulating a new aestheticism.⁴

As an author with only one published novel to his name, the noncirculated A Modern Lover, and with a previously censored volume of rather mediocre poetry, Pagan Poems,⁵ Moore's challenge to magnates like Charles Edward Mudie and W. H. Smith might appear foolhardy. Arguably his attack was nothing new:⁶ from the mid-century onward writers had waged war on the circulating libraries for placing a stranglehold on the literary marketplace, colluding with publishers on the price of texts, and even prescribing their length, as was evidenced by their insistence on the overpriced triple-decker format.⁷ While the financial repercussions of this circulating dictatorship,⁸ in particular the imposition of...