Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage, 1901-1968, and : Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation, and : Bound and Gagged: A Secret History of Obscenity in Britain (review)

There is a long, inglorious, and still continuing history of censorship in Britain in which long-standing themes of national sexual prudery and ruling-class secrecy have been intricately intertwined. There is also a fairly long tradition of writing books about it.

The books by Alan Travis and Nicholas de Jongh form part of a lengthy polemical tradition that details the absurdities and biased assumptions under which the censorship of books, plays, pictures, and so on deemed obscene has taken place in Britain with an intention to improve the situation. Both works are designed for a general audience but are nonetheless of considerable interest to historians of sexuality, although they must be used with some caution.

Both authors, particularly Travis, cover ground already well trodden by others: Alec Craig in The Banned Books of England (1937, reprinted in 1962), C. H. Rolph in Books in the Dock (1969) and The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd. (1961), and John Sutherland in Offensive Literature (1982). However, Travis was able to gain access to previously closed files in the Public Record Office, though he concentrates mainly on well-known cases of prosecutions, such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, James Joyce's Ulysses, and the works of D. H. Lawrence. In the Lawrence case he does elucidate the author's long struggle with the authorities well before the posthumous courtroom triumph of Lady Chatterley's Lover (and demonstrates that this case was to all intents lost by the Crown even before the notorious "wives and servants" speech by prosecuting counsel). He has a useful chapter on the routine policing of obscene literature and the secret Home Office Blue Book of titles of books subject to destruction orders by magistrates throughout the country.

Travis's use of the relevant files illuminates the contradictions and tensions between different individuals and departments. Oxbridge-educated civil servants in Whitehall were routinely embarrassed by local police forces confiscating classics of European literature (Boccaccio's The Decameron was a regular victim) and succeeding in getting them condemned by provincial magistrates. An issue Travis does not address here is that of context: while it was not infrequently claimed that the works that had been confiscated and destroyed as pernicious literature were freely available in the local public library, one can envisage that when these books were found in the company of soft-core pulp fiction and nudist magazines in the recesses of the shops of dubious booksellers, there was a certain element of guilt by association.

Following from claims that the books that were the subject of police action could be found in local libraries (a subject that has never to my knowledge been addressed by historians) is a question about the public library and "dangerous literature" in Britain. Were librarians acting as the custodians of the public's right to know and to have access to at least classic or serious works dealing with sexual topics? Up to a point perhaps they were, though probably only the in-depth study of local library committee records and details of purchasing policies would confirm this. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that when libraries did hold, for example, Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, it was seldom on the open shelves and more often in the librarian's office. This was probably less an issue of clear-cut censorship...