Book Review: A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England by Christopher Hillard

What is left to be said about the history of censorship and obscenity in modern Britain? Over the last three decades scholars have shown that censorship was more than a restraint upon ideas of freedom of speech, that it produced literature rather than simply banning it. ¹ We know that the legal definition of obscenity was ‘variable’, ² dependent upon class, age, sexuality and gender; ³ we know that censorship reflected concerns about mass literacy and the increasing power of the working classes; ⁴ we know that the regulation of obscenity was exercised by postal services, publishers and circulating libraries as much as by judges; ⁵ and we know censorship helped to make citizenship possible for some and impossible for others. ⁶ To this extent, Christopher Hilliard's A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern Britain enters a crowded field. Any assertions of novelty will be hard won.

Perhaps for this reason, Hilliard makes few claims to innovation in his book. Instead, it is the framing of his work that will strike readers familiar with the field as new. Hilliard does not anchor his study in the usual conceptual harbours for this theme – histories of sexuality, gender, class, literature or biopolitics – but rather finds his intellectual moorings in histories of liberalism. He examines how liberal ideals such as freedom of speech, the self-governing individual and Mill's harm principle were absorbed, contested and reworked in the ‘unostentatious’ thinking of ordinary people from the mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. To prove this, he excavates a wealth of new archival material, particularly concerning those often ignored in existing scholarship – activists, judges, customs officials, barristers, low-level bureaucrats and ordinary people.

Chapter One demonstrates how the twin pillars of mid to late nineteenth-century obscenity law, The Obscene Publications Act (1857) and the criminal law action for obscene libel, were premised upon a definition of obscenity aimed at those whose capacity for self-governance was in doubt: the increasingly literate and newly enfranchised working classes. Obscenity was a capacious legal category that depended, in Lord Cockburn's formulation, upon a work's ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’ vulnerable readers. ⁷ It did not initially take authorial intent into account, which meant that by the twentieth century – as Chapter Two demonstrates – serious works of literature were being targeted. Ulysses (1922), The Well of Loneliness (1928) and The Sleeveless Errand (1929) were all banned and the publication of sexually explicit modernist literature consequently moved offshore. Customs and post-office officials shifted to centre stage in the theatre of censorship and indeed one of the strengths of Hilliard's book is his examination of how overlapping authorities, including the Home Office, the Department of Public Prosecutions and the police, worked together to regulate obscenity.

Chapter Three moves from high modernism to American pulp (gangster comics, fiction and pornography), consolidating Hilliard's argument that the Victorian twinning of censorship with citizenship continued into the middle decades of the twentieth century. Campaigners and legislators involved in the drafting of the Obscene Publications Act (1959) sought to ‘protect literature and suppress pulp’ (p. 61), demonstrating that freedom of expression was not an a priori right open to all but rather depended upon class. Chapter Four focuses on the 1960 trial over a mass market edition of Lady Chatterley‘s Lover (1928), specifically how the new legislation allowed a democratic challenge to the hitherto reigning culture of deference.

The second half of the book spans the period from the 1960s to 1979 and comprises four chapters which trace the shift towards a more pluralist culture; the conclusion briefly takes the issue through to the present day. Chapters Five and Seven examine the role of censorship campaigners in enforcing or challenging obscenity law in the 1960s and 70s, noting how censorship was an issue that could bring people with divergent political views together: communists with conservatives and clergy, and classical liberals with radical gay liberationists. Chapter Six explores the criminal trial of the satirical magazine Oz in 1971 which saw a widening of the definition of obscenity to encompass anti-establishment ideas and drug use, especially when directed at the young. It also witnessed legal arguments for an expansive right to freedom of expression, which Hilliard continues to examine through film censorship in Chapter Seven, and judicial shifts in definitions of public decency based on ‘what a reasonably tolerant person living in a plural society would accept’ (p. 185). Chapter Eight concludes with the Williams Report and it is in the community submissions to the inquiry examined in this chapter that we see ‘neighbourly liberalism’ (p. 210) in action.

Hilliard's history is at its heart a study of vernacular liberalism, one where ‘the routine matters as well as the reflective, the lay as well as the learned’ (p. 10). This framing, however, contains the seeds of the book's weaknesses: an unwillingness to engage with existing scholarship and a reticence to make clear the theoretical debts of his work. In Chapter One, for instance, Hilliard argues that the correct historical context for Victorian obscenity law was not just the upsurge in mass literacy but the extension of the franchise to working class men: what would happen if the vote (or a book) fell into the wrong hands? Scholarship arguing for the importance of the Indian Mutiny as a motivation for the Obscene Publications Act (1857) (the perceived need to purify the empire and those who govern it); ⁸ scholarship suggesting that the Act was aimed at middle-class men (governance of others was dependent upon governance of the self); ⁹ or arguing for the significance of gender (Cockburn's test came to be known as the ‘young girl’ test because of concerns with female purity) ¹⁰ are all ignored. Having framed his work as a study of liberalism, Hilliard appears historiographically isolated.

We may also speculate that Hilliard's novel framing of the topic explains his reticence to engage with theory. Perhaps his imagined readers in histories of liberalism would recoil at references to Foucault, although Foucault's influence on the book seems obvious: A Matter of Obscenity offers an empirically grounded study of governmentality, demonstrating how power was distributed and exercised among legal and extra-legal actors and institutions. It also shows the importance of hierarchically-inflected beliefs around self-discipline in the exercise of democratic rights and it reveals how the banning of speech produced an explosion of talk. These criticisms aside, for those unacquainted with the field, Hilliard offers a fascinating romp through pornography, gangster comics, naughty postcards, avant garde plays, lewd cinema and modernist literature to demonstrate how ‘obscenity law reflected uncertainties about what could be said – and, crucially, how and to whom – in a changing society’ (p. 4).