A matter of obscenity : the politics of censorship in modern England / Christopher Hilliard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hilliard, Christopher, author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Censorship--Great Britain--History.

Censorship.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021]

Summary:

For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' the prosecutor asked the jury, 'Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?' Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments.

Contents:

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Obscenity, Literacy, and the Franchise, 1857-1918

Chapter 2. The Censorship versus the Moderns, 1918-1945

Chapter 3. Protecting Literature, Suppressing Pulp, 1945-1959

Chapter 4. The Lady Chatterley's Lover Trial, 1960

Chapter 5. The Liberal Hour, 1961-1969

Chapter 6. Subversion from Underground, 1970-1971

Chapter 7. Campaigners and Litigants, 1972-1977

Chapter 8. Philosophers and Pluralists, 1977-1979

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Manuscript Sources

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Also issued in print: 2021.

ISBN:

9780691226101

0691226105

9780691226118

0691226113

OCLC:

1257078938