3) To Deprave and Corrupt – Key Trials (i) 1868-1954
The difficulty with discussing Obscenity trials is that they broadly fall into two categories: those of things like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (DH Lawrence 1928) which are already well documented, and those of things like Lady Bumtickler’s Revels (John Camden Hotton 1872) which are not. Clearly Lady Chatterley has rather more gravitas than Lady Bumtickler, but is she in truth any more historically significant? Well yes, alright, I suppose she is, but where’s the fun in that? Nevertheless there is a serious point to be made here about deliberately buried history. The trials of workaday Dirty Books are largely undocumented simply because they are judged to be of no value. In contrast the trials of Serious Literature are endlessly pored over, typically in tones of affected amazement at the philistinism of their prosecutors. Ho hum. Still, the historic travails of Literature do offer a useful insight into what could and couldn’t be published at any given point. On that basis, this section will attempt to tersely run through the major trials punctuating the (otherwise largely stable) period between Cockburn’s influential ‘Deprave and Corrupt’ dictum of 1868 and the subsequent crisis of 1954.
Although it seems difficult to believe now, the newly-defined law was quickly put to use to persecute anyone who dared openly discuss sexual matters with the aim of alleviating unnecessary suffering or ignorance. James Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were prosecuted in 1877 for reprinting The Fruits of Philosophy – an Essay on the Population Problem (a forty-year-old birth control manual), and Havelock Ellis was similarly convicted in 1898 for his book Sexual Inversion, a pioneering scientific study of homosexuality. Such non-fiction prosecutions continued regularly up to 1942, when Dr Eustace Chesser’s committed (and successful) defence of his own plain-speaking sex manual Love Without Fear at the Old Bailey at last ushered in a marginally more enlightened attitude.
As for literature, legal-fire was initially directed towards the dreaded French, whose national output has long been viewed with great suspicion. In 1888 ex-pat Italian publisher Henry Vizitelly was taken to court by the National Vigilance Association for having the audacity to reprint English translations of such classics as Zola’s La Terre, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Daudet’s Sappho, de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, and Gautier’s Madamoiselle de Maupin. (The fact that Zola had a mere two weeks earlier been awarded the French Legion of Honour for services to literature and freedom made no difference whatsoever). The prosecution had helpfully transcribed select extracts into the indictment itself, causing one outraged juror to leap to his feet during committal and insist they could not be read out in open court. Confronted with this depth of prejudice before his trial had even started, Vizitelly threw in the towel and pleaded guilty, receiving a merciful fine of just £100. The following year, having ill-advisedly published further books by Zola and de Maupassant he was jailed – a sick man of seventy – for three months, and died a few years later effectively ruined.
Not that British authors fared much better. DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow was subject to a destruction order in 1915, and in 1926 Shane Leslie’s The Cantab – detailing the semi-autobiographical misadventures of a naive Cambridge undergraduate – was likewise banned. But the most infamous trial of the era was undoubtedly that of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928, which accidentally set a legal precedent that would last thirty years. The book (a sympathetic study of a discreetly-described lesbian relationship) was warmly praised by reviewers, and its appearance initially seemed uncontroversial until the more sensationalist elements of the popular press got wind of it. The notorious self-appointed moralist James Douglas of the Sunday Express offered the following assessment: “This novel forces upon our Society a disagreeable task which it has hitherto shirked, the task of cleaning itself of the leprosy of these lepers and making the air clean and wholesome once more … it flings a veil of sentiment over their depravity. It even suggests that their self-made debasement is unavoidable because they cannot save themselves … I would rather put a phial of prussic acid into the hands of a healthy girl or boy than the book in question.”
Corgi 1972 / Obelisk 1929 / Obelisk 1938
At the trial (before Bow Street magistrate Sir Chartres Biron), defence KC Norman Birkett mustered forty distinguished witnesses prepared to speak up for the novel, but – while cross-examining the first – then made the sensational blunder of asking whether, in their opinion, the book was obscene. This was the one question in law Birkett couldn’t ask, it being the central issue at hand and thus solely a matter for the magistrate himself to decide. Biron quite correctly disallowed the question and dismissed the witness, but then politely refused to hear from any of the 39 others either, finding the book Guilty without their assistance. As has been subsequently pointed out, what Birkett SHOULD have asked was something along the lines of “Whether this book is obscene or not – and that of course is a matter for the learned magistrate – is its publication advantageous to the pursuit of literature?” Had THAT been disallowed (and the witnesses all sent away unheard) there would have been a powerful ground of appeal to the High Court on a point of law, which could potentially have led to acceptance of expert literary testimony as both valid and admissible. As it was, that breakthrough would have to wait another three decades.
A year later, in 1929, Sleeveless Errand by Norah James was the subject of a similar destruction order. Heavily influenced by Joyce, this interesting, independently published novel takes the form of an extended (two day) conversation between a couple of Bright Young Things who have both been hurt in love and form a suicide pact as a result. The content was frank and the language notably risque for the time – God and Christ were regularly used as epithets, as were bloody, balls, and ‘poor little bugger’. The prosecution further complained that the book actively advocated adultery. It has never been reprinted, and – as James happened to be Publicity and Advertising Manager of Jonathan Cape, publishers of The Well of Loneliness – the suggestion has since been made that the prosecution was at least in part personally motivated. There have also been veiled hints (as is often the case with novels of this type) that some of the characters portrayed were thinly disguised versions of real (and influential) Society figures who considered themselves grossly libeled but didn’t care to say so out loud.
Possibly the most wide-ranging police-swoop on a ‘respectable’ publisher occurred in August 1934, when the Buckingham Palace Road offices of the Fortune Press were raided. The firm was established and run from 1924-1971 by Reginald Ashley Caton, latterly the subject of emerging academic interest as a pioneer of gay publishing, though only (as one biographer flatly puts it) “for opportunistic commercial reasons”.
Fortune Press 1933
The resulting haul, tried at Westminster Magistrates Court from October onward by Mr Ronald Powell, was a mixed bag of translated classics and contemporary novels, and was of such a volume that the case dragged on for six months. Powell ruled that literary merit was irrelevant and refused to hear expert evidence to the contrary, regardless of the work’s antiquity or importance: “The majority of the books which come before me are of a kind which no publishers of reputation would dream of associating with their names. I regard the action of the police in this case as a public duty, and I think they would be doing a public service if they keep an eye on similar publications”. Giving final judgement in March 1935, he ordered Fortune Press to pay 45 guineas costs, and condemned eighteen individual titles to destruction.
There were four contemporary novels: The Magnificent (1933) plus Brass and Paint (1934), both by Terence Greenidge, Little Victims (1933) by Richard Rumbold, and No Place for the Young (1934) by Erik Warman, all with (sometimes coded) homosexual themes. The remainder were translations of foreign texts: two by Alfred Allison (Les Vies des Dames by Pierre de Brantome, plus JK Huyman’s satanist-classic La Bas), two by Montagu Summers (c17th witchcraft-textbooks De Daemonialiate of Ludovico Sinistiari, plus Le Histoire de Magdelaine Bayvent), and three by Shane Leslie (Aphrodite and Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louys, plus Strato’s Boyish Muse). Other titles included the Satyricon of Petronius, Plato’s Symposium, a bowdlerised edition of The Perfumed Garden and ‘Don Leon’ (a collection of ancient poetry). Several others (including Beresford Patrick Egan’s De Sade) had to have their illustration-plates removed. On his death in 1971 it emerged that the wily Caton had not in fact handed over all the relevant copies for destruction as ordered, but had managed to squirrel large amounts away at the back of a warehouse.
A much better-remembered gay novel – Boy by James Hanley – waited four years to be banned, being published in 1931, but not prosecuted until March 1935 (the action possibly prompted by the appearance twelve months earlier of a cheap 3/6 edition). The book is certainly a tough read, being the thoroughly depressing story of a working class lad brutally treated by parents and workmates alike who runs away to sea where things quickly get even worse. The publishers Boriswoode were fined a total of £350, having been advised by their solicitor to plead guilty at committal in order to avoid the expense of a full trial they were almost certain to lose. Rather more upbeat was Wallace Smith’s US novel Bessie Cotter, also prosecuted in 1935, which details in realistic and unsentimental terms the life of a Chicago prostitute around the turn of the century. The prosecution were uncompromising: “This book deals with what everyone will recognise as an unsavoury subject – gratification of sexual appetite”. Following Boriswoode’s example, publishers Heinemann contritely pleaded guilty on legal advice. Three years later a similar British book, To Beg I Am Ashamed, by the pseudonymous ‘Sheila Cousins’ (Ronald Matthews, likely assisted by a slumming Graham Greene) didn’t even get to court. A supposed autobiography (roughly a quarter of which details its author’s life as a prostitute) it provoked concerted condemnation in the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Spectator, following which the police visited publishers Routledge and threatened them with “serious consequences” if they continued to distribute it. Exactly what these consequences might have been was never specified, but Routledge took the hint and the book was withdrawn.
Obelisk 1936 / Corgi 1962 / Jarrold 1942
The outbreak of War naturally slowed the pursuit of dirty books, but at least one significant trial took place at the Old Bailey in May 1942 – James Hadley Chase’s lurid white-slave-trade gangster novel Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief. This represented a new, toughly amoral – and strikingly sadistic – style of pseudo-American crime fiction that was to prove highly influential. Chase (born Rene Raymond in suburban Ealing) had written the successful Kansas-set thriller No Orchids For Miss Blandish in 1939, but this follow-up proved too much for the authorities, who immediately identified it as a distinctively modern phenomenon: “…a new type of obscenity, so far as the Courts were concerned. In nearly every case where books had been the subject of proceedings they had dealt frankly with, or expressed too freely, normal sex relationships. Although they had been undesirable, the appeal was to a natural instinct. The book in question described acts of debased sexual perverts, and the appeal was to sadism. There were descriptions of the stripping, beating, torturing and raping of young women….” Two similar gangster-novels were tried immediately afterwards, both by “Darcy Glinto” (actually Harold Kelly of Romford): Road Floozie, and Lady, Don’t Turn Over. This brash genre of cheaply titillating US-style pulp fiction would explode in the early 1950s with significant legal consequences (as we shall shortly see).
The final major controversy of the 1940s didn’t get as far as court, but did provoke questions in Parliament. In 1949 a newspaper campaign (led by the Sunday Times) against Norman Mailer’s tough war-novel The Naked And The Dead put pressure on the Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, to take action. But Shawcross (mindful of the book’s obvious integrity) had no intention of making a fool of himself, and in May offered the following statement to the Commons: “In cases of the kind involved here there are two public interests to which I must have regard. It is important that no publisher should be permitted to deprave or corrupt morals, to exalt vice, or to encourage its commission. It is also important that there should be the least possible interference with the freedom of publication, and that the Attorney General should not seek to make the criminal law a vehicle for imposing a censorship on the frank discussion or portrayal of sordid and unedifying aspects of life, simply on the grounds of offence against taste or manners. While there is much in this most tedious and lengthy book which is foul, lewd and revolting, looking at it as a whole I do not think that its intent is to deprave and corrupt, or that it is likely to lead to any other result than disgust at its contents”.
Leonard Smithers c.1900 and one of his Erotika Biblion titles 1901
Of course, as already noted, during these comparatively highbrow literary trials REAL dirty books continued to be covertly churned out with far less publicity. Following Dugdale’s death the two key names (separately and in partnership) of the late Victorian / early Edwardian era are Leonard Smithers (1861-1907) and Harry Nichols (1865-1941). Smithers was the more respectable of the pair, born in Sheffield but trained as a solicitor in London, who acquired a notable circle of decadent friends including the explorer Sir Richard Burton, Beardsley, Beerbohm, Crowley, Symons and Wilde plus various others, several of whom he went on to publish. Then in about 1887 he met Nichols, and things rapidly went downhill. Nichols was born in Wortley, Leeds but established himself as an Antiquarian book dealer in Sheffield where his real business was publishing pornography on the side. In 1888 the pair formed the ‘Erotika Biblion Society’ and with Nichols acting as printer and Smithers handling the orders soon became prolific: Teleny (attributed to Wilde), Gynecocracy, White Stains (Crowley), the Yellow Room and many others even further downmarket. By 1900 Smithers was bankrupt and died alone seven years later in a squalid room in Islington, surrounded by two empty hampers and fifty bottles of chlorodyne – his unmarked grave in Fulham Palace Road cemetery was paid for by Lord Alfred Douglas. By that point Nichols was on the run, having decamped to Paris in 1900 to continue publishing by mail order. Threatened with deportation back to England, in 1908 he escaped again, this time to New York where he stubbornly kept on printing until committed to Bellevue Mental Hospital in 1939, where he died forgotten two years later. Happy endings all round, eh?
But somebody (still to be properly identified) who knew the pair was in operation in London well into the 1910s. Jack Smithers (Leonard’s son) published his memoirs in 1939 which offer a few tantalising hints. Following his father’s death, at sixteen Jack went to live for a while with ‘Gerald N—‘ in an anonymous house in North London:
“As one entered the front door of the house into the hall and passage, the first door on the right was the sitting-room, and in that sitting-room was a double-crown Wharfe press driven by an electric motor. In one corner there was a stack of unprinted book-paper: elsewhere stacks of printed sheets, and against one wall a single case-rack holding about twenty cases of book-type. Part of the floor had been removed by N— to put in silent foundations for the Wharfe and also to accommodate the motor. The whole thing was beautifully rigged up and ran silently and smoothly, turning out printed sheets, the next door neighbours never even suspecting that such a piece of equipment was in the street….
Kate was the compositor; she would sit on an office-stool all day setting type, as fast as light she would empty the cases… She had been trained in some printing works in Scotland, and just how N— got hold of her I do not know; I think that she had been a chorus-girl, and that Rosie [N—‘s wife] had secured her… In this house, at least, the N—s turned out the most obscene books, the very crudest or lewdest it is possible to conceive. I read some of the sheets as they came off the press, and young as I was, I realised that it was, to say the least, tough. Rosie toured a lot, securing engagements here and there, but this was largely a blind, her job being to secure such customers for the books as she could… She was a small, slightly built, fluffy creature, full of life and fun and boldness. Friends of similar kidney came to the house, and there were parties which beggar description… The low, abominable chanting of lewd songs that the neighbours might not hear, Rosie and Kate dancing nude for dear life on the dining table, the photographing of women and men….”
An eye-opening teenage experience to say the least. But (as we have already seen with the errant Nichols) for the next part of this story we have to abandon England temporarily and cross the channel to Paris….
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