Nineteenth-Century English Obscenity Law

Abstract

The historical episode is perhaps ending during which published sexual writing was an important object of legal regulation. The legislative limits of the episode are set by the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (Lord Campbell’s Act) and the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, the key statutory construction being Regina v. Hicklin which in 1868 established as the test of obscenity a publication’s ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’. During this episode, legal regulation of the publication of sexual writing was found both plausible and necessary. By the late 1970s, to judge from the Williams Report, this was no longer so: ‘[T]he printed word should be neither restricted nor prohibited since its nature makes it neither immediately offensive nor capable of involving the harms we identify, and because of its importance in conveying ideas’ (1979, p. 160). If opinions such as this indicate a closing of the episode on philosophical grounds, others refer to more general shifts in cultural conditions. Thus, buoyed with aesthetic and psychoanalytic hope, Stephen Marcus argues that ‘we are coming to the end of the era in which pornographers had a historical meaning and even a historical function’ (Marcus, 1974, p. 285). For Charles Rembar (1968), however, the appeal of written obscenity is at an end simply because the young no longer get excited that way.