A Matter of Obscenity

Book excerpt: "A popular story about the 1960s and 1970s holds that this was when Britain shook off the vestiges of an oppressive Victorian moralism. Many of those campaigning against censorship saw it this way. But this was also a struggle that pitted Victorian liberalism against supposedly Victorian morals. John Stuart Mill's ideas provided a way of thinking about freedom, personal autonomy, and the social contract for people who otherwise had little in common with Victorian liberals. This book by Chris Hilliard of the University of Syndey will show how readers and editors, lawyers and law enforcement, politicians and philosophers grappled with questions of freedom, authority and order as a famously deferential society became increasingly pluralist. It was in the aftermath of the publication of affordable English language editions of the works of Emile Zola, in the late 19th century, that this essentially Victorian conflict first materialised in recognisable form. It was in 1960, when Penguin were tried for obscenity after the publication, in English, of the first unedited edtion, that this conflict reached both a crescendo and then a settlement. The book is divided into four parts, each tracing the story of a different phase in the history of obscenity law in Britain. There are also three "interludes" examining areas of law that came into tension with the social changes of the modern period-libel, sedition, and blasphemy. The interludes place struggles over obscenity in a larger cultural context and deepen the legal analysis by exploring the conceptual and policy challenges thrown up by other common-law misdemeanors and tort law"--