Review of Book:  Censored:  A literary history of subversion and control, by Matthew Fellion and Kathleen Inglis

Publication Information:  McGill-Queens University Press, Copyright 2017

Subject:  The History of English Language Censorship 

Background on Authors From Book Cover: “Matthew Fellion is a writer and independent scholar.  His interests include the history of reading and nineteenth-century realist novel.  Katherine Inglis is Chancellor’s Fellow and lecturer in the Department of Literature at the University of Edinburgh.  Her research focuses on censorship and nineteenth-century literature.”

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“The written word is the proving ground for freedom of speech.”[i]

Censored:  A literary history of subversion and control, by Matthew Fellion and Kathleen Inglis, is a history of censorship in primarily two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States.  The time period covered by the book is from the late14^th century with the first English translations of the Bible in the United Kingdom, which were products of heresy to established religious and state authorities, to, in the 21^st century, the challenge by the Arizona State Department of Education of the teaching of Mexican and Mexican-American literature in the Tucson Arizona public schools as anti-American, or as seditious.

The subtitle of the book, a literary history of subversion and control, explains its scope.

The first part of subtitle as being a literary history of censorship looks at the censorship of literary classics such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Valdimir Nabokov’s Lolita.  However, the authors of Censored take a broad view in interpreting what literature is and include an autobiography, nonfiction writing, magazines, comic books, some drama, and a children’s book.  In this array of literature, the authors have chosen to deal with “… the more contentious cases, in which those whose speech was restricted have struggled against the constraints.”[ii]

The other part of subtitle, of subversion and control, points to what causes censorship and what is happens when a book or publication faces censorship.  Subversion is a publication challenging established authority (political, moral, or religious) or a publication challenging human norms/human understanding on matters.  The book looks into challenges to authority and human understanding that include blasphemy, corrupting morals, obscenity, and promoting crime.   The authors take a boarder view of the causes and effects of censorship which is less easily defined in theory, but is more evident in what actually happens with censorship.

What happens when censorship is activated is seen as a process in a chain of communication as follows:

“One way to understand censorship is to imagine a chain of communication stretching from a speaker to their audience.  A simplified version of the chain, for a book published in the traditional way might look like this:  author-publisher-printer-retailer-reader.  In reality the chain is more complicated.  The ‘publisher’ includes distributors, wholesalers, and merchants.  An institution, such as a library, school, or prison, might intervene between the retailer and the reader, and various agents of law and order, such as custom officials, postal inspectors, police officers, and self-appointed moral crusaders, can intercept the communication, inserting themselves into the chain.  The reader might continue the chain, returning the book to circulation, by selling it or giving it away. And the author may choose a different method of circulation altogether, such as self-publishing or sharing the work with a coterie of friends.  Nevertheless, at every link in the chain, the substance of the communication can be altered or destroyed.”[iii]

The chain of communication will play a part in each chapter of Censored demonstrating the power dynamics and social forces that drive censorship.  For example, the 1928 trial in United Kingdom of Radclyffe Hall’s book, The Well of Loneliness, which was a sympathetic depiction of lesbianism.  Hall was not on trial: her publisher was on trial for publishing the book by charges brought by the United Kingdom’s Home Secretary and Department of Public Prosecutions.   At the trial, Hall was never was called as a witness, her view of her book and the literary merit that others saw in her book were extraneous to the trial.  What was pertinent to the trial were archaic legal standards of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act which give police the authority to search, seize, and destroy a publication, and 1868 legal standard, R v Hicklin, that a work was obscene if it tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.”[iv]  The Well of Loneliness fell victim to the prejudices it was challenging and was found by the court as an obscene publication purely for its sympathetic depiction of lesbians.  From the trial’s verdict all copies of the book that the police had seized were destroyed, the publisher ceased the publication of the book in the United Kingdom, and Hall had to pay fifty percent of the legal costs for the trial by an agreement she had with her publisher if her book was legally challenged.

Radclyffe Hall’s book, The Well of Loneliness, is one of the twenty-five chapters in Censored (there is an afterword on censorship and the Internet).  The chapters do not have to be read in chronological order.  The authors have made each book chapter to be read independently and have crossed reference within each chapter similar ideas or themes that can be found in other chapters in the book.   Censored does a good job in providing a comprehensive overview of the controversies generated when censorship is invoked as a process, and gives a comprehensive overview of the practices of censorship used in particular times and places when censorship has been invoked.

FOOTNOTES

[i] Censored:  A literary history of subversion and control, by Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017), 16

[ii] Ibid, 13

[iii] Ibid, 16-17

[iv] Ibid, 164