Amazon.co.uk Review
With the tangle of the Web, the notion of censorship is as relevant and challenging as it's ever been.
The Guardian's Alan Travis wraps discussion of free speech and child protection on the Net, the role of the Internet Watch Foundation, and a call for a comprehensive revision of the Obscene Publications Act, around an agile account of the history of its application. And it comes, naturally, in a brown paper cover. Opening with
Ulysses, banned after the DPP read just 42 of the 732 pages, with establishment outcry drowning out Molly Bloom's orgasmic ones, it proceeds via a now-classic progression of test cases--
The Well of Loneliness,
Fanny Hill, and virtually anything by DH Lawrence, but infamously
Lady Chatterley's Lover. A series of hapless double-barrelled Home Secretaries did their best to wreak havoc on literature they had not read, with perhaps the worst, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a dour anti-Communist who also presided over ominously worthy organisations such as the Public Morality Council, using as a yardstick whether a work would bring a blush to the cheek of Little Nell. Today L'il Kim might be more appropriate, but the nanny state ruled in the nursery of public morality.
It was to grow up. The battles of the reforming Roy Jenkins against police corruption (the Met Commissioner laid down, as a smudged thumbnail, that if the ink came off in your hands, it was porn), the Lady Chatterley case, the needless severity of the sentences in the "Oz" trial, and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968, all helped define abstract concepts such as obscenity and harm, while sending vulgarity back to the Blackpool postcards it had always graced. Fascinating when viewed alongside Michael Hames' The Dirty Squad, which shows the recent shift of police focus to child pornography, Alan Travis' fluid, wry journalism, the story of the growing pains of Britain as a sexual nation, successfully highlights when the law is an ass, while underlining the fundamental role it still has to play, alongside responsible self-regulation, in a global community lacking moral equilibrium. --David Vincent
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Synopsis
The complete story, told for the first time using secret government files of the attempts to control what we read. The trouble begins in Victorian England with the Obscene Publications Act. Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, D H Lawrence (the police went for him in a big way, not just Lady Chatterley but his poetry and paintings too), Henry Miller and many others. All were banned. The post office opened packages coming from abroad, the Customs and Excise raided publishers, booksellers and printers and the Vice Squad clumsily went for Cape, Penguin and other publishers. All to suppress books freely available in the rest of the world. The idiocies of successive Home Secretaries are laid bare and Alan Travis shows how things changed in the 1960s with the end of theatre censorship and a new laws. But now it is all changing again with censorship on the internet and videos, particularly from the threat of paedophilia, extreme violence and racist hate speak.
