Censorship in Inter-War Britain: Obscenity, Spectacle, and the Workings of the Liberal State

Abstract

��� Some people are made by censorship and some are broken. James Joyce argued that he “ought to be given the Nobel Prize for Peace” for uniting “Puritans, English Imperialists, Irish Republicans, [and] Catholics” against Ulysses. 1 Radclyffe Hall decided to martyr herself for the cause of sexual inversion. Preparing for the next day's publication of The Well of Loneliness, she had her lover read Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol aloud to her. 2 D. H. Lawrence wrote three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover in preparation for the charges of obscenity, each more explicit than the last. The British government acted as expected and banned Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. And as expected, the censorship of these works fed outrage, bolstered arguments for free speech, and allowed Joyce, Hall, and Lawrence to place themselves at the behest of Art. 3 In contrast, censorship ruined the lives of many others. Mr. Bonnaire, a wholesaler of books and postcards, was found guilty of obscenity and charged ten guineas costs for the trial, even though members of the Home Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions agreed that Mr. Bonnaire did not intend to break the law. The judge even gave back four obscene books and seven obscene postcard series so that he could return them for reimbursement because of the accidental nature of his offense. Bonnaire, however, foresaw bankruptcy as a result of the trial and the court