In both the UK and the U.S., at the beginning of the 20th century, judicial practice relating to “obscene literature” was based on a legal precedent from the Victorian period.
Obscenity and the “Law of the Child“
This precedent case was Regina vs. Hicklin (1868), and the question the court had to settle was whether an anti-Catholic pamphlet violated the provisions of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. The judge responsible for the case, Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn, deemed that this was so and explained his decision as follows:
“[T]he test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.”
The so-called Hicklin test meant that the overall intention of a text did not protect it from legal sanction. It was enough if isolated passages could be construed as posing a danger to those most susceptible to ‘moral corruption.’ In practice, this meant that a work could be deemed obscene if any of its parts were unsuitable for children.
The Liability of British Printers
Matters were made even worse in the UK by the 1869 Newspapers, Printers and Reading Rooms Repeal Act, which made publishers and printers – not authors – liable for any work they chose to publish.
This legal context is one of the reasons why the publication history of Joyce’s Dubliners was so complicated. Joyce had completed his collection of short stories as early as 1907, but it was only published in 1914 because potential publishers kept spotting supposedly risky details – and because Joyce usually refused to delete or even adjust any of the passages to which these publishers objected.
In the case of Ulysses, Regina vs. Hicklin would have even more far-reaching consequences.
Table of Contents
- James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Law: An Introduction
- Obscenity and Literature: Legal Context around 1915
- James, Nora, and the “Konkubinatsverbot”
- Adultery as a Crime of Property
- Doubt as a Virtue
- Joyce Files a Lawsuit in Zurich
- Dying Without a Safety Net
- Ulysses Outlawed in the U.S.
- A Victory for Free Speech
- Suicide as a Crime
- A Difficult Return: Stricter Migration Laws
- A Defamation Case Against the BBC
Sources: Hardiman, Adrian. Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law. 2017. Paperback ed., Apollo Books/Head of Zeus, 2018, pp. 247–250. | Hutton, Clare. “Chapters of Moral History: Failing to Publish Dubliners.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 97, no. 4, 2003, pp. 495–519. | Spoo, Robert. Modernism and the Law. Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 61–62.
