Purity, Obscenity and the Making of an Imperial Censorship System

Bibliographic Data

ID20078608
AuthorsD Heath (0000-0003-2304-6266, corresponding author)
Year2006
Pages160-173
Publication date2006-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMedia and the British Empire (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230205147_10
OpenAlexW2242348714
ISBN9780230205147
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

While the British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks was undoubtedly the most avid exponent of the purported effect of 'impure' literature on Britain's linguistic — and by extension racial and national — purity, he was by no means the first. By the late nineteenth century, community organisations and the state, as well as the newly emergent medical profession, had come to form a 'medico-moral alliance' in Britain which attempted to shift the focus away from viewing 'purity' (a term that nominally referred to the campaigns against prostitution, but was in fact applied to a wide range of moral and social crusades) as a moral question to regarding it as a medical and racial concern.2 Whatever the immediate targets of the members of such an alliance, their larger goals were intimately connected with the preservation of the British 'race', nation and Empire. Attempts to regulate 'obscene' literature — that is, to 'juridif[y] those channels — differentiated by age, gender, class and culture — through which the literature of erotic formation circulates'3 — thus became an aspect of the racial purity movement. 'Obscene' literature in the shape of new forms of print culture, such as sexology texts and naturalistic fiction (which not only deployed many of the techniques and literary tropes found in pornography but were readily available to a rapidly expanding mass readership), became regarded as 'a pathological agent invading bourgeois homes and schools', while the new, cheap and decidedly popular publications that had begun to mushroom in the 1880s, such as 'pornographic' postcards, mutoscopes, stereoscopes and advertisements for birth control products and aphrodisiacs, were deemed 'a threat to the procreative behaviour, well-being and public decency of the popular classes'.4 KeywordsNational ArchiveBook TradeBritish PublisherRacial DiscourseBritish BookThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Art · Censorship · Political science · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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