Lust on Trial

In the late nineteenth century, Anthony Comstock used his authority as a special inspector for the U.S. Post Office and as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to hunt down and prosecute purveyors of what he deemed erotic materials. Many historians have examined his career, but the art historian Amy Beth Werbel's Lust on Trial is the first to interpret the cultural meanings of the full range of goods and images Comstock censored. Fired with evangelical zeal, Comstock believed that erotic literature, devices, and images—as well as contraception—inspired lust and thus led young people to sin. After the Civil War, as a member of the Young Men's Christian Association he worked to pass a New York State obscenity law, adopting aliases and false addresses to obtain, seize, and destroy materials he viewed as obscene. He used arrests (notably of Victoria Woodhull in 1872), municipal ordinances, licensing requirements, and eventually federal legislation, to suppress “immoral” publications and productions. As Werbel points out, critics at the time disparaged Comstock as “the best-informed man in America regarding the dazzling array of visual and sexual predilections, desires, and fantasies enjoyed by his fellow citizens” (p. 95

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