Edward Duncombe was minding his bookshop in Upper St. Martin’s Lane when a strange man came through the door. He wore a travelling cloak, as if he had just returned from a journey, and asked Duncombe for “some Songs and a catalogue of obscene Books for a friend in the Country.”Footnote ¹ Money was no object. He was willing to pay two or three guineas apiece for the books his friend was looking for. The stranger had come to the right place. Duncombe, 63, ran a brisk trade in smutty song books, and sold pornographic novels and prints under the name John Wilson. He had recently returned to his business after a two-year stint in Cold Bath Fields Prison, having made the mistake of selling one of those novels to a man who had visited his shop repeatedly, promising to pay an enormous sum.Footnote ² That man had been an agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Britain’s longest-running anti-vice society. Duncombe had no appetite for another prison sentence. He told the stranger that he did not sell obscene books, or know anyone who did. The stranger was not discouraged. He returned to Duncombe’s shop again and again, asking for specific titles: The Confessions of Madame Vestris (c. 1830), an epistolary account of youthful seduction and wedding-night bliss, and Seraglio Scenes (1830s), a harem fantasy “by the author of ‘The Lusty Turk’.”Footnote ³ Each time, Duncombe refused.

Duncombe’s instincts had not failed him. One day, at the conclusion of yet another disappointing visit, the stranger did not slink away from the bookshop. Instead, he turned to the door and called out to a group of police officers waiting in the street. They crowded in. One of the officers instructed the old bookseller not to move, lest he handcuff him and “strap him down.” Then a plain-clothes officer entered with an agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Together, they ransacked Duncombe’s shop, rifling through the drawers behind the counter and scattering books and papers everywhere. Try as they might, however, they “could not find any obscene or improper Books or Prints.”Footnote ⁴ After the search was over, the plain-clothes officer turned to the Society agent and told him to take what he wanted. The agent took one last look around the shop. Eventually, he pocketed a handful of plates from behind the counter, and five or six books that struck Duncombe as unremarkable. “Commonly sold and exposed in Shop Windows,” they included three medical titles: “Aristotle’s Works, Physiology of Man, and Physiology of Woman.” A few weeks later, in April 1856, Duncombe found himself in court, charged with distributing obscene material.

Duncombe had been selling cheap medical works for about twenty years. Among other things, he marketed them as titillating reading material. But would any judge or jury consider them obscene? Duncombe did not believe it. And if there is any truth to this story, which he submitted to support his defence at trial, the leaders of the Society for the Suppression of Vice shared his doubt. The Society did not present Aristotle’s Works, Physiology of Woman, or, indeed, any of the books that Duncombe claimed its agent had seized from his shop as evidence of his crime. Instead, it presented the judge with a lavishly illustrated pornographic volume. The stranger, a paid witness for the Society named Blower Halden, claimed that Duncombe had sold it to him for thirty shillings after a friendly round of haggling. The book wasn’t a plant, Halden added hastily: before he entered Duncombe’s bookshop, “his pockets were searched by Sargent Thomas of the F. Division to see that he had no book about him, and when he came out he immediately handed the book in question to the officer, who was waiting in the street, and both marked it with their signatures.”Footnote ⁵

Who was telling the truth in this episode is less important than what it emphasizes about the status of cheap medical works on sexual matters at the time. They were assumed to attract prurient readers. Their authors and publishers could be harangued for pandering to those readers. They were sometimes marketed as titillating reading material. However, as the diverse, open trade explored in the previous chapters suggests, selling them was not considered a legal risk. The expansion of the print marketplace had certainly aroused anxieties that extended far beyond regular practitioners’ concerns about its effects on the medical profession. Readers now despaired at how to navigate the sheer amount of published material available for sale.Footnote ⁶ The limits of publicly acceptable display also became a more frequent topic of debate. Together with manuals on venereal disease, reprints of old midwifery books, and works on female beauty, the publishing industry boom had made salacious penny papers, thrilling sensation novels, and gossipy news reports on divorce, inheritance, and sexual assault cases ubiquitous.Footnote ⁷ Stereoscopic slides of Parisian ballet dancers were being displayed in shop windows across London, and advertisements for nude photographs were beginning to trickle into the press.Footnote ⁸

If the past few chapters have emphasized anything, it is that such materials were subject to a range of interpretations. The same medical work could be considered a shameless piece of self-promotion, a source of scientific knowledge, a means of moral instruction, a guide to a pleasurable sex life, convenient masturbation material, or some combination of these things. Victorian views about what was and was not beyond the limits of public display consequently diverged, sometimes in the extreme. For some Londoners, nude statues on display at the Crystal Palace, the site of Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, were grossly offensive. For others, a campaign to have the statues’ genitals covered up was a cartoonish display of cultural ignorance.Footnote ⁹ There was only one cultural form that almost everyone, including publishers like Duncombe, agreed was obscene: unrelentingly explicit fiction like The Confessions of Madame Vestris, and the kinds of prints it was often packaged with. In a context in which laws against the display and distribution of obscene material existed, but a legal definition of obscenity did not, this meant that throughout the 1830s and 1840s prosecutions for obscenity overwhelmingly focused on pornography, the emergent, as-yet unnamed genre whose production and distribution Duncombe and his competitors were turning into an industry.

That pattern changed in the 1850s. Duncombe’s 1856 trial did not surround medical works. However, it was bookended by a series of legal actions that ended in the destruction of cheap medical books and pamphlets and the shuttering of public anatomical museums on the grounds that they were obscene. This chapter examines these developments, and how they were driven by medical reformers’ mounting concerns about consulting surgeons and public anatomical museums, and the Society for the Suppression of Vice’s determination to shut the Holywell Street trade down. The mid-nineteenth century is often characterized as a watershed moment in which anxieties about print and sex set off a moral panic that established new standards for public display. The events examined in this chapter paint a different picture, one that affirms Katherine Mullin’s recent argument that “the ‘Victorian morality’ supposedly encapsulated in the 1857 [Obscene Publications] Act and underscored in its 1868 refinement was something of a [modernist] fantasy.”Footnote ¹⁰ They emphasize how tirelessly, and often ineffectually, small groups worked to whip up opposition to publications and displays that were widely tolerated, less out of concern for their specific effects on British citizens than out of opposition to particular kinds of businesses that had grown large and lucrative in the new age of mass print.

In examining how and why these groups argued that medical works were obscene in the hands of certain players, this chapter offers a picture of crystallizing strategies that would impact medical bookselling for decades to come, and influence how regular practitioners and, later, sex radicals contested and produced authority. Medical reformers made allegations of obscenity to undermine a kind of entrepreneur that they considered a threat to the medical profession and its members, while the Society for the Suppression of Vice embraced such allegations amid a flagging crusade against commercial vice culture. While gaps in the historical record make the Society’s arguments difficult to access, medical reformers and some members of the judiciary supported these allegations by promoting contextual models of obscenity justified by paternalistic ideas about the reading capacities of women, children, and especially young men, the largest target audience of consulting surgeons and Holywell Street publishers alike. Medical works distributed in certain ways to certain audiences, they suggested, presented a danger to public morals in ways that they would not in other contexts.

By positioning the question of how a publication was being sold as crucial in obscenity cases, contextual models of obscenity addressed two obstacles that the groups I examine ran into. The first was the culture of reprinting and excerption that the Victorian print marketplace was built on, which meant that medical representations that these groups framed as obscene did not simply fall into roughly the same genre as works that they framed as legitimate. They were often very similar textually. The second obstacle was rapid crystallization of pornography’s identity in the hands of a new, specialized body of producers. It did not yet have a name. Nevertheless, it was a media form that many people considered instantly recognizable by the 1850s, and it offered a standard against which works like Aristotle’s Masterpiece would always be compared. The formulation of a legal “test of obscenity” in 1868, examined towards the end of the chapter, established commercial context as vital to determining obscenity in legal cases, affirming arguments examined in this chapter. As we shall see, the test’s introduction did not necessarily sway public, governmental, or judicial opinions as to whether medical works could fairly be called obscene. Many people were not convinced. However, its introduction would prove to be a significant turning point in the history of selling, and authorizing, sexual knowledge.

The Trials of Prosecution

The origins of British obscenity law lie more than a century prior to Duncombe’s trial, in an attempt to put the bookseller Edmund Curll in prison. Curll was known for publishing piracies, state secrets, and bawdy books, and tried to barter favour by acting as a political informant. His antics made him powerful enemies in the government, and by the middle of the 1720s they were determined to punish him. In 1725, the Crown had Curll arrested for selling “Lewd and Infamous Books.” However, it found it difficult to establish that Curll had committed a crime. The works it presented to the court as evidence were Venus in the Cloister, or, The Nun in her Smock (1724), an English version of an anti-Catholic piece of French erotica, and A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718), a translation of a Latin production framed as a medical treatise. Both works could be considered immoral, but, in England, neither counted as blasphemous, libellous, or seditious. Moral matters were dealt with in ecclesiastical courts under canon law, and Curll’s counsel argued that common law had no jurisdiction in the case. Ultimately, a novel counterargument prevailed and, in 1727, the common-law misdemeanour of obscene libel joined those of blasphemous and seditious libel. What made Curll’s actions criminal, judges in the case decided, was that he dealt in printed works, which could be distributed “all over the kingdom.” Curll’s actions constituted a threat to public morality because his publications could spread around and “affect all of the King’s subjects.”Footnote ¹¹

Recognizing obscenity law’s origins in an attempt to punish a single troublesome bookseller is helpful to understanding how it operated in England more than a century on. It did not ban books or censure authors, but targeted isolated acts of publication, display, or distribution. Its highly individualized applications meant that it was enforced very inconsistently and, as we shall see, enabled a certain amount of legal creativity: as in Curll’s case, charges of obscenity were often driven by concerns that stretched beyond, and in some cases had little to do with, the works at issue. This origin story also helps explain the state’s relatively hands-off stance on enforcement. Obscene libel’s status as a misdemeanour rested on the argument that obscene material endangered all of the monarch’s subjects. Yet, the government was never strongly invested in protecting them from it. While the police played an increasingly important role in obscenity cases during the nineteenth century, no public prosecutor was ever charged with bringing them to court. That task was mostly left up to private parties, who were welcomed to prosecute those who dealt in obscene material – and to shoulder the costs of doing so.

For most of the nineteenth century, the Society for the Suppression of Vice primarily enforced obscenity laws in England. On its establishment in 1802, the middle-class Anglican organization outlined some extraordinarily broad goals: it aimed to combat “profanation of the Lord’s day and profane swearing; publication of blasphemous, licentious and obscene books and prints; selling by false weights and measures; keeping disorderly public houses, brothels and gaming houses; procuring; illegal lotteries; [and] cruelty to animals.”Footnote ¹² Suppressing so many forms of immorality proved impossible for the Society, whose use of agent provocateurs to catch vice in action made it so unpopular with the public that it perennially struggled to attract members. It drifted from campaign to campaign. At various times, it waged war on Sunday trading, blasphemy, racecourses, betting shops, West End prostitution, and sensational journalism, only to give up after a few years. There was one exception to this pattern: the Society’s opposition to the Holywell Street trade. The Society had been a stalwart enemy of radical politics in the 1810s and 1820s, bringing fourteen actions for blasphemous libel against Richard Carlile and his family members, and it was a consistent opponent of the raucous trade in sexual material that grew out of radical circles.Footnote ¹³

The Society’s decades-long crusade against Holywell Street publishers was plagued by problems largely caused by the nature of obscenity law itself. One of the most significant was that prosecutions for obscene libel were expensive, time-consuming affairs. The Society relied on regular donations from a small number of wealthy patrons, including Eton College and the Dean of Westminster, and occasional bequests from deceased members to fund its activities.Footnote ¹⁴ It never had enough money to bring all the prosecutions it wanted to. Aiming to maximize their impact, it tended to target the most successful Holywell Street publishers. All told, it prosecuted William Dugdale nine times. As the fact that the Society repeatedly prosecuted Dugdale suggests, however, its actions had little practical impact. According to the Society, the number of shops known for selling sexual material in London did fall from nearly sixty in the 1830s to about twenty by 1850.Footnote ¹⁵ However, the massive expansion of Holywell Street newspaper advertising over this period suggests that if this is true, it probably had less to do with the Society’s prosecutions than it did with the increasing popularity of postal retailing, and the dominance that Dugdale, Duncombe, and a few other figures came to exert over the trade.

Why were the Society’s prosecutions so ineffectual? People often speculated that Holywell Street publishers got charges against them dropped or dismissed by calling on friends made in high places through their trade in luxury pornography. A former compositor of Dugdale’s claimed to have bumped into him at his shop just a few months after he had been sentenced to two years in prison.Footnote ¹⁶ However, it appears that the main problem was, again, the law itself, which did not have the capacity to ban books, nor destroy businesses. A bookseller could be fined or sent to prison for up to two years for distributing obscene publications, and the state could destroy his copies of the works at issue. However, new editions of the same works could and did freely enter the market, as competitors capitalized on the free publicity that obscenity trials generated. In many cases, as the Society’s secretary, Henry Pritchard, complained in 1857, Holywell Street publishers’ families continued to run their businesses while they were in prison, sometimes issuing copies of the same works they had been prosecuted for selling. These offences would have to be dealt with separately to get the works off the street.Footnote ¹⁷

The Society had enduring faith that more legal action would resolve these problems, and repeatedly lobbied Parliament to pass legislation to make it less expensive and more expedient. Thanks to these efforts, a clause in the 1824 Vagrancy Act banned the exposure of “any obscene print, picture, or exhibition” “in any street, road, highway, or public place,” and enabled offenders to be summarily tried before a magistrate.Footnote ¹⁸ Unfortunately for the Society, the clause did not cover material displayed in shop windows (a shop window was not legally a public place), nor material sold inside a bookshop. Prosecution for obscene libel remained the Society’s only recourse in these cases. More lobbying eventually secured clauses in the 1838 Vagrancy Act, which made displaying obscene articles in windows an offence, and the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act, which enabled the police to take sellers of obscene articles into custody without a warrant. These developments fostered cooperation between the Society and the Metropolitan Police force, and, at first, they enabled more prosecutions.

However, Holywell Street publishers were nothing if not adaptive. Dugdale baited the Society on at least one occasion by displaying racy prints affixed with strategically placed labels in his shop windows, but most cleaned up their window displays.Footnote ¹⁹ The Society did not consider this much of a victory. Its goal was to kill the trade itself. To keep prosecutions going, it fell back on an old trick: paying young men to visit Holywell Street publishers’ shops and purchase items that could be used as evidence for prosecutions. Holywell Street publishers soon caught on. Suspected agents were sent away with bawdy songsters and other merely suggestive material. Recognized agents were packed off with religious pamphlets. By the middle of the 1840s, the Society and its allies in the police force had taken to using the bawdy material to apply for warrants to search their shops for explicit publications. Once again, Holywell Street publishers adapted. They concealed their explicit productions and kept their eyes peeled for police officers. In 1851, one of Dugdale’s shop-boys recognized officers approaching his shop at no. 37 Holywell Street, locked them out, and dashed to Dugdale’s second shop at no. 16 Holywell Street. By the time the police arrived at no. 16, a mass of books and prints was burning in the fireplace.Footnote ²⁰

The difficulty of procuring evidence to prosecute Holywell Street publishers was deeply frustrating to the Society and its allies in the police force. In their zeal to crack down on the Holywell Street trade in the face of its seemingly unstoppable expansion, they began to ignore the letter of the law. In March 1856, shortly after the alleged ransacking of Duncombe’s shop, John Stanton, an agent for the Society, and seven police officers stormed into Dugdale’s house while he was out on business. They did not have a warrant to search it. Nevertheless, as a “great crowd” looked on from the street, they did so and seized thousands of books, prints, and stereotype plates on the grounds that they were obscene. Dugdale was incandescent with fury. He was also prepared. William F. Howe, a legal clerk he had hired to get him out of Cold Bath Fields Prison a few years earlier, had been at the house in his absence. With Howe’s assistance, Dugdale sued Stanton for entering his residence and seizing his property. The police raid had been illegal, Dugdale argued, and Stanton’s actions had been burglary. This time, Dugdale had the law on his side.Footnote ²¹

The lawsuit embarrassed the Society, the police, and the judiciary. Dugdale and his supporters dredged up mishandling of previous obscenity cases, boldly defended his trade in explicit literature, and ridiculed the Society’s claim that all of the items seized in the raid were obscene. Acting as a witness, one of Dugdale’s daughters, Frances Thornhill, testified that she – a married woman with three children – did sell “what you [the judge] call obscene books” at her father’s shop. However, she declared, “I do not call ‘Fanny Hill’ obscene. Coloured figures of naked men and women are in that book, but you can also see them at the Crystal Palace.” Watchers in the court gallery laughed. Seeing that the judge was unconvinced by Thornhill’s views on Dugdale’s edition of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Howe took the argument in a more conciliatory direction. He hastened to agree that the work was indecent. But, he pointed out, Stanton and the police had illegally seized “some thousands [of works] … which are not so. There are the ‘Sam Hall’ song books, for instance, with Mr. Robson in Villikins (laughter); the ‘Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony,’ by Sheridan; Dr. Culverwell’s works; Lord Byron’s ‘Cain’; ‘Animated Legs’.” The gallery roared with laughter.Footnote ²²

Howe found support on the witness stand as well as in the gallery. An arbitrator called by the court, a Soho stereotype founder, agreed with Howe’s assessment of Dugdale’s publications. Having sifted through the mass of books, prints, and stereotype plates seized from Dugdale’s house, the founder declared that the “only obscene works amongst it are ‘Fanny Hill,’ ‘Scenes in a Harem,’ ‘The Trial of Roger for a Game at Romps’ and the ‘Adventures of a Bedpost’,” all well-known erotic titles. “The remainder,” he opined, “are mostly medical works and facetious, humourous tales, but are not obscene or indecent.”Footnote ²³ Dugdale won his suit. But the Society refused to back down. It pushed on with its actions, and with lobbying of government. The following year, seizing property suspected of being obscene became legal, and the raid on Dugdale’s shop became a model for action against the Holywell Street trade. This shift in strategy brought works like Aristotle’s Masterpiece and R. and L. Perry & Co’s The Silent Friend to the centre of courtroom debates about the boundaries of obscenity law.

Medical Works in Court

The Society for the Suppression of Vice found a saviour in the Lord Chief Justice, John Campbell: a man who was both an active politician in the House of Lords and a judge who had ruled for the Society in many obscenity cases over the years.Footnote ²⁴ In May 1857, Campbell presided over two obscenity trials. One was yet another trial for William Dugdale, who was charged with selling “prints of an indecent nature” and an “obscene and disgusting book.”Footnote ²⁵ The proceedings were memorable. After recounting Stanton’s actions the previous year and suggesting that lines in Campbell’s staid chronicle Lives of the Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal in England (1848–50) were grossly indecent, Dugdale cried that he had not had a fair trial, brandished a knife, and threatened to commit suicide on the spot. But the trial that lingered in Campbell’s mind was that of William Strange, another printer, publisher, and bookseller connected with radical politics, for selling Paul Pry, a flash penny paper that spun its stories about sexual scandal as a campaign to expose metropolitan vice.

Like other flash papers, Paul Pry was suggestive, but not sexually explicit. The Society’s decision to target a periodical of such “low-level smuttiness” has been interpreted as a sign of its determination to draw a firm “distinction between acceptability and unacceptability” in print culture.Footnote ²⁶ The Society certainly found the paper’s adoption of its anti-vice rhetoric as a fig leaf for publishing courtesan biographies offensive. However, it is doubtful that it targeted Paul Pry solely for its content. Flash papers frequently promoted and were sometimes backed by Holywell Street publishers. Paul Pry was printed at Strange’s address for a pseudonymous proprietor, and the only person who advertised in it was William Dugdale, who used the paper to spread word about his “extensive Catalogue of Rare and Curious Works.”Footnote ²⁷ The Society convinced Campbell that comparatively innocent works like Paul Pry could be moral poison, and opened his eyes to how interwoven trade in such works was with trade in pornography.Footnote ²⁸ Watchers in the court gallery had laughed at the idea that Dr. Culverwell’s works were obscene. However, such works were a means through which young men were encouraged to seek out immoral pleasures – and purchase reading material that few Victorians would hesitate to call obscene.

Speaking of the matter in the House of Commons, Campbell cited Dugdale’s translation of Alexandre Dumas the younger’s romantic novel La Dame aux camélias (1848), which the bookselling firm W. H. Smith was then selling across the country in its popular railway bookstalls. Although he personally considered Dumas’s novel “of a polluting character,” Campbell admitted that few people would consider the novel obscene. However, he pointed out, Dugdale’s translation was bound with a catalogue that advertised nearly a hundred publications, “most of which” were cheap and, he opined, “of a very abominable description indeed.”Footnote ²⁹ A copy at the British Library lists a mixture of pornographic novels, prints and albums, bawdy song books, night guides, medical works, and French letters for sale.Footnote ³⁰ The catalogue transformed Dumas’s novel into a gateway to iniquity. Advertisements for inexpensive editions of Fanny Hill and The Adventures of a Bedpost – works which, Campbell pointed out, had been found obscene in court – appeared at the top of its very first page. “What [is] the remedy for all this,” he asked, “and how [is] the evidence to be procured?” The Society had told him of the difficulty it had in getting its hands on works like The Adventures of a Bedpost.Footnote ³¹

Campbell’s answer was a bill, drafted with the Society’s help, that was designed to create exactly what it wanted in the wake of Dugdale’s embarrassing lawsuit: a law that would enable the police to seize and destroy obscene material on sworn testimony that it was being sold to the public. Like the clauses in the Vagrancy Acts and the Metropolitan Police Act, Campbell’s Obscene Publications Bill did not specify what obscene material was. Unlike those pieces of legislation, sellers whose property was searched and publications were destroyed would have no recourse to a hearing.Footnote ³²

The bill horrified many members of Parliament. Some members of the House of Lords argued that in failing to spell out what constituted obscenity, Campbell was making way for the destruction of great art and literature. Before long, an over-zealous police officer would surely mistake a classical nude for an indecent print.Footnote ³³ In the House of Commons, debate centred on a different problem: Campbell’s bill invited deliberate abuses of the law. Leaving the term “obscene” undefined, some MPs argued, would incite a flood of frivolous lawsuits. Recalling Dugdale’s recent performance in court, one predicted that the “literary works of Lord Campbell himself – his Lives of the Lord Chancellors … would be made the subject of prosecutions.”Footnote ³⁴ Others worried that frustrated authorities would exploit the bill’s provisions to search the property of people suspected of committing other crimes. And others were certain that competitors would use them to attack each other. The MP Richard Monckton Milnes reported that booksellers “entertained a well-grounded fear that, in a trade in which so much competition existed, the Bill, if passed, would enable any man, hostilely disposed towards them, to … declare upon an oath, that he knew they had some obscene books in their possession,” a claim that could lead to a raid on their businesses and, potentially, the unwarranted destruction of their stock.Footnote ³⁵ Campbell aimed to kill a cancer on the book trade, but his cure would poison the industry.

None of these objections was unfounded.Footnote ³⁶ But Campbell was stubborn. Although he eventually altered the bill so that a magistrate, judge, or justice of the peace would decide whether works seized by the police were destroyed, and although he insisted that the bill was intended to apply “exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth” – which ensured that it passed in August 1857 – he refused to define the term “obscene.”Footnote ³⁷ Why? Some scholars have suggested that Campbell, the Lord Chief Justice, was naïve and thought that obscenity was self-evident; others, that he thought defining obscenity too difficult to accomplish without endangering his bill. However, Campbell’s zeal to rid England of Holywell Street publishers, and his knowledge of how they operated, suggests a third possibility: Campbell knew that leaving the term open to interpretation was the only way to have a chance at destroying the Holywell Street trade. In isolation, few people considered many of the works that Dugdale sold obscene. He took care to conceal works that were widely seen as offensive from the authorities – and should they be destroyed, he could sell other material until he could reprint them and use it to advertise them. If the Society found magistrates who could be swayed by the argument that material other than pornography was dangerous in the wrong hands, however, it could strike a much larger blow at his and his competitors’ businesses.

That is, at least, what that Society seems to have attempted immediately after the passing of the Obscene Publications Act. Historians often claim that no judgments on works “other than pornographic material” were passed under the Act until 1868, over a decade after it came into effect.Footnote ³⁸ However, court records of obscenity trials rarely indicate which titles came under scrutiny, a policy meant to avoid giving them publicity. Since journalists were not bound to conceal titles or refrain from describing the works at issue, newspaper reports often fill in these details.Footnote ³⁹ Reports on the raft of obscenity trials that followed the Act’s passage in the autumn of 1857 and the spring of 1858 suggest that at the direction of the Society the police systematically raided publishers’ and booksellers’ shops and warehouses in and near Holywell Street, indiscriminately seizing the stock of players whose main business was sexual material and players who probably sold just a few explicit works alike. The Society then asked magistrates presiding over the cases to order the destruction of many works that would not previously have been considered likely to justify obscenity charges, including medical works.

Reports of the proceedings illustrate serious disagreement over whether these works could fairly be called obscene, not least between the Society and the people whose businesses had been raided. Book trade workers did not bother to defend pornography in these cases. Typical defences for selling an explicit novel or print were that the seller had acquired it in a bulk purchase from another bookseller and not known what it was, or that a Society agent had pressured the seller to procure it. The only possible exception to this pattern was Sydney Powell, a bookseller who challenged the court to prove that stereoscopic slides that he insisted were “intended for medical men … and in no respect more indecent than the exposure of living models in our schools of art” were obscene. If the court could assure him “of the point at which the line could be drawn” between science and obscenity, he swore, “he would pledge himself to observe the law.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Medical books and pamphlets, however, were given a real defence. Sellers protested that such works offered valuable information, had freely circulated for decades, and were being sold in respectable shops all over London. On those grounds, they were clearly not obscene.

At first glance, news reports suggest that these arguments were ineffective. James Thornhill (Dugdale’s son-in-law), Edward Morris, Charles Paul, William Winn, and Henry Blacketer each protested when they appeared to summons in the autumn of 1857 that their medical works were “perfectly correct” instructional volumes, only to see them destroyed.Footnote ⁴¹ Some magistrates seem to have been as eager to destroy their stock as the Society. In one case, in which several booksellers protested the Society’s characterization of Aristotle’s Masterpiece as an obscene publication, the magistrate roared that “the title page alone was enough to condemn the book.”Footnote ⁴² Others wrestled with the decision. The magistrate Robert Phillip Tyrwhitt mused that “there were certainly some very indecent things” in an unnamed medical work sold by Blacketer, and that they “were certainly very dangerous to youth,” but, being at least “half-medical,” the work must have some scientific value. Yet perhaps, Tyrwhitt reasoned, “the medical was only used for the purpose of selling the books.” The “book before him was never read by young surgeons.” Ultimately, he justified condemning the work to destruction by citing concerns about its circulation. It may have scientific value, he conceded. Yet, Blacketer sold it “into the hands of raw, inexperienced youths.” The fact that Blacketer was selling the book to inappropriate readers turned necessary scientific detail into gratuitous representation.Footnote ⁴³

However, some news reports suggest that other magistrates rejected the idea that medical works, or at least some medical works, were obscene. For instance, Winn’s expression of bewilderment over what booksellers “may sell and what [they] may not” on one of his court appearances suggests that some magistrates thought medical works put before them unobjectionable, so debates about them never took place in court, or were not reported:

It is also clear that some judges considered even measured decisions like Tyrwhitt’s wrongheaded. In November 1857, Justice John Taylor Coleridge spoke out against the “misdirection of the provisions of a statute, doubtless well intentioned, but not therefore the less dangerous.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In Coleridge’s view, the intended and rightful target of the Obscene Publications Act was trade in pornography, and men of his station knew pornography when they saw it: “common sense,” he claimed, enabled them to identify publications whose object was to “excite depraved passions.” However, “it was not uncommonly said that this or that picture of some great artist … might properly form the subject of a prosecution … and it was very easy for ingenious persons to deceive themselves, and perhaps others, by such a tone of argument.” Echoing earlier debates in Parliament, Coleridge raised the spectre of a scenario in which Holywell Street publishers turned “the table on the public by prosecuting [such] works and publications under the colour that they are of the objectionable kind.” They might claim that an artist’s statue of Eve at the fountain in John Milton’s Paradise Lost was obscene, and prevail on the basis that works of a similar character – works that could be misused by people with “impure mind[s],” but whose purpose was not to excite the passions – had been condemned. This would surely undermine public faith in the law. “Instead of looking at an isolated passage or picture,” he argued, magistrates must “look at the book itself, and see whether the general object of it was of the kind represented in the indictment.” “Take any medical or surgical book,” he went on. Such a book could be misused, of course, but everyone “knew that the author, in dealing with his subject, must tell things for the sake of instruction.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In this uncertain environment, as Winn’s comments suggest, some publishers aimed to make it harder for the Society to argue that their medical works were obscene. The title page of one 1857 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece declares that “the whole of these celebrated productions have undergone a complete revision, and every objectionable passage calculated to be offensive to virtue or morality, carefully expunged” (Figure 4.1). Its preliminary Advertisement, dated November 1857, repeats the message, claiming that expurgation has rendered the manual “instructive and entirely free from offence”:

This edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece is, indeed, one of the more buttoned-up versions of the manual, in which the original introductory Masterpiece, which describes puberty and the first stirrings of sexual desire, has been replaced with an essay on “Marriage: Its Duties and Enjoyments,” which appears to have been cobbled together out of excerpts from various literary works, conduct books, and Nicholas Venette’s Conjugal Love.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many of this edition’s differences from the 1684 Aristotle predate the Obscene Publications Act’s passage. It may not really have been censored for the occasion. However, a reference in its chapter on “Monstrous Births” demonstrates that an editor did work on the text after the Obscene Publications Act was passed. Here, a brief description of the hirsute body of Julia Pastrana, an indigenous Mexican woman who was exhibited as “the Bear Woman” and “the Nondescript” in London in August 1857, joins descriptions of other “living curiosities.”Footnote ⁴⁹ According to the text, Pastrana’s exhibition took place “a few weeks ago.” While updating this section, an editor may have deleted material that they considered likely to support obscenity charges.

Figure 4.1 Title page with disclaimer. Revised Edition of the Works of Aristotle, the Famous Philosopher (London: J. Smith, [1857]).

By courtesy of Michael and Anne Bull.

Luckily for those who issued copies of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the manual and other cheap medical works vanished from the courts when the Holywell Street raids ended in 1858. The Society was satisfied with what it had accomplished, and so was Campbell. “Holywell-street, which had long set law and decency at defiance, has capitulated after several assaults,” he wrote gleefully in his diary. “Half the shops are shut up, and the remainder deal in nothing but moral and religious books!”Footnote ⁵⁰ The actions of 1857–8, which Campbell compared elsewhere to the 1857 siege of Delhi, did deal a massive blow to the Holywell Street trade. However, their effects were mostly temporary. Aspects of the trade, and of London’s low culture more broadly, were permanently diminished. Although Duncombe and Dugdale carried on selling sexual material well into the 1860s, they advertised in a narrower range of venues, and the raucous commercial culture promoted by flash papers like Paul Pry faded along with flash papers themselves.Footnote ⁵¹ But new players and new forms of entertainment seamlessly filled their place. Businesses oriented around the sale of explicit photographs and stereoscopic slides had begun to emerge in the 1850s. By the early 1860s, they were booming.

Adolphus Henry Judge, alias Adolphus Henry Delplangue, was known as “one of the most extensive and crafty dealers in these publications … the king of the trade.”Footnote ⁵² Judge and his four brothers – one of whom was married to Dugdale’s daughter Jessie – created thousands of explicit photographs out of premises in Kentish Town, London.Footnote ⁵³ They sold them to customers hearkening from “all classes of society” and “all parts of the country” by post under a variety of trade names, including Delplangue & Co, Megret & Co, Hall & Co, and Rozez, Janin, and Humbert, and probably supplied third-party dealers on a wholesale basis.Footnote ⁵⁴ Like Dugdale a few years earlier, Judge advertised widely in the press. His advertisements often indicated that his images were taken “from life” or “from nature,” euphemisms for nudity that served as shorthand for such photographs in advertisements through the rest of the century. In some venues, Judge was more daring: an 1863 notice in Herapath’s Railway Journal informs readers that Delplangue & Co sold “erotic photographs” alongside the novels of the Marquis de Sade.Footnote ⁵⁵

As that advertisement suggests, while such pornographers did not deal in the same variety as Holywell Street publishers, they typically offered a handful of explicit novels and medical works alongside visual material, as well as French letters. Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Every Woman’s Book, and Fruits of Philosophy were the most common medical works advertised.Footnote ⁵⁶ Curiously, Judge also experimented with cultivating another market for his photographs: medical students. In 1861, Delplanque & Co advertised “Photographs showing the Mons Veneris, Labic Pudendi, Perinaeum, Meatus Uranarius, &c.” to students in the Medical Times and Gazette Advertiser and the Lancet General Advertiser for a guinea a set.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is impossible to know whether these images were the same ones that Judge advertised elsewhere as erotic photographs, and hard to say whether medical students, who were known for making bawdy jokes in anatomy theatres, were really meant to use them as instructive material.Footnote ⁵⁸ Either way, Judge’s decision to advertise in medical journals suggests new ways in which thin boundaries between the categories of the medical and the erotic could be exploited.

As well as failing to shut down trade in sexual entertainment, the events of 1857–8 failed to establish that cheap, explicit medical works were obscene, even in pornographers’ hands. On one raid on Judge’s residence in Kentish Town, police officers dismissed what they found as “quasi-medical” productions and speculated that Judge kept his offensive material in another venue.Footnote ⁵⁹ Next to the photographic equivalent of The Confessions of Madame Vestris, Aristotle’s Masterpiece could look awfully tame. And those who did consider such works dangerous to public morals often did not think that they were covered under Campbell’s Act. Indeed, a writer for the Saturday Review suggested that Campbell’s refusal to define the term “obscene” was to blame for an increase in the sale of materials “which are certainly not positively indecent, but which, it is equally clear, are expressly intended for the gratification of that pruriency which Parliament tried to deprive of its coarser stimulants.”Footnote ⁶⁰ A writer for the Solicitor’s Journal & Reporter summed up the situation in 1867: the “definition of the offence [of obscene libel in common law] is very defective,” he grumbled, “nor have the statutes, which have supplied a better machinery for suppressing the offence, given any assistance in defining it.”Footnote ⁶¹ For now, the only certain means of securing a victory in obscenity cases was to seize pornography.

Obscene Quackery

The Society for the Suppression of Vice was not the only group eager to persuade the authorities that, in the hands of certain players, medical works were obscene. While the Society was trying to put Holywell Street publishers out of business, a handful of reform-oriented medical journals began to campaign against what they called “obscene quackery.” From the early 1840s, following the explosion of consulting surgeons’ manuals into the marketplace, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the Medical Circular, and, in Ireland, the Dublin Medical Press made strident efforts to galvanize opposition to their authors. As we saw in Chapter 2, they ran investigations into the infrastructure of consulting surgeons’ businesses, and published bitter exposés of their imitations, exaggerations, and, in some cases, outright frauds. However, these efforts had little effect on consulting surgeons’ ability to do business. Indeed, they only became more of a fixture in the market for medical advice. Increasingly, campaigning medical journals rallied around a different charge, one that turned regular practitioners’ longstanding anxiety about presenting sexual information to the public into a weapon against irregular medical practice: they claimed that consulting surgeons’ manuals and advertisements were obscene.

A typical article on obscene quackery claimed that consulting surgeons represented a grave threat to public morals. Their advertisements exposed vulnerable people to allusions to sexuality without their consent, while their “vile trash” manuals were calculated to incite morbid or prurient engagement. For the good of the nation, newspaper editors must ban consulting surgeons’ advertisements from their pages. These articles got an enthusiastic reception from medical readers. Doctors often wrote to the Lancet and the British Medical Journal to praise them for exposing “obscene quacks,” to express their anxiety at the prospect of putting “an ordinary newspaper into the hands of a female … lest they should be shocked by the disgusting advertisements which are emblazoned on its pages,” or to call for the establishment an “Association for the Repression of Quackery” or a “Society for the Suppression of Fraudulent and Obscene Advertisements,” which would work to “redeem … the periodical press from its present position of hireling servitude to medical swindlers and obscene advertisers.”Footnote ⁶² Campaigns against obscene quackery also gained modest support in provincial newspapers, whose editors did not stop publishing consulting surgeons’ advertisements, but happily attacked their rivals for doing the same.Footnote ⁶³

Regular practitioners may well have found consulting surgeons’ manuals and advertisements offensive. However, just as newspaper editors stood to benefit from accusing their rivals of publishing indecent advertisements, charging consulting surgeons with purveying obscene material served their own interests. As Roy Porter emphasized, an accusation of quackery is the very definition of what sociologists of science have called “boundary work”: applying to no particular practice, but to any form of behaviour that its wielder deems unorthodox, the term has long served as an instrument to situate certain individuals, groups, acts, or ideas outside the bounds of medicine.Footnote ⁶⁴ Accusations of obscene quackery were a twofold strike: at once, they rhetorically situated consulting surgeons outside the bounds of legitimate medicine and outside the bounds of respectable society. More narrowly, they lent medical reform, a project to which journals like the Lancet and the British Medical Journal were devoted, new currency as an issue of public morals. Writers for these journals had long claimed that legislation to regulate medical practice was the only permanent solution to the scourge of quackery.Footnote ⁶⁵ Now, they framed that legislation as essential to protecting citizens’ morals as it was to protecting their bodies.

To support their claims, anti-quackery campaigners promoted a contextual view of obscenity oriented around the issue of circulation. Long-standing concerns about medicine’s relationship with commerce had had a powerful effect on the ways quackery was represented in regular medicine. Transparent commercialism was positioned as a form of quackery itself, but it was also portrayed as a calling card of incompetent or dishonest practice since it went against regular medical conventions. If a medical work was advertised through placards, handbills, or cards; if it included testimonials for its author’s services or directions to access them; or if its title used vernacular medical terms, the logic went, its author must be a charlatan. Arising during a period in which an encounter with a consulting surgeon’s advertisement was utterly unavoidable, campaigns against obscene quackery took this argument in a slightly different direction. Instead of, or in addition to, collapsing charlatanism with commercialism, they collapsed obscenity with commercialism. The “popular” form of consulting surgeons’ manuals, their easy accessibility, and the ubiquity of advertisements for them were framed as clues that should apprise readers of offensive content within the manual, and framed as dangerous in their own right.

An 1850 pamphlet issued by the Union for the Discouragement of Vicious Advertisements, an anti-quackery group associated with the Lancet, offers a good illustration of this argument in action. The pamphlet begins by decrying the lurid content of works like Manhood and The Silent Friend. However, it rapidly shifts away from discussing the manuals’ main text and images to focus on their bibliographical makeup and the ways they were distributed:

According to the Union, it was not the content of these works alone that threatened the “young and unwary.” Even seemingly mundane elements of the manuals, such as their tables of contents, were “calculated to arouse dangerous ideas.” What made these works especially endangering in the Union’s rendering, though, was their material accessibility: obscene quackery is portrayed as a kind of disease in the Union’s pamphlet, inexorably creeping into domestic space. “No home is safe,” the pamphlet warns its readers, “these publications may be carried, by the facility of modern transport, into each of our nurseries and kitchens, and be perused, perhaps at this moment, by some member of our households in unwary ignorance.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Collapsing commercialism with obscenity was an expedient approach to attacking the consulting surgeon trade. Decrying consulting surgeons’ representations of the body and sexuality in specific terms was untenable. Their manuals promoted the same ideas as works by regular medical practitioners, and used similar, and sometimes exactly the same, language to do so. Linking medical works’ decency as reading material and legitimacy as science with certain methods of presentation and distribution, on the other hand, enabled anti-quackery campaigners to draw a line between medical orthodoxy and medical heterodoxy rooted in commercial practice at a time when consulting surgeons’ exploitation of print for commercial gain was exactly what alarmed them.

Although tales of doctors’ sexual misconduct circulated in the press (and, inevitably, in the pornography trade), anti-quackery campaigners do not seem to have worried that charges of obscene quackery would arouse concern that regular practitioners were being corrupted by their own reading material.Footnote ⁶⁸ They diffused this possibility by appealing to the same paternalistic model of reading that Tyrwhitt had cited to condemn Blacketer’s book: a model of reading that framed women, children, and young men as vulnerable to the influences of print in ways that established professional men like themselves were not. What campaigns against obscene quackery did risk arousing was concern that regular medical authors endangered public morals. The commercial dividing line that they drew between medicine and quackery was precarious. As we have seen, the differences between regular and irregular medical book advertisements could be subtle to the uninitiated, and the regular and irregular medical works’ prices and modes of distribution were often the same or similar. Arguably, if no home was safe from contamination from Manhood, no home was safe from the influence of works on sexual matters issued by John Churchill and Hippolyte Baillière.

Initially, anti-quackery campaigners simply aimed to convince newspaper editors to stop publishing consulting surgeons’ advertisements.Footnote ⁶⁹ Their efforts were spectacularly unsuccessful: irregular medical advertisements represented a significant and reliable stream of income that newspaper editors did not want, and in many cases could not afford, to lose. The law became an increasing focus of campaigns against obscene quackery in this context, following events in 1853 and 1854 which saw local authorities charge three figures connected with travelling anatomical museums with displaying obscene models under the Vagrancy Acts: Joseph Woodhead, the owner of Woodhead’s Museum, in Sheffield; J. W. Reimer, the owner of Reimer’s Anatomical Museum, in Hull; and James Lang, a demonstrator at Henry’s Anatomical Museum, in Barnsley.Footnote ⁷⁰ Lang pled guilty to exhibiting “indecent representations of the human body,” and was released on the condition that he close the museum.Footnote ⁷¹ Reimer was found guilty, but only fined a nominal 2s 6d – less than the cost of three tickets to his museum – because the magistrate was convinced that the museum had “educational potential.”Footnote ⁷² Woodhead was fined ten shillings and moved his museum to London, where his models had been displayed without complaint in the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, only to be fined again for displaying “filthy, obscene, and indecent figures.”Footnote ⁷³

The sources of the complaints against these museums were never made public. Reports only indicate that “some individuals” were offended by what they saw and decided to report it to the authorities.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, Woodhead claimed that medical men conspired to bring charges against him in London, and it is not unlikely that medical men were the complainants in some, and even all, of these cases. As Alan Bates has demonstrated, public anatomical museums were enormously popular in the early 1850s, selling up to a million tickets a year. Bates argues that their sheer popularity galvanized opposition to them among medical practitioners even before they started advertising medical services: what had once looked like a welcome means of promoting medical expertise was beginning to look like an unwelcome challenge to it.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even if they were not the source of the complaints against the museums, it is significant that medical practitioners contributed to efforts to shut them down. In all of these cases, local doctors testified against the defendants, claiming, as one practitioner did in the Lang case, that their displays “were calculated to excite the errotic [sic] desires of the people, and … make a profit by pandering to those desires.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Apprised of the Vagrancy Acts’ efficacy as a mechanism for shutting down public anatomical museums, anti-quackery campaigners began to consider obscenity law as a means of combating the consulting surgeon trade. Campbell’s introduction of the Obscene Publications Bill during the summer of 1857 attracted close attention from writers for the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. While some of these writers viewed the bill’s introduction ahead of legislation for medical reform as evidence of misplaced government priorities, others urged their colleagues to embrace it as an instrument to suppress quackery.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like the Vagrancy Acts, the Obscene Publications Bill did not cover advertisements in newspapers. However, if it was passed, a complaint could enable the police to seize consulting surgeons’ manuals. If a magistrate deemed them obscene, they would be destroyed, and their authors could be prosecuted for obscene libel. The popular weekly Punch, which counted several ex-medical men among its staff and often reported on medical debates, promoted these views to the public, going so far as to deem a crackdown on consulting surgeons the “chief case for Campbell’s Act.”Footnote ⁷⁸

On the eve of the Act’s passage, anti-quackery campaigners pressed the Society for the Suppression of Vice to prosecute consulting surgeons. The Lancet argued that there was “abundant ground to warrant the interference of the Society.” “Worrying the Holywell-street vendors is good sport enough,” the journal coaxed, “but scarcely more successful than lopping off the heads of a Hydra … Surely [obscene quackery is] more deserving of [the Society’s] attention, as being calculated to engender that miserable depravity of mind which induces men to purchase the poison vended by traders in obscene publications.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The Society did not acknowledge the Lancet’s words. Months passed, and a parade of cheap medical works passed through the courts. The Lancet and its allies stepped up their appeals. By the winter of 1857–8, Punch was equating consulting surgeons with Holywell Street publishers, dubbing them “Holywell Doctors” and “Holywell quacks,” and arguing that they were as, or more, dangerous to public morality as men like William Dugdale:

The Society ignored these appeals.

The campaign against obscene quackery temporarily died down around the passage of the 1858 Medical Act, which finally gave “legally qualified Medical Practitioners” statutory recognition.Footnote ⁸¹ The Act established a General Medical Council to form and maintain a public register of qualified medical practitioners, monitor standards for medical training, and de-register practitioners found guilty of committing criminal acts or engaging in unprofessional conduct. For years, medical reformers had claimed that such legislation would eradicate quackery. However, the Medical Act was not designed for this purpose, and it quickly proved to be an ineffectual instrument for it. Many general practitioners could not afford to pay fees to be included in the Medical Register, which meant that it did not list many medical men who would have been considered “regular.” And practitioners who practised medicine in ways that offended their colleagues often declined to register themselves, which left them free to practice as they wished. It was possible to prosecute such practitioners for falsely claiming medical qualifications or using titles such as “surgeon” or “physician” in advertising material. However, they could easily dodge a guilty verdict by purchasing a foreign diploma. Some irregulars didn’t bother to purchase one, resigning themselves to paying the maximum five-pound fine for committing the offence in the event they were prosecuted.

As medical reformers began to recognize that the Medical Act could not suppress the consulting surgeon trade, screeds against obscene quackery surged back into the medical press.Footnote ⁸² The surgeon Francis Burdett Courtenay’s melodramatic exposé Revelations of Quacks and Quackery (1865), first published as a series of reports in the Medical Circular, warned parents that if their daughters sent away for a consulting surgeon’s manual, “irreparable moral contamination” would ensue.Footnote ⁸³ The Lancet claimed that “vile quack advertisements” had led to the suicide of a young man in Kent. The “books to which they refer contain every element of pruriency, of vile suggestion, and of cunning terrorism which can work upon the mind,” it cried.Footnote ⁸⁴ The general outline of these arguments was not novel. Irregulars had been accused of damaging minds and morals for a long time. However, anti-quackery campaigners made their accusations in ever more brutal terms, framing consulting surgeons and, increasingly, the owners of public anatomical museums as sexual predators and shadowy anarchists. Now, their works did not simply weaken public morals or set off hypochondria. They fostered “loathsome debauchery,” violence, and social disorder.Footnote ⁸⁵

In 1860, local authorities charged William and Louis Lloyd, the owners of a public anatomical museum in Leeds, with displaying models “dangerous to public morality.” The Lloyds’ defence that their anatomical models were educational was rejected, and they were destroyed on the grounds that they were “utterly useless for any scientific object” and “pandered to the worst passions of human nature.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Five years later, Reginald Rudd, described as “a medicine vendor,” was charged with distributing obscene books in Bolton. Rudd’s solicitor argued that “everything recorded in the publications might be met with in medical books,” but agreed that they “had unquestionably a degrading effect.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Rudd was only fined twenty shillings, but campaigning medical journals framed this and the Lloyd case as important precedents that portended sweeping action against consulting surgeons under Campbell’s Act.Footnote ⁸⁸ They were wrong. Eight years after the Lloyd case, the Lancet was still calling on the police and the Society for the Suppression of Vice to do their duty, and lamenting obscenity law’s weak enforcement.

Several issues impeded organized action against consulting surgeons under obscenity laws during the 1850s and 1860s. One was that anti-quackery campaigners were unwilling to act themselves. (It is notable that most charges against irregulars on the grounds that they were displaying or distributing obscene material during this period were under the Vagrancy Acts, which cost complainants little time or money.) Instead of taking the law into their own hands, they aimed to persuade others to prosecute consulting surgeons. However, there was not much practical support for such a project. The General Medical Council refused to admit proprietors of “unseemly” exhibitions into the Medical Register, and removed prominent consulting surgeons from it: in 1863, Robert Jacob Jordan was struck off the Medical Register for “conduct unbecoming of a physician,” and Samuel La’Mert was struck off for publishing an “indecent and unprofessional treatise.”Footnote ⁸⁹ However, neither the Council nor any other major medical institution supported prosecuting such practitioners for distributing of obscene material.

There was also little support for prosecuting consulting surgeons under obscenity laws outside the medical community. “The ‘fine line of demarcation’ … between us and them,” as one medical writer put it, presented a difficult roadblock.Footnote ⁹⁰ While anti-quackery campaigners framed consulting surgeons’ publications and advertisements as fundamentally different from those of legitimate medical practitioners, many people did not perceive meaningful differences between them. Cataloguing medicine’s wars with itself, the Saturday Review quipped that medical men “avow that their object is to clear the profession of quacks … before we assist them in their undertaking, we should like to know, in common with a large part of the public, what it is they include in their definition of quackery.”Footnote ⁹¹ Relatedly, many people were skeptical of the claim that consulting surgeons’ publications endangered public morals. It is difficult to interpret its silence in the face of endless entreaties from the Lancet, but it is plausible that the Society for the Suppression of Vice considered it neither necessary nor desirable to prosecute consulting surgeons since they warned people against sexual vice in such strident terms. And finally, many people did not think that obscenity laws applied to medical works, even though medical works had been seized and condemned under them. In a yet another skirmish involving Woodhead’s Museum, Bates notes, authorities in Derby called the museum “disgusting and demoralizing,” but did not think they had any legal power to shut it down.Footnote ⁹²

The 1860s drew to a close with the stink of failure, at least for the groups examined in this chapter. Several public anatomical museums shut down around 1857, possibly out of fears that the Obscene Publications Act would be used against them. Yet, others appear to have benefitted from the notoriety of being called obscene, and the consulting surgeon business continued to thrive.Footnote ⁹³ And while the Holywell Street trade was seriously diminished by the end of the 1850s, a new kind of trade in sexual material – trafficking in some of the same products, and some that anti-vice crusaders considered even worse – was flourishing. At the same time, to the consternation of legal experts, there remained no consensus about what the term “obscene” meant in a court of law. Campbell’s refusal to define the term in his bill may have been meant to facilitate the Society for the Suppression of Vice’s fight against the Holywell Street trade, but it fostered a great deal of confusion.

The Circumstances of the Publication

In 1868, the legal meaning of the term “obscene” was resolved, after a fashion, with a ruling in the trial R. v. Hicklin. The Hicklin case surrounded The Confessional Unmasked, a pamphlet first published under a pseudonym in 1836 that purported to expose the “Depravity of the Romish Priesthood.” An evangelical group called the Protestant Electoral Union – whose founders included the solicitor Charles Hastings Collette, soon to be the new secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice – had issued 25,000 copies in 1865.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Confessional was deliberately shocking: adopting a common structure in pornographic literature, its author arranged passages culled from various Roman Catholic theological manuals in order of sexual explicitness, beginning with fairly tame questions that priests might put to the young about courtship and ending with answers to questions about specific sex acts, such as whether a husband might “introduce his —— into the mouth of his wife.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Whether the Union aimed to protest state tolerance for Roman Catholicism or, as Mullin has suggested, make a steady stream of income from those who recognized the pamphlet’s utility as a sex manual, it promoted the Confessional in towns with large Catholic populations and set off a “sectarian, political, and regional uproar.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1867, authorities in Wolverhampton charged Henry Scott, a metalworker who had been selling the pamphlet for a shilling, with distributing obscene material. A drawn-out legal skirmish ensued, and the case ended up on the Queen’s Bench in 1868.

The defence claimed that the Confessional could not be obscene because it was a religious work. This argument was widely ridiculed in the press: picking “out every foul passage” from theological manuals and selling “them in a penny pamphlet to boys in the streets,” the Pall Mall Gazette cried, rendered them unfit for their original purpose.Footnote ⁹⁷ According to Mullin, the outcry forced the new Lord Chief Justice, Alexander Cockburn’s, hand. He ruled for the prosecution, declaring, “I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In outlining this “test of obscenity,” Cockburn made history: the Hicklin test, as it became known, became the standard legal method of determining obscenity in Britain, the United States, and most British colonies for nearly a century, influencing the outcome of obscenity trials all over the world.Footnote ⁹⁹

As Mullin has emphasized, Cockburn’s test of obscenity was formulated to address a difficult and unanticipated local predicament.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, as this chapter is shown, it also addressed a decade of debate in Parliament, among legal experts, in the courts, and in the press about what kinds of material obscenity laws covered. By the mid-nineteenth century, as one writer for the Solicitor’s Journal & Reporter suggested, it was difficult for many experts to view common-law understandings of obscenity as covering anything other than pornographic material. The photographs that Adolphus Henry Judge advertised as erotic were clearly created with “lewd” or “licentious” intent.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Medical and theological works were not. But the print world of the mid-nineteenth century was a complex and convoluted one, a world in which sexual discourse was constantly being broken down, stitched together, reframed, and redistributed in new ways. For different reasons, anti-quackery campaigners and some members of the judiciary had argued that how a publication was sold, and to who, mattered. In defining obscenity not in relation to authorial intent but in relation to audience – “into those whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” – Cockburn’s test of obscenity affirmed those arguments.

It is important to recognize that in practice, however, Cockburn’s test of obscenity did not rest on a work’s audience, not precisely. What those who sought to apply the test, including Cockburn himself, relied on was an idea of readership or potential readership, grounded in analyses of various features of a work’s commercial context: who had published it, how much it cost, where and how it had been advertised, how it had been distributed, and so on. Cockburn made his test’s reliance on these kinds of contexts more explicit earlier in the case when he addressed the issue of “necessarily” obscene works: like a theological manual or a legal textbook, a “medical treatise, with illustrations necessary for the information of those for whose education or information the work is intended, may, in a certain sense, be obscene, and yet not the subject for indictment,” he declared, “but it can never be that these prints may be exhibited for any one, boys and girls, to see as they pass. The immunity must depend upon the circumstances of the publication.”Footnote ¹⁰² Cockburn suggested that certain forms of advertisement and distribution legitimately served medical needs, that others did not, and that a judge could tell the difference.

The formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity marked a crucial turning point in the history this book traces. In practice, it made medical works obscene no more than the Holywell Street raids had. Many authorities continued to be skeptical of the idea that medical works were covered under obscenity laws, even when they were cheap, popular works that could easily fall into the hands of young and female readers. However, alongside the 1858 Medical Act and regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to professionalize their own print culture, the test created a more stable framework for arguing that medical works were obscene in court. This had a significant impact on trade in medical works on sexual matters. Sellers were intermittently prosecuted under obscenity laws as part of efforts to combat quackery, pornography trafficking, fraud, and political organizing, and the circumstances of their works’ publication and distribution were used to argue that they were obscene. These actions helped fuel myths about censorship that were applied to sell sexual knowledge in its material form and as a programme of scientific enquiry.