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The chapter analyses the creation and definition of obscenity in the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the ‘Hicklin Ruling’ of 1868. It considers the parliamentary debates which led up to the 1857 Act, and the polarized views of MPs on the subject. It also analyses the disagreements and anxieties surrounding the Hicklin Ruling, revealing the conflicts among nineteenth-century legislators, commentators, publishers, and writers on the question of literary censorship.

This chapter focuses on the period leading up to the passage of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. It considers fears of the Americanization of British culture culminating in the purge of 1954, when the scale and intensity of anti-obscenity proceedings reached a peak for the period covered by this book. It also describes key moments of dispute around the publication of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

This chapter discusses the controversies on censorship. During the Thatcher years, critics of obscenity in popular culture and the arts had some victories, but it was not close to the center of social change. Labour MP Clare Short made efforts to amend the Obscene Publications Act by itemizing forbidden types of scenes and poses. Moreover, the Campaign against Pornography and Censorship refused to see censorship as the answer to the problem of pornography. The chapter notes the advent of the Internet as another change for the 1990s. Censorship is always significant, but it is no longer a pressing matter similar to Lord Campbell's Act and the Williams Report.

This chapter discusses obscenity, literacy, and the literary franchise. Obscenity law took shape as Britain debated the extension of the literary franchise, while mass literacy changed expectations about politics and culture. The twin pillars of English obscenity law were the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the judgment in the R v. Hicklin case a decade later. Judges base decisions about a borderline book's acceptability on matters of price and distribution which is similar to debates surrounding the Second Reform Act (1867). The Second Reform Act enfranchised urban male householders. The chapter tackles library censorship as novelists knew some subjects were off limits.

The most obvious reason why the Video Recordings Bill is undesirable is that the so-called ‘video nasties’ have already been deemed illegal under the Obscene Publications Act (OPA) and disappeared. In its statutory role, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) will become a large quango accountable to no one but the Secretary of State. It is impossible not to see the Bill as part and parcel of a multi-fronted attack on civil liberties in Britain. Sir Bernard Braine has continuously tried to hijack the Bill on its passage through the Committee Stage. The chapter then deals with some of the wider knock-on effects of the Video Recordings Bill, such as its effects on film censorship and on television. It is mentioned that the Video Recordings Bill cannot be divorced from the wider ideological climate.

This chapter investigates the intersection of the aesthetic prohibition of the disgusting with the development of modern obscenity law and the regulation of sexuality. It turns to the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in order to scrutinize the historical moment when the domain of the law came into contact with and absorbed certain aspects of the aesthetics of disgust. What, the chapter asks, did the law take from the aesthetic domain, and specifically from the aesthetics of disgust, in codifying the obscene as a statutory offense? It also examines how are we to understand the transfer of aesthetic conceptions of judgment and of the relationship of feeling to discourse into what would seem to be an incompatible juridical framework. Ultimately, the chapter analyses how the pollution model of obscenity arose in the context of Henry Vizetelly's trial for the translation and publication of Zola in 1888, as well as in Hardy's writings on iconoclasm in Jude the Obscure.

This chapter illustrates the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) trying repeatedly to liberalise its guidelines relating to ‘R18’ videos, and being prevented from doing so by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw. The story of the ‘R18’ began in 1982. The differences between Section 2 and Section 3 proceedings under the Obscene Publications Act (OPA) are explained. Bernard Williams' unwillingness to recommend that sex shops should be licensed had by 1987 been amply justified. The combined efforts of Customs and the Home Secretary brought to an end the trial liberalisation period. The Makin' Whoopee! was passed by the Video Appeals Committee (VAC). It ‘may offend or disgust but it is unlikely to deprave or corrupt that proportion of the public who are likely to view it’. Straw ultimately failed to bend the BBFC to his will makes the existence of those powers no less disturbing.

This chapter surveys the history of obscenity in English jurisprudence, from the invention of obscene libel as a crime in the eighteenth century through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and its 1959 reform. It draws on Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to argue that the invention of obscenity, and its subsequent definitions and redefinitions, reflect changes in media ecology and technology. It begins by examining the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, before surveying the history of obscenity, and concluding with readings of the way the technologically mediated character of obscenity is reflected in both James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

This chapter explores why the Video Recordings Act (VRA) looks set to be a permanent feature on the statute book. A draft Video Recordings Bill was notified to the EC on 10 September 2009. The British Video Association urged its members to continue submitting DVDs as normal to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport played the role of ‘intervener’ with the result that the Obscene Publications Act is abolished. ‘Harm’ is defined in the context of media legislation. It is argued in this chapter that the VRA should simply be abolished hook, line and sinker. As far as film and video censorship in contemporary Britain is concerned, the message from the political class continues to ring out loud and clear: there is no alternative.