A Brief chronological Compendium of a Few Banned or Challenged Works, and Censorship and Anti-Censorship Efforts Part I: Pre-20th century (?-1900)

Father always required me to think for myself, and Mr. Clemens urged me to, also. I was taught that the one Unforgivable Sin, the offense against one's integrity, was to accept anything at all simply on authority. --Mama Maureen Johnson, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, pg 100

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24th century BCE: First recorded use of a word meaning freedom

By Urukagina of Lagash; a Sumerian king and the first known social reformer. He put a stop to the abuse of his citizen-subjects by expelling the tax collectors from his city and curbing the excesses of the high priest.

Anaxagoras was punished for impiety. Another leading philosopher, Protagoras, was charged with blasphemy and his books were burned on order of the judges of Areopagus. Protagoras was banished from the territory. This action stemmed from his opening a discourse by confessing as to not knowing whether or not there were gods. These instances of repression and persecution in Athens were not truly typical of Greek democracy, for usually the freedom to speak openly in private or in the assembly was respected.

Plato suggested that Homer be expurgated "for immature readers." He would also have banned all poets from his idealized republic.

All Confucian books were burned save one copy of each which was kept in the Chinese State Library. The destruction of the literature and the persecution of Confucians was an extension of the original plans to consolidate the Qin dynasty composed by Shi Huang Ti (246-210 BCE). He is also alleged to have had 460 Confucian scholars buried alive. He apparently believed that with all previous historical records destroyed, history could be said to begin with him.

Those plans were carried out further by Prime Minister Li Si circa 208 BCE. The ban on books was lifted in 191 BCE, after the Qin were overthrown by the Han Dynasty.

[That date might be wrong; I've seen this incident placed in 250 BCE. as well. --MN]

During the civil war between Julius Caesar and the followers of Pompey the Great, Caesar was besieged in Alexandria; a fire that destroyed the Egyptian fleet spread through some stores of books, about 40,000 of which were ruined. That time it was an accident. This store of books might have been at the Temple of Seraph, which once housed an annex of 43,000 volumes, rather than at the Library itself.

According to legend, the library at Alexandria was burned (deliberately and in toto I assume), three times. However, it was also damaged a few other times. (Note: in some contexts "library" does not necessarily mean the physical building, but the collection of texts.)
(see 272, 391, 640)

0008: Ovid

The Roman poet was banished from Rome for writing Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). He died in exile in Greece eight years later. All copies of Ovid's works that were in Florence in 1497 were burned by Savonarola.
(see 1928)

By Homer. It came under attack from the Roman emperor Caligula. He tried to ban the work, written more than 300 years earlier, because he feared that people would be energized by Greek ideals of freedom and he would lose his control over the people.

By Aristophanes; for anti-war sentiment.
(see 1955; 1967)

By order of the Roman emperor Lucius Domitius Aurelian.
(see 47 BCE, 391, 640)

In 313 the Roman emperor Constantine the Great decreed toleration of Christianity. Twenty years later he set the pattern of religious censorship that was to be followed for centuries by ordering the burning of all books by the Greek theologian Arius.

Under the Roman emperor Theodosius I, Christian forces burned the collected works.
(see 47 BCE, 272, 640)

Pope St. Innocent I enumerated in a letter a number of apocryphal writings, rejecting them as non solum repudianda sed etiam damnanda. This was the first attempt at a catalogue of forbidden books.

By Papal decree. This list was included in a decree by Pope Gelasius and is generally regarded as the first Roman proscription of books, although the formal term Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not applied until 1559. Pope Gelasius was later canonized; for asserting Papal primacy.

Burned by the orders of Caliph Umar I (581?-644). He had all the 200,000 volumes in the library burned under the pretext, "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed." In burning the books the caliph provided a six month supply of fuel to warm the city's baths.
(see 47 BCE, 272, 391)

By Sappho. This Greek poet lived circa 600 B.C.E; she is famed for her revolutionary approach that expressed feelings of romantic longing. Her work was destroyed first by early Christians around the year 400 and later by Pope Gregory VII in 1073. The Pope's efforts left just one complete poem existent.

By Jews. It was burned in Cairo, Egypt. The Catholic Church censored it for many centuries because of its 'blasphemy and immorality'. Several popes ordered copies burnt or confiscated, and Pope Julius III decreed that any Christians reading the Talmud would be excommunicated.
(see 1242; 1244; 1490; 1553)

By rebelious peers. The first challenge to the system of absolute monarchy was unwillingly signed into effect at Runnymede Meadow by Prince John. Prince John had taken the throne on behalf of his brother, King Richard the Lionhearted, who had gone off crusading. He was such a despot, however, that the dukes threatened him with a revolt if he did not sign the Magna Carta. Rumor has it that as a result of his despotism, no British king has taken the name John since then.

By Jews. Perhaps 10,000 copies of the Talmud, carried in twenty-four wagon loads, were burned at the stake before the eyes of grieving Parisian Jews. These people were kept at bay by royal soldiers. Jewish communities all over Europe mourned this and later destructions of these holy books. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg lamented: "O [Torah] that has been consumed by fire, seek the welfare of those who mourn you." Louis IX's attack on the Talmud amounted to a direct assault on the basis of medieval Jewish material and spiritual life.

Louis had ruled that the Talmud was "full of errors, and that the veil covers the heart of these people to such a degree, that these books turn the Jews . . . to fables and lies."

Franciscan theologian Alexander of Hales noted that burning the Talmud would be an appropriate punishment for anti-Christian speech or actions.
(see 1190; 1244; 1490; 1553)

Pope Innocent IV ordered Louis IX to again burn the Talmud. He also ordered Louis to forbid Jews from hiring Christian nurses or servants. Louis willingly complied.
(see 1190; 1242; 1490; 1553)

Pope Sixtus IV granted the fullest powers of censorship to the university in Cologne, France, and praised it for having checked with such zeal the printing and selling of irreligious books. In 1482 the Bishop of Würzburg enacted a law of censorship for his diocese; in 1485 and 1486 the Archbishop of Mainz did the same for his ecclesiastical province. These actions paved the way for the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII, which universally prescribed the censorship of books and entrusted the bishops with its execution.

The invention of printing in the 15th century made prepublication censorship possible, and Pope Innocent VIII introduced such censorship. Printers were required to submit all manuscripts to church authorities, and a work could be printed only after it had been approved. This was the first, universal, binding papal edict of censorship; it went unheeded.

[A process called prior restraint. --MN]

Burned at Salamanca, Spain.
(see 1190; 1242; 1244; 1553)

By Dante Alighieri. It was burned on religious grounds.

Savonarola, one of the most notorious and powerful of all censors, was a most charismatic Florentine religious fanatic with a large following. During these two years, he persuaded the artists of Florence themselves to bring their works -- including drawings of nudes -- to the bonfires. As well as burning all copies of Ovid's works then in Florence.

Some poets decided they should no longer write in verse, having been persuaded that such lines were wicked and impure.

Popular songs were denounced, and some were turned into hymns with new pious lyrics. Ironically, in May of 1498 another great bonfire was lit -- this time under a cross from which hung Savonarola himself. With him were burned all his writings, sermons, essays, and pamphlets.

Ten rules were drawn up by the priests selected by the Council and which were subsequently ratified by Pope Pius.

On this day Pope Leo X issued the Bull "Exsurge Domine", by which all the writings of Martin Luther, even future writings, were forbidden under pain of excommunication.

Six thousand copies of the English translation of the New Testament, by William Tyndale, had been printed in Cologne, Germany, and smuggled into England -- and then burned by the English church. Church authorities were determined that the Bible would be available only in Latin.

[Amost certainly because the priest-class didn't want the common people reading and understanding the bible for themselves, and able to figure out how the priests were manipulating them thereby. A ploy that has been used as recently as 1994-2001 by the Taliban of Afghanistan. --MN]
(see 1535)

By King Henry VIII. In this year he outlawed all imported publications.

By Niccolo Macchiavelli. Although it was written in 1513, and copies of the work had been in circulation since before 1527, The Prince was only published in this year. Publication was approved by Pope Clement VII, a cousin to Lorenzo de' Medici, to whom the work was dedicated, and the book was reprinted in twenty-five editions over the next twenty years. By 1552, however, opposition to it arose. The Council of Trent ordered the destruction of all of Machiavelli's works, he was denounced as an atheist in Rome, his writings were banned there and throughout all of Europe, the Jesuits burned him in effigy in Germany, and both Catholics and Prostestants railed against him. In 1559 The Prince was placed on the Index Prohibitorum.

For more background about this book and the socio-cultural milieu in which it was written, read: Books That Changed The World, Robert B Downs, 1956.

This vested in the king the power to declare and punish heresies. King Henry VIII persecuted both papists and reformers and burned copies of the English translation of the New Testament.

By printing presses. As the increased manufacture of books brought down the costs of printing them the prices of the books declined. Monks prevailed upon François I to ban printing in this year. The move was an economic one in part, because their livelihood as scribes was certainly threatened. When Gutenberg invented the press, it allowed a single man to produce as much in a single day as a scribe could by hand taking an entire year. An overriding concern, however, was the threat to their monopoly on ideas. Historian A.G. Dickens wrote of the times, "In the speed of religious ideas it seems difficult to exaggerate the significance of the [printing] press, without which a revoluiton of this magnitude could scarecly have been consummated. Lutheranism was from the first the child of the printed book, and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standardized and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe." That ban on printing, enacted in 1535, was never enforced; nonetheless, the proclamation signaled a turning of the tide in the course of human events.

Johanna Neuman wrote of these times in her book:

Indeed, in the first forty years after the printing press was invented, 20 million books were published. In the next 100 years, the total reached 200 million. This explosion of available information to a far vaster audience did not doom the monarchs of the day, but it increased the chance that a literate public would raise questions about their rule. Suddenly, kings and poets were not the only ones reading, and individuals began to form their own ideas about world events. This was an inherently dangerous turn of events to the policy elite.
--Lights, Camera, War
ISBN 0-312-14004-5
Dewey # 070.19 N491

For the high crime of being the first person to translate the Bible into English. He was arrested, tried for heresy, and then strangled and burned at the stake at Antwerp, Belgium.
(see 1525)

By King Henry VIII. His licencing system applied to anyone who wanted to print anything; including books, pamphlets, or even shiipping schedules. The system created valuable printing monopolies and prevented the publication of unorthodox opinion. The licensers were bureaucrats who operated quite arbitrarily, took as long as they wished to decide yea or nay, gave no reason for their decisions, and did not have any court of appeal.
(see 23 Nov 1644)

Pope Paul III established the Universal Roman Inquisition, or Congregation of the Holy Office, one of whose duties was to examine and condemn heretical or immoral works. The Congregation of the Holy Office lasted until 1965, but it was not abolished even then -- its mission was simply redefined.

[This inquisition was not related to the Spanish Inquisition begun in 1478. That was something entirely separate, albeit contemporaneous. --MN]
(see 1559; 1965)

King Henry VIII forbade anyone from having a copy of Tyndale's or Coverdale's New Testament.

Etienne Dolet was hanged and burnt at the stake as a heretic and blasphemer for printing the works of humanists, including Erasmus.

Under Pope Julius III, Cardinal Peter Caraffa, head of the Inquisition and the future Pope Paul IV, ordered copies of the Talmud burned in the Papal States and all across Italy.
(see 1190; 1242; 1244; 1490)

By John Rogers; a former catholic priest who wrote under the nom de plume John Matthew. In 1537, King Henry VIII bowed to public pressure for an English language bible, and he declared a translation based on the work of Walter Tyndale and Miles Coverdale as the authorized version. This authorized version was prepared and annotated by John Rogers. In 1554, Queen Mary I ascended to the throne and began her campaign to reinstitute catholicism as the religion of the state. Rogers/Matthew was among the first of three hundred to burn at the stake for heresy during a campaign for which this queen became known as Bloody Mary.

Pope Paul IV first issued the Index of Forbidden Books, not a challenged or banned work, but rather a compilation of works prohibited by the R.C. Church, and which was supplemented by his successors. Approximately 5000 books were ultimately listed in the Index. The last edition was issued in 1948 and it was finally rescinded in 1965.
(see 0496)

By Diego de Landa. The Bishop of Yucatan, he had incinerated dozens of Maya codices on this day. He commented about it: "There were many beautiful books, but as they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil, we burnt them."

By William Shakespeare. The original version of the play contained a scene in which the king was deposed from his throne. Queen Elizabeth I was so angry that she ordered the scene removed from all copies of the play.
(see 1608)

By William Shakespeare. King James I banned the play in this year, after he first saw it. The ban lasted for about five years. Some say it was because he found the witches' curses too realistic; that having written a work on demonology, he considered himself an expert on the subject.

By William Shakespeare. This play was restored to its original condition this year. According to a well done paper about censorship of Shakespeare's works:

The best-known case of political censorship is that of Richard II; which occured in 1597. Then, in 1601, the Earl of Essex used Richard II, including the excised scene, to arouse resentment against the Queen. The excised scene was restored in 1608, under the reign of King James, who had "an affectionate remembrance of Essex."

By Sir Walter Raleigh. This book was banned by King James I of England for "being too saucy in censuring princes."

By Galileo Galilei. He had begun agitating at this time for the R.C. Church to begin bringing Holy Scripture into line with Copernican Theory, which was the anti-geocentric view of the universe. This, despite having been warned by friends in the church that it would be unwise to follow such a course of action. De Revolutionibus was placed on the church's Index of Forbidden Books because Galileo would not let the matter rest and the issue was sent up the chain of command to the Pope. Galileo was enjoined by the church against promoting the Copernican view.
(see 1559)

All books that promote the idea that the earth moves are banned by the Roman Catholic church.

By Giordana Bruno. This work was banned by the Roman Catholic Church until 1838. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for refusing to recant it.
(see 1632)

Galileo appealed the ban on preaching the non-geocentric view of the universe on the election of Maffeo Barberini as pope. The ban was upheld for largely political reasons.
(see 1632)

By Martin Luther. This German translation of the Bible was burned in Germany by order of the Pope. The resulting publicity attending this incidence of censorship apparently generated 5000 sales in five days.
(see 1885 to compare it with the sales of the censored Mark Twain)

By Galileo Galilei. He had been becoming increasing arrogant and overbearing since 1615, and his downfall began in 1623 with the election of his close personal friend Maffeo Barberini as pope. Barberini took the name Urban VIII. In the book, Galileo had a fool, Simplicio the simpleton, make the statement that the pope had ordered inserted into the manuscript to the effect that Galileo's theory about the tides does not prove that the Earth rotates on its axis. His enemies in the church were quick to jump on this as an attack against the church by saying that church doctrine had been put into the mouth of a simpleton. This so angered the pope that he ordered an investigation, and in August the Inquisition banned further publication of the work and ordered all extant copies burned.

Galileo, being so politically naive that it was becoming his hallmark, prevailed upon his protector, the duke of Tuscany, to object to the ban. However, the duke supported Spain, and Barberini had been elected with the support of the French Cardinals. Barberini saw the strongly worded objection as a chance to bolster his political position, and all it would cost him was his friendship with a brilliant but increasingly troublesome old man. This action released the brakes holding back the persecution of Galileo, and he was encouraged to recant under threat of burning at the stake He did so on on 22 Jun 1633 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
(see 1622)

By John Milton. A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England, Areopagitica is a prose work. It was published on this day at the height of the English Civil War. The work is titled after a speech written by the orator Isocrates in 5th Century B.C. Athens, which also supported freedom of speech. The British crown forbade all printing except by Royal permission in 1476; this prelicensing continued for nearly 200 years, eventually calling forth the Areopagitica, .... Although Milton was religious and a Parliamentarian, he used the book to argue against censorship, as Parliament had begun to restrict freedom of speech. Milton believed this would be damaging to the learning process. Areopagitica was delivered before parliament in 1644 and was published without license in defiance of a restraining ordinance. Areopagitica was condemned by Oliver Cromwell and the Parliament of Protestant England in 1644 for such sentences as: "And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good Booke... who destroys a good Booke, kills Reason itself, kills the Image of God as it were in the eye." Precensorship of the press was abolished in England in 1695 and never again enforced.
(see 1538)

by William Pynchon. A religious pamphlet, it dealt with the doctrine of atonement, which he wanted to clear "from some common errors." Printed in London, copies showed up in Massachussetts several months later. The Puritan authorities confiscated what they could and sought to have the work banned. The General Court complied willingly and condemned the work on 19 Oct. The material was put to the torch by the Public Executioner the next day in the Boston Marketplace. The incident has the distinction of being the first book burning in America.

By thirty citizens of Flushing, New Netherland. Since renamed New York, the then colony was under the authority of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who issued an order barring townspeople from harboring Quakers. Governor Stuyvesant was firmly resolved to maintain order and cohesion through outward religious conformity. His response to the Remonstrance was to arrest town officials who had signed the document, to abolish their government and replace it with his own government filled with appointees. The town clerk was banished and other signatories were forced to recant.

By Blaise Pascal. This work of the mathemetician and philosopher was ordered shredded and burned by Louis XIV.

The theatres of Britain reopened after having been closed by order of Oliver Cromwell.

By John Eliot (missionary). It was banned and ordered destroyed by the General Court of Massachusetts.

By Roger Morrice. This seventeenth century Puritan minister cum political journalist wrote a diary that was hailed in Aug 2003 as being as vivid as the diary of Samuel Pepys. The Entring Book covers the period of 1677 to 1691, inclusive. Part of the diary, however, was entered in code to protect both Rev. Morrice and his associates. Had the agents of King Charles II and then James II seen the entries in the clear, all parties would likely have enjoyed a quick trip to prison as it was illegal to send newsletters and information around the country at the time. About 40,000 words of the one million word work were encoded. Rev. Morrice, as a convinced Puritan, was extremely critical of what he saw as the moral laxity of Restoration England. Tunbridge Wells, for instance, a fashionable spa of the times that was patronised by royalty, was described as "the most debauched town in the kingdom".

By England. Up until this time Englishmen could still be arrested arbitrarily and imprisoned indefinitely.

He became the first printer known to have been arrested as part of a government-sponsored anti-porn movement. As today, "lascivious" or "obscene" books were among the most profitable during the 18th century (1701 - 1800). Indeed, writing styles being what they were then, it was often difficult to tell when a philosophical treatise was not obscene. Again: as today.

America's first colonial newspaper, it was published for only one day before British colonial authorities shut it down. The closure was because it had reported an item about the King of France having sex with his daughter-in-law.

Raising enough of a controversy that the licensing system was replaced with what became copyright. Up until this time, since the inception of the printing industry, printers supported government licensing because it maintained a stable commercial environment, and this was considered essential to the development of publishing.

By John Locke. At Oxford Univeristy, it was expressly forbidden to teach this work.

By Daniel Defoe. It was placed on the Index Librorum by the Spanish Catholic Church.

By James Franklin, brother to Benjamin. The paper was established in 1720 or '21. One of the pieces in the Courant, about some political issue, had apparently offended the Assembly, and James was arrested, censured, and imprisoned for it for a month by the Speaker's warrant. Benjamin believes it was "because he would not discover his author". Which I take to mean that James protected the confidentiality of his source. Benjamin himself was made to testify before the Assembly, though he was released even though he did not reveal the author of the offending piece either. He supposed it was because the Assembly allowed as to how he was an apprentice and bound to keep his master's secrets.

James's release from imprisonment was accompanied by an order of the House that, "James Franklin should no longer print the paper called the New England Courant."

After some discussion among James & company it was decided that the most ethical course of action was to allow the paper to be printed under the name of Benjamin Franklin instead.

[As near as I can tell this is the first instance in North America of a newspaper protecting the confidentiality of its sources. This is supposed to have been the second newspaper to appear in America, the first having been the Boston News-Letter, although Publick Occurances was published in 1690; however, perhaps it is not counted as it was closed after its first day of publication, so only one edition was printed. --MN]

By Lemuel Gulliver, better known as Jonathon Swift. Denounced upon publication as "wicked and obscene"; expurgated even in 20th-century college English texts.

By Benjamin Franklin. He established this German language newspaper in Germantown; now a part of Philadelphia. Franklin didn't speak German, but knew the settlers needed information. The paper was not successful and soon failed.

Editor-in-Chief John Peter Zenger. This colonial paper was started by a pair of New York lawyers who did most of the writing under pseudonyms. The paper was established specifically to examine and challenge the criminal conduct of the then Governor William Cosby. The first edition hit the streets on 05 November 1733. Under their stinging commentary, Cosby soon grew frustrated, and in '35 he had Zenger brought up on charges of publishing a false, scandalous, and seditious libel. The counsel for the defendant, Alexander Hamilton, imported from Philadelphia to get around courtroom politics, encouraged the jury to think for themselves and to find a verdict according to the dictates of their consciences. The judge ordered them to disregard most of Hamilton's fiery and inspiring rhetoric because it was not the law of New York. The jury acquitted Zenger after deliberating for ten minutes.

This case is especially important in the annals of the fight for free speech because it is from that decision that all subsequent freedoms of the press are derived today in the United States.
(see 1835; 01 Mar 2001; 25 Jul 2001)

By the famed German author Goethe. This book was published in this year and soon became popular throughout Europe. A short novel in diary form, it is about a young man writing of his sufferings from a failed love affair. The final chapter of the book drops the diary form and graphically depicts Werther's suicide. A number of copycat suicides followed publication, and the Lutheran church condemned the novel as immoral. After which, governments in Italy, Denmark, and Germany, banned the book.

Two hundred years later an American sociologist, David Phillips, wrote about the effect of reporting suicides generating copycat suicides in The Werther Effect. This, in turn, would generate debate in the field of journalism about reporting suicides at all.

By John Cleland. It was written in an effort to make enough money to get out of debtor's prison, which it did. It was banned in England from 1749 to 1821, and in the U.S. from 1749 to 1963.

A copy of the work can be found in electronic format at the The Gutenberg Project.

By Henry Fielding. This work of humour was banned in France.

Banned as an instrument of war in Britain.

By John Milton. It was listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

By Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson drafted this bill, heresy was a capital crime, Roman Catholics were barred from holding office, and free thinkers and Unitarians were subject to be declared unfit and could even have had their children removed from them. Most of these laws were rarely enforced but their existence was a reminder of what was possible under a state-church establishment. Passage of the statute was a great victory for "no establishment" as a core principle of religious freedom. Jefferson, in Paris at the time, wrote to Madison, "It is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions."
(see 16 Jan 2004)

By William Shakespeare. It was banned from the stage until 1820 -- in deference to the perceived insanity of the reigning monarch, King George III.

By France. This declaration was a rather revolutionary doctrine (no pun intended) because it embodied rights that were considered natural instead of something conferred by society or governments.

By Thomas Jefferson et al. On this day Congress ratified the ten constitutional amendments that had been passed by the thirteen former colonies in what was now the United States. These ten amendments became known as The Bill of Rights.

By Thomas Paine. In Part II of The Age of Reason, Paine wrote:

Conceiving, after this, that I had but a few days of liberty, I sat down and brought the work to a close as speedily as possible; and I had not finished it more than six hours, in the state it has since appeared, before a guard came there, about three in the morning, with an order signed by the two Committees of Public Safety and Surety General, for putting me in arrestation as a foreigner, and conveying me to the prison of the Luxembourg. I contrived, in my way there, to call on Joel Barlow, and I put the Manuscript of the work into his hands, as more safe than in my possession in prison; and not knowing what might be the fate in France either of the writer or the work, I addressed it to the protection of the citizens of the United States.

Under the direction of a man named Couthon, one of the most atrocious colleagues of Robespierre, the publication was apparently so effectually suppressed that no copy bearing the date of 1793 can be found in France or anywhere else. Paine was arrested for speaking out against the revolutionary attack against religion to implement state imposed atheism.

In this case, Paine applauded the revolutionary government's attack on "the divine right of kings", but opposed its methods. However, The Age of Reason was also censored in England for a time.

For more about this incident and the background for it, see Editor's Introduction to the Age of Reason, by Moncure D. Conway.
(see 24 Jun 1797)

By Camille Desmoulines. If I remember correctly it was critical of the Reign Of Terror that followed the French Revolution; in which 40,000 citizens were summarily executed in approximately one year. When Robespierre complained about the bad press, Desmoulines invited him to reply to the criticisms, whereupon Robespierre went around to the printing house and had an edition of the paper burned. When asked what he thought about this reply, Desmoulines said to Robespierre, "Burning is no answer."

By Thomas Paine. A pirated copy of his work had been spirited to England where it was published by H.D. Symonds on 25 Oct 1795. Symonds pandered to the better heeled folk and his pirate edition went for half a crown. When Paine found out he was incensed and worried that the work was full of errors. He sent a manuscript to be published in a less expensive fashion that would go for one shilling. This edition was published on 01 Jan 1796. It was this less expensive book which drew the attention of Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality. one Thomas Williams was convicted on this day of having sold a copy [one] of the "Age of Reason"; Williams also sold pious tracts. His imprisonment touched off a thirty year long movement for religious liberty.

Paine's critical review method excited more animosity than his deistical predecessors, apparently because he compelled the apologists to defend the biblical narratives in detail, and implicitly acknowledge the tribunal of reason and knowledge to which they were summoned thereby. As a result, England suppressed Paine's works and many an honest Englishman was sent to prison for printing and circulating The Age of Reason.

For more about this incident and the background for it, see Editor's Introduction to the Age of Reason, by Moncure D. Conway. The paragraph wherein he describes the callous brutishness of the "Christians" who had Williams prosecuted is particularly instructive. The total lack of compassion exhibited by the Society is still extent today.

[Personally, I tend to attribute the discriminatory censorship to a class prejudice. The high priced edition, meant for the gentry, had Paine's ideas in it, but the assumption most likely was that the gentry wouldn't be perverted into the immorality of freethinking whereas the common rabble would be. A fallacious assumption still extent to this day, particularly within various right-wings and ultra-conservative groups. --MN]
(see 28 Dec 1793)

By President John Adams. The U.S. government of the day was firmly under the control of the Federalist Party in the Senate, House of Representatives, and the White House. The Alien and Sedition Act was passed in the Senate on 04 Jul, reportedly to specifically associate it with patriotism. The House passed it on 10 Jul, and President Adams ratified it on this day. The Sedition Act made it a crime to write or publish "any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress ... or the President ... with intent to defame . . . or to bring them, or either of them, into cotempt or disrepute; or to excite against them or or any of them the hatred of the good people of the United States." Conviction could be punished by up to two years imprisonment and a fine of up to 2,000 dollars. The law was said to be needed to defend the country against incursion by the Jacobin Terror, stemming from the French Revolution of 1789.

Such protestations the the contrary, however, the Sedition Act was designed to suppress favorable commentary for Thomas Jefferson during the run up to the 1800 presidential elections. The act itself contained an expiry provision, dated 03 Mar, 1801; the day before the presidential inauguration. In the just over two and a half years it was in force, fourteen men were prosecuted under the act. Among them were the editors and owners of the leading pro-Jefferson newspapers:

• Philadelphia Aurora,
• Boston Independent Chronicle,
• New York Argus,
• Richmond Examiner.

John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist and former counsel to the President, wrote of the incident in a column reprinted at CommonDreams.org on 19 May 2006:

When war with France loomed on the horizon in 1789, public fear was widespread. But so was public criticism of going to war with France. Congress played on public fears and enacted the Sedition Act of 1789, making it a crime to utter or publish "false, scandalous, and malicious" statements against the federal government, including Congress or the President. President John Adams, in turn, signed the law and prosecuted Americans under it. (President Jefferson later pardoned those who were convicted.)

Adams's biographer, David McCullough, acknowledges that "fear of the enemy within" provoked the action, which President Adams insisted was a "war measure" - even though there was no war. McCullough observes that the law was "clearly a violation of the First Amendment," and Adams well knew it, since his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, so advised him. More to the point, McCullough says that the ulterior motive underlying the seditious libel law was the Federalist president and his Congressional supporters' desire to stifle their political opposition with the law, which they did. The law's stated requirement that a statement be false was described by its sponsors as a liberalizing reform of the common law of seditious libel, under which truth was no defense. In practice it made no difference as judges placed the burden of proof that the statements were true in all respects upon the accused, and the prosecutions were for expressions of opinion, which cannot be proven true.

President Thomas Jefferson pardoned everyone convicted under the act soon after he took office.

By Matthew Lyon. Vermont's fourth congressman, he was a Revolutionary War hero who fought with Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, and he was imprisoned for speaking his mind. He spent four months in jail and was fined $1,000 for the "crime" of writing a letter to the editor of a Vermont newspaper; in which letter he criticized President John Adams. His conviction was under the Sedition Act; a bitterly debated law that attempted to limit the constitutional right of free speech of the fledgling United States of America. Vemonters were so incensed by the treatment of their congressman that he became a national martyr, and angry voters re-elected him to a second term in 1798 while he was still in his prison cell. Then, cheering crowds lined the route of his carriage on his ride back to Washington D.C. Lyon campaigned for Thomas Jefferson, who became the nation's third president. The Sedition Act was not renewed, and Jefferson pardoned all those who were still in prison under the law. In Apr 2004, Rep. Bernie Sanders (Ind - Vermont), commented about the incident, "Matthew Lyon was one of the great heroes of the early days of America. He played a key role in our history at a moment when there was a real struggle about which direction the country would go. Would it be a democratic government where people could speak their minds or an authoritarian government where dissent was punishable? He helped save free speech for us all."

Vermont passed obscenity statutes targeting the French postcard trade.

Censored by Thomas Bowdler, working with his wife, son, daughters, and nephews. The Family Shakespeare, in eight volumes, exemplifies the larger effort by the Bowdler family to "clean up" the classics.

This form of censorship known as bowdlerization to this day. Bowdler still credited Shakespeare as the author of The Family Shakespeare. He said of the work in the subtitle: "nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." He also wrote in the preface that he had removed, "everything that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty". Some ten percent of the playwright's text.

[This date might be wrong. I have seen this incident placed in 1807 and in 1818 as well. --MN]
(see 1980)

By Victor Hugo. It was criticized for its anticlericalism and the Catholic Church placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1834. It remained there until 1948.

By Joseph Howe. As with the John Peter Zenger case of 100 years earlier, Howe was accused of a seditious libel when he publicized government corruption. In this case, he printed a letter signed The People, which alleged that magistrates and police had embezzled thirty thousand British pounds from the poverty stricken and distressed. He refused to identify the writer or recant. Under the law, he could not call witnesses or introduce evidence to prove the allegations. This incident took place at the dawning in British North America of the age of representative government. Howe himself was motivated primarily by a spirit of independence rather than one of high-minded journalistic principles. At his trial, he began his arguments by reminding the jurors by whom he was accused: "I know them, as you know them, to be the most negligent and imbecile, if not the most reprehensible body that ever mismanaged a people's affairs." In this statement, he set the tone of his remarks, and went on to speak for six hours without notes. His speech was a blend of high principle with sarcastic humour, and he described conditions of neglect so horrible one of the jurors broke down and cried. This oration has been called one of the greatest in the history of Canada, and when he came to an end, he spoke with ringing conviction, "Will you, my country men, permit the sacred fires of liberty, brought by our fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised? I conjure you ... to leave an unshackled press as a legacy to your children."

As in the Zenger case, the judge directed the jury to find Howe guilty. As in the Zenger case, the jury deliberated for ten minutes and Howe was acquitted.

A biographer wrote of the subsequent jubilation:

It was impossible for the bench to keep order. The excitement spread to the corridor, down the broad steps and out into Granville Street, and when Joe emerged the crowd swept down on him, shook his hand, hugged him, clapped him on the back, and some cried. Then, hoisting him on their shoulders, they bore him though the cheering, laughing crowd to his front door.

Joseph Howe had justified in Canada the libertarian principle that government serves the people, not the people, government.

By Elijah Parish Lovejoy. Mr. Lovejoy was a Presbyterian clergyman well known for his anti-slavery stance. He founded the St. Louis Observer which he often used to publish abolitionist polemics. Beset by pro-slavery protests, he moved across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois where he founded the Alton Observer. Even there, however, his equipment was destroyed a number of times by rioters. Including in 1837 when he was murdered by a mob while trying to stop them from destroying his printing press yet again. His death reverberated across the country and helped galvanize anti-slavery feelings.

By Flaubert. He was brought up on charges of indecency by the French government. This attempt to silence his work backfired and instead ensured his fame and established him firmly as an important author.

English Parliament updated an act that required all plays to be performed in England to be submitted for approval to the Lord Chamberlain. This power of censorship remained with the Lord Chamberlain until 1968. Despite objections by such illustrious figures as George Bernard Shaw.

In what is probably a perfect demonstration of what would happen in the event of antidisestablishmentarianism being implemented today, there were riots in Philadelphia after Catholics asked the school board to allow Catholic students to read from Catholic Bibles rather than the King James Bible.

[I assume that the riots stemmed from the catholics being told, "No." --MN]

[Addendum (10 Dec 2002): Oops. No, it wasn't. The rioting was by protestants and stemmed from the question of religious tolerance raising its head at all. To quote from the About.com web site:

Sometimes, their wishes were respected - the superintendent of public schools in New York City decided that prayers could no longer be mandatory. Sadly, Catholics were rarely so well received. The bishop in New York City was forced to post armed guards outside of Catholic churches to stop vandalism. In other cities, the violence was worse. When Philadelphia's board of education voted in 1843 to allow Catholic children to be excused from religious exercises and Bible readings, Protestants rioted. Catholic churches and the homes of Catholic families were burned. Thirteen people were mercilessly killed.

This incident is part of a very little known piece of U.S. history called the Bible Wars. --MN]
(see 1859)

By Charles Darwin. Actually a case of self-censorship. Darwin had completely outlined his 230 page essay by 1844, but then very happily put it away in a desk drawer with instructions that it was to be published in the event of his death. One theory often put forward for the delay in publication was that Darwin was frequently ill; which he was. Never so ill, however, that he could not find the time in the interim to correspond extensively with other scientists, father ten children, write and publish a few others books such as a journal of the voyage of the Beagle and an account of his theory on coral reefs, a treastise on volcanoes, and another one on the geology of South America; and a masterful study of barnacles that consumed seven years and left him with a hatred for the little beasts.

It is much more likely that he did not publish the book sooner than he did simply because he feared the storm of opposition he knew the work would provoke. He was an overly gentle soul and mightily disinclined to disputation, and he knew that his work would draw fire not only from the clergy but from his fellow scientists as well. In point of fact, he told his friend Joseph Hooker that to promote his theory would be likened to an act of murder; and it was to be called The Murder of Adam. Against these forces, Darwin would have to defend a theory he knew to be incomplete. Neither he nor anyone else understood the micromechanism of heredity. At the time, the gene was yet to be discovered.

Quite simply, Darwin, puttering about happily in his garden with wormstones and petunias, did not look forward to a day when a thousand county parsons would turn his name into a synonym for the anti-Christ. He finally had to publish when another scientist developed the same hypothesis independently.
(see 1859)

When this opera premiered in Paris, at the beginning of the aria called "Oh God, Kill Him!", a member of the opera company fell dead. At the same point in the production on the second night, a member of the audience died. When the orchestra leader fell dead at the third performance, Emperor Napoleon III banned the opera for good.

By Nathaniel Hawthorne. This book was published in this year. As a result of Hawthorne's treatment of Hester Prynne, he was effectively run out of town by the outraged citizenry of Salem, Massachussetts, and he moved his family to the relative serenity of the Berkshires.

[Obviously the people of Salem hadn't learned anything since the witchcraze of 1692. --MN]
(see 1852; 1966; 1977)

By Verdi. The censors of Venice required that Verdi change the setting for the play, and that one of the characters be demoted from king to a lesser noble. This was to avoid having any potential assassin gain inspiration from the opera and attempt to murder the king. The opera was about a jester named Triboulet in the French court of Francis I. The main character was renamed to Rigoletto and the king demoted to Duke; the one who sings La Donna e Mobile.
(see 1859)

By Ivan Turgenev. This work wasn't banned, however; Turgenev managed to sneak it past the censors. Dorothy Bryant describes the incident thusly in her book Literary Lynching:

At the same time, his stories were published as a book titled A Sportsman's Sketches. He emerged from house arrest at Spasskoye to find himself a literary and political hero. This collection of low-keyed slices of life set against his beloved rural landscape was such an effective attack on serfdom that it was considered a major force in bringing about the Act of Emancipation ten years later.

How did he get these stories past the censor? By developing an objective style, far ahead of his times, free of the authorial comments that were a feature of 19th century writing. (Edmund Wilson called it "the noncommittal which is none the less committal." Hemingway advised beginning writers to read Turgenev, whose writing had inspired his own famously deadpan style.) Censors are not noted for their sensitivity to literary nuance. In presenting people, actions, words, and gestures without editorializing -- for instance, a landowner beating a serf -- Turgenev had persuaded nearly everyone of the evils of serfdom. There was uneasiness in high places, but all factions among the liberals and radicals loved the book.

[Man, I have to admit that I laughed out loud when I read that line, Censors are not noted for their sensitivity to literary nuance. Boy-howdy! -- but truer words were never spoken. --MN]

By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Censored for its earliest readers because the author sided with Hester Prynne rather than her husband, it was banned in Russia in 1852 by Nicholas I, during the 'censorship terror'.
(see 1850; 1966; 1977)

By Harriet Beecher Stowe. Originally meant to be published in serial form of three of four installments, this work dragged out for almost a year's worth of issues in the National Era anti-slavery magazine, starting in June 1851. The serial so captured the imagination of readers, however, that it came out in book form even before the last installment. Sales quickly skyrocketed to astounding numbers: a 5,000 copy first run was printed, of which 3,000 sold on the day of release, and the remaining 2,000 on the second day of sales; within a week, 10,000 copies had been sold, and 300,000 went in the U.S. alone by the end of the first year; eight powered presses ran day and night, three paper mills tried to keep up with the demand for paper, and still the publisher was thousands of copies behind in his orders. Supposedly the book was read by every reasonably literate person in the country. Overseas sales were even more astounding.

In the beginning, the book circulated freely in the Confederate States of America, but a storm of anger soon arose. Ms. Stowe's name was soon bracketed that of Satan, newspapers printed savage critiques meant to expose errors and fallacies, and thousands of piece of hate mail arrived for Ms. Stowe, and possession of the book became dangerous in the South. For more background about this book and its impact upon the world and times, read: Books That Changed The World, Robert B Downs, 1956.

By Benjamin Jowett. The legendary erudition of this Oxford academic is immortalized in a famous Balliol College masque's quatrain: "First come I; my name is Jowett. There's no knowledge but I know it. I am the master of this college; What I don't know isn't knowledge." Yet, when he published his interpretation, he was accused of heresy and his salary was frozen.

Invented by the British this year.

By Hinton Rowan Helper. It became a symbol of abolition in the North. A shorter (two hundred page) compendium was released for consumption in the Southern states. Distributers in the slave states were arrested and heavily fined. In South Carolina, Harrold Wyllis was arrested, and then threatened on the floor of the Capital with hanging, by Congressmen (outcome unknown). In Arkansas, three men were hanged -- for possessing the book.

By Charles Darwin. When this book was finally published, it was banned from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Darwin had been a student. The Origin of Species was banned in Yugoslavia in 1935 and in Greece in 1937.
(see 1844)

By Verdi. This time, this Verdi opera was ordered changed by French censors. A Masked Ball is about the assassination of Carl Gustav III of Sweden. He was mortally wounded at a midnight masquerade ball on March 16, 1792. Just before the debut of A Masked Ball, Napoleon III had had an attempt made on his life. The censors demanded that the victim be of lesser nobility and that the setting also be changed. Verdi responded to these demands by moving the setting from Sweden to colonial Boston, and the king became Riccardo, a never-existent governor.
(see 1851)

By George Eliot. This novel was attacked as the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind". It was withdrawn from circulation libraries in Britain.

By Tom Wall. A catholic student in the protestant-establishment run public school system, Boston, Massachussetts. At the age of 11 years, he was required to read in class the ten commandments from the protestant King James version of the bible, a violation of his catholicism. He refused and the teacher beat him until he gave in. The teacher was taken to court but all charges were dropped. This was the "equality" of the American, Protestant-dominated court system.
(see 1844)

By Edouard Manet. When displayed in Salon des Refusés it met with a burst of indignation. According to Gabriel Séailles, the anger was generated not by "either the subject or its realism, but the new technique, which ran counter to all preconceived ideas of art and all the theories of the schools. Basically, Manet was being excoriated for being a pioneer. It was apparently rather startling to the traditionalists that a nude woman was a recognizable model sitting with two art students, rather than a generic nymph."

[Luncheon On The Grass is a portrait of two couples picnicing, with a lake in the background. The two male students are fully dressed, while one of the women, the one seated next to the men, is wearing some kind of flimsy bath wear. A negligee type thing that women commonly wore in the bath so as not to catch a cold. The other woman is bathing in the pond; she is completely nude. --MN]
(see 1865)

By Victor Hugo. This novel was placed on the Index Librorum until 1959.

By Edouard Manet. At the 1865 Salon. Edmond Bazire apparently wrote of the incident, "sticks and umbrellas were brandished in the face of this awakening beauty. Crowds formed which the army could not disperse. The authorities were so alarmed that they set two guards in gold braid to mount guard over her. But even that was not enough! When as usual the exhibition was rearranged, they placed her offending nakedness so high that neither demonstrations of anger nor the eye could reach her."

[Olympia is the portrait of a courtesan who is lieing on her bed and staring out of the painting directly into the eyes of the viewer. Although she wears some accouterments this is a full frontal nude. Behind her, her negro maidservant is holding up a housecoat for Madam to slip into when she gets out of bed. On the foot of the bed is a black cat. According to one opinion on the piece, what stirred up such passions wasn't the nudity so much as the invitational come-hither look in the subject's eyes. As with Luncheon, Manet used a model who posed for him fairly often, and made her recognizable in the portrait. --MN]
(see 1863)

Singing pro-Confederate songs was prohibited in the former confederate states.

By José Rizal. First published in 1887, this novel was branded "heretical" and "subversive" by a special jury of the Royal and Pontifical (Dominican) University of Santo Tomas and banned by the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines. Rizal was later executed by the Spanish primarily for having written the book.

By Walt Whitman. This volume of 12 poems was criticised because of the author's exaltation of the body and sexual love and also because of its verse form. It was withdrawn in Boston because the District Attorney had threatened criminal prosecution due to the use of explicit language in the poems.

The public uproar over the action generated so many sales of his books that Whitman was able to buy a house with the proceeds.
(see the following entry)

By Henrik Ibsen. Published in Copenhagen this year in an edition of 10,000 copies, it caused a storm of horror and anger such as Ibsen had never before experienced. It was loudly denounced as nihilism, an attack on the values of the church, a defence of free love, and a violation of such taboos as incest and syphilis. Ghosts was sent to a number of theatres in Scandinavia, but they all turned down the play. The outcry affected sales of the book and large quantities of unsold copies were returned to the publisher. The owners of bookshops were ashamed to have the book on their shelves, and it was not until 1894 that a fresh edition was needed.
(see 1890; 1892; 1939)

By Walt Whitman. Banned quickly and decisively by the Watch and Ward Society of Boston.

[The '81 and '82 actions seem to have been separate albeit related. The first to have it expurgated under threat of withdrawl from circulation, and the second to have it banned outright. --MN]

[Addendum (27 Feb 2003): Perhaps the banning was not so quick as all that, and as I surmised above, the '81 and '82 actions were related. There is a .GIF of the 22 May 1882 New York Times article about the banning of Leaves of Grass. It gives a brief outline of the then ongoing challenge to the work. This .GIF is available by the grace of the Mount Holyoke College Library web page about erotica. --MN]

By Mark Twain. Starting a long tradition that persists to this day; the book was banned by the public library of Concord, Massachussetts, which found it coarse, crude, and inelegant. "Trash suitable only for the slums" was the view. Twain actually rejoiced because he knew the Puritan treatment would only boost sales elsewhere. Also a lesson the censorship advocates have yet to learn to this day.

[The explusion of Huckleberry Finn from that library resulted in 50,000 sales in two months. Twain figured it would only get him an extra 25,000. Also see the entry for Martin Luther's German Psalter, 1624 --MN]
(see 1905; 1957; 1984; 1994; 1995)

By Thomas Hardy. There was some consternation when this book was published and the vilification of it -- which began within a couple of days of publication and spread from England to America by cablegram -- far outstripped the complaints about Tess Of The D'Urbervilles. One Bishop, W.W. How, Bishop of Wakefield, wrote in a letter to the newspapers that he had thrown his volume into the fire and burned it. Hardy read this news with some scepticism, as it was the height of the summer and fires were not then in abundance, and because it is not so easy to burn a thick book. However, How also wrote to his Member Of Parliament, and the book was quietly removed from the library, and a promise was made that further work by Hardy would be diligently scrutinized. Hardy never found out about that action.

By Henrik Ibsen. Ghosts was banned in St. Petersburg on religious grounds. The ban was lifted in 1958.
(see 1881; 1892; 1939)

By school principal Mortimer Warren. This modest book of sex instruction was banned in Boston and Warren lost his job.

By Ida B. Wells. As a journalist and part owner of The Memphis Free Speech she penned a scathing editorial that defended several black men that she felt had been wrongly accused of raping white women. After the editorial was printed the newspaper's office was attacked and the equipment destroyed. Ms. Wells was in Philadelphia at the time but the mob left a note telling her to not return to Memphis. Ms. Wells did not return but did continue her crusade against lynching. She later became a founding member of the NAACP.

By Henrik Ibsen. In England the Lord Chamberlain refused the application for a printing licence. The ban in England was removed by the Lord Chamberlain only in 1915.
(see 1881; 1890; 1939)

By May Irwin and John C. Rice. A year after the first cinegraphic presentation by the Lumière brothers, in Paris, a fifty foot long strip of film showing a scene from the broadway play The Widow Jones excited controversy and moral outrage in the United States. Journalists called for the banning of the scene in which the actors share a gentle kiss. This clip, produced by Thomas Edison, became known as The Kiss. The editor of the Chigaco literary magazine The Chap Book, Herbert Stone, wrote of the scene:

When only life sized it was pronounced beastly. But that was nothing compared to the present sight. Magnified to Gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting. All delicacy or remnant of charm seems gone from Miss Irwin, and the performance comes near to being indecent in its emphasized vulgarity. Such things call for police interference.

By politicians in New York State. Those who were part of a Tweed-like machine and who didn't like insulting drawings of themselves being published tried to make it a major offense to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians. They spent months trying to get a bill passed to make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. The movement failed.

By Emile Zola. On this day Emile Zola's open letter to French President Felix Faure, regarding the Dreyfus Affair, was published on the front page of the Paris daily L'Aurore. He risked his career and even his life. "J'accuse" accused the French government of anti-Semitism and of wrongfully placing Alfred Dreyfus in jail; the newspaper was run by Ernest Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, who decided that the controversial story would be in the open letter format. On 07 Feb, Emile Zola was brought to trial for libel and was convicted on 23 Feb. He declared that the conviction and transportation of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island came after a false accusation of espionage and was a miscarriage of justice. The case had divided France deeply between the reactionary army and church, and the more liberal commercial society. The ramifications continued for so long that on the centenary of publication of J'Accuse, France's Roman Catholic daily paper, La Croix, apologized for its anti-Semitic editorials during the Dreyfus Affair.

By Kate Chopin. Published in April of that year, it received only one favourable review and a number of unfavourable reviews. In June, however, there came a series of scathing reviews in newspapers across the U.S. There is some question as to whether or not the work was really ever withdrawn from any library. According to Dorothy Bryant in her examination of Kate Chopin and The Awakening in Literary Lynching, the book was never officially removed, but that there are many ways to effect covert censorship. Ms. Bryant admits that she sides with Biographer Per Seyerstad and maintains that the work was censored covertly. What is key to this incident, however, is that the bad reviews seemed to work the way they were intended to for once. Ordinarily, such an attack will drive up sales of the challenged work (see 1624, 1840, and 1885 for three such cases), but The Awakening was apparently buried as a result of this challenge. The cause, asserts Ms. Bryant, is that the reviews did not use such language as "indecent", that would titillate prospective readers, but rather left the public with the impression that the work was arty, but depressing; and therefore: boring. As a result, sales flagged.

[I would hesitate to call this one a case of censorship myself. While a literary lynching is indisputably the end result of the bad reviews, a censorship challenge, to my way of thinking, is a deliberate action. For the poor sales of The Awakening to have been the result of censorship, one must, I believe, assume collusion among the reviewers. Even though this was the age of the telegraph, wire services were certainly not as extensive then as they are now, if existent at all, and ownership of widely located newspapers was not as concentrated then as now. The cases Ms. Bryant cites about Turgenev and Hardy, for instance, certainly were the result of concerted and collusive efforts, however, she does not draw the connections between the various bad reviews in this incident that she did with the incident in which Orwell's Homage To Barcelona was attacked. Mind you, it is not unlikely that the newspapers might have cablegrammed each other in a spirit of "professional courtesy". Consider the incident against Thomas Hardy in 1886 when a challenge to Jude the Obscure leapt the Atlantic overnight.

Still, Ms. Bryant's definition of literary lynching comprises a spontaneous attack against a work.

Also, the ramifications of this literary lynching do not stop with The Awakening. In a near perfect demonstration {Well, if you're a writer and understand these things} of how censorship stifles the creative spirit, Kate Chopin basically pined away after a later manuscript was rejected without comment. She apparently wrote no more, selling only a few backlogged short stories. I heartily recommend the chapter on Kate Chopin by Ms. Bryant, accessible through the link above. Also, if one doubts the rationale offered for the challenge to The Awakening, cross reference her analysis with Heinlein's remarks about the reaction to Lady Chatterly's Lover. --MN]