Virginia Woolf, The ‘Censorship’ of Books (1929)

This essay by Woolf was published in the journal Nineteenth Century and After (April 1929) as part of a symposium on censorship.

As the law stands at present, a police magistrate has the right to destroy as obscene any book which he thinks likely to corrupt the mind of any reader who is liable to be corrupted. If it is advisable to entrust anyone with such power – of which I am doubtful – obviously the time has come when the nature of what is corrupting and thus destroyable must be more clearly defined. Nor is it difficult to suggest what lines that definition should follow. There can be no doubt that books fall, in respect of indecency, into two classes. There are books written, published and sold with the object of causing pleasure or corruption by means of their indecency. There is no difficulty in finding where they are to be bought, nor in buying them when found. There are others whose indecency is not the object of the book, but incidental to some other purpose – scientific, social, aesthetic – on the writer’s part. The police magistrate’s power should be definitely limited to the suppression of books which are sold as pornography to people who seek out and enjoy pornography. The others should be left alone. Any man or woman of average intelligence and culture knows the difference between the two kinds of book and has no difficulty in distinguishing one from the other. 

No can any reasonable person doubt, after watching the law as it stands at work, that it causes more harm than it prevents. The average citizen is nowadays certainly a reader and quite frequently a writer. In both capacities he is injured, annoyed, and possibly corrupted, by the censorship as exercised at present. Nothing can be more insulting to his intelligence and exciting to his curiosity than to be told there is a book that he must not read because in the opinion of somebody else it would corrupt him to do so. As was amply proved last autumn (1), prohibition often serves only to stimulate the appetite. Discussion is roused where there would have been indifference; knowledge is sought where there would have been ignorance. The vice in question becomes a topic of conversation, and young people are made to think it attractive because it is fashionable and forbidden. 

Even more serious is the effect upon the writer. The police magistrate's opinion is so incalculable – he lets pass so much that seems noxious and pounces upon so much that seems innocent – that even the writer whose record is hitherto unblemished is uncertain what may or may not be judged obscene, and hesitates in fear and suspicion. What he is about to write may seem to him perfectly innocent – it may be essential to his book; yet, he has to ask himself, what will the police magistrate say? And not only what will the police magistrate say, but what will the printer say and what will the publishers say? For both printer and publisher will be trying, uneasily and anxiously, to anticipate the verdict of the police magistrate and will naturally bring pressure to bear upon the writer to put them beyond the reach of the law. He will be asked to weaken, to soften, to omit. Such hesitation and suspense are fatal to freedom of mind, and freedom of mind is essential to good literature. Moreover, if modern books become so insipid, so blameless, so full of blank spaces and evasions that we cannot read them, we shall be driven to read the classics, where obscenity abounds. 

For these reasons I think it desirable that the law should distinguish clearly between books that are written or sold for pornographic purposes and books whose obscenity is an incidental part of them – between Aristotle’s works as they are sold in the rubber goods shops, that is to say, and Aristotle's works as they are sold in the shops of Messrs Hatchard and Bumpus. (2)

Notes

(1) Woolf is referring to the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness, in 1928.

(2) Respectable bookshops in central London

Beth Daugherty will discuss this essay in her lecture on Woolf’s Essays in our current Woolf Season. Saturday 6 April 2024.