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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Non-Fiction of Gay Interest
Content: "In the wake of the 'Oz' Trial and of other actions against literary freedom (or against permissiveness, depending on one's point of view), Arthur Calder-Marshall's book is exceptionally timely and interesting. It is a series of pen portraits of the men who in the nineteenth century helped to establish those rights which we have, until recently, perhaps tended to take for granted: freedom of publication and, in general, freedom to hold and express unpopular views. "The cases which Arthur Calder-Marshall cites span almost the whole of the nineteenth century, ranging from William Home's [sic - name is Hone] indictment for blasphemy shortly after the Napoleonic Wars to Havelock Ellis's condemnation without trial for 'uttering a filthy, bawdy and obscene libel, to wit Sexual Inversion'. In between, the stories are told of the revolutionary Paineite Richard Carlile, the allegedly blasphemous George Holyoake and that self-conscious martyr George William Foote. All these trials, while ostensibly dealing with charges of obscenity and blasphemy, were in fact politically motivated. And wherever a case was defended, even though the defendant might go to jail, the offence was later repeated with impunity." (from the jacket) Background / Biography: "Arthur Calder-Marshall, born in 1908, was educated at St Paul's School and Hertford College, Oxford. His best-known novels are About Levy, Dead Centre, Pie in the Sky and The Scarlet Boy. He has written an autobiographical memoir of Aleister Crowley and his circle, The Magic of My Youth, and biographies of such diverse characters as Vice-Admiral the Rev Ryall Wadham Woods (No Earthly Command), 'Father Ignatius' (The Enthusiast), and the author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Havelock Ellis). It was his interest in Ellis which led him into the detailed investigation of the Bedborough Trial, and further to a more detailed study of nineteenth-century secular martyrdom, its motives, mechanics and results, as exemplified in Lewd, Blasphemous and Obscene." (from the jacket) Reviews: Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
"The seed for Lewd, Blasphemous and Obscene was sown in 1925, when as a schoolboy of seventeen I first read Havelock Ellis's The Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a comprehensive, humourless and depressing compendium of sexual behaviour, which would never have been brought to my notice if the first volume had not been indicted in 1897 as 'a certain, lewd, wicked, bawdy, scandalous and obscene libel'. For over thirty years Havelock Ellis remained high in my list of secular martyrs to reactionary oppression. It was not till I wrote my Life of Havelock Ellis (1959) that I saw the case was more complicated than I had imagined and that the prosecution had been been brought not on moral but unstated political grounds." from p13-14, Foreword: Calder-Marshall's biography of Havelock Ellis is available here Secondhand booksellers |
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