During the later nineteenth century middle class society was obsessed with righteousness and ill at ease with modernist art. Whilst the writer depicted the bourgeois as a malicious fool (le père Ubu is the ultimate caricature in a tradition going back as far as Balzac’s César Birotteau), the upright citizen fought back by taking the artist to court and making him pay for his ‘immoralities’.
Rejecting much of contemporary written and visual art, opponents argued that vicious doctrines vitiate the mind of the young, indecent pictures befoul their imagination, explicit books deprave their character. Goethe had no hesitation in stressing that the young can read without risk, but alarmists disagreed. They warned parents to protect their children against the treacherous power of fine sounding words and alluring imagery.
The battle between writer and censor has raged for centuries throughout Europe. It was a conflict in which the latter long held the upper hand. The French Revolution acknowledged the communication of ideas as a fundamental human right. Every citizen shall be free to speak, write, or print. The reality of these freedoms was continuously undermined – even in France. Political censorship was not abandoned.
The censor was supposed to uphold the moral fibre of the nation too. In Britain, the Walpole Government passed a law in 1739 which handed the Lord Chamberlain the authority to oversee public performances. Unlicensed productions were punished by closure of the theatre and imprisonment of its actors.
This power was extended by the 1843 Theatres Act. Works by Dumas and Ibsen were refused licenses, as was Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Even The Mikado had its permit temporarily withdrawn on the occasion of a visit by the Japanese Crown Prince in 1907. Before 1968, theatres were prevented from staging any play that mentioned homosexuality, venereal disease, or birth control. In that year, a new Theatres Act was passed that removed the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing power. Plays were left subject to scrutiny under obscenity laws only.
Sigmund Freud’s thinking on sexuality had a liberating influence upon literature. In parallel with the demand for modernity rose the emancipation movement. In 1928 Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness. The fact that the novel portrayed lesbianism as ‘natural’ outraged both critics and readers. Although without direct sexual references, a British court judged the novel obscene as it defended ‘unnatural practices between women’. Publicity over the legal battle increased the visibility of lesbians in society.
Charles [Carl] Lahr was born in 1885 at Bad Nauheim, Rhineland, into a farming family. A political agitator, he fled Germany in 1905 to avoid military service and went to England. In London he encountered the anarchist Guy Aldred, founder of the Bakunin Press. During Kaiser Wilhelm’s state visit to London in 1907, Lahr was bundled out of a restaurant on Leman Street for yelling out that the bastard should be shot. He remained under police suspicion. After the declaration of war in 1914, he spent four years of internment in Alexandra Palace alongside hundreds of other ‘enemy aliens’.
In 1921 Lahr took over the Progressive Bookshop at no. 68 Red Lion Street, Holborn, which he ran with his wife Esther Archer. Their tiny outlet may have shared the ground floor of an eighteenth-century building with a jumble shop, but it played a cameo role in countless literary memoirs of the twenties and thirties.
In addition, Charles and Esther set up the Blue Moon Press, publishing small editions of short stories. They taunted the inter-war censor with pamphlets on The Benefits, Moral and Secular, of Assassination, and with James Hanley’s the homo-erotic fiction. The couple also produced a literary magazine named New Coterie (Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence were amongst its contributors).
Lahr took the risk of distributing the first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published in 1928 by the Italian bookseller Pino Orioli). Banned in Britain and America, dispatch of the novel proved difficult, and copies were scarce. This created a vacuum that was filled with pirate editions.
Lawrence decided to produce a cheap edition of Lady Chatterley to undercut the illicit trade, but he was unable to find a publisher prepared to brave the censor. Victor Gollancz was interested, but would only consider an expurgated manuscript. Lawrence refused. The novelist finally found a publisher in the intriguing figure of Edward William Titus, a Polish-born American who was married to the cosmetics giant Helena Rubinstein and owned the Montparnasse rare bookstore ‘At the Sign of the Black Manikin’ (opened in 1924) and was founder of the Black Manikin Press. Titus brought out a cheap, paper-bound edition of Lady Chatterleyin May 1929.
In London, Lahr continued as a clandestine distributor of the novel, agreeing to take 200 copies of the paperback. By March 1930 D.H. Lawrence was dead. That year, the first London edition of Lady Chatterley was produced in a basement workshop near Euston Station. There were 500 copies in all, each bearing a false Florentine imprint: ‘the Tipografia Guintina, directed by L. Franceschini’.
Following the controversy surrounding Lady Chatterley, postal workers acting under instruction from Scotland Yard opened a registered parcel sent by Lawrence from Florence to his literary agent Curtis Brown in London. The package contained two typescripts of Pansies, the last book of poems Lawrence saw published in his lifetime. It was confiscated on grounds of indecency.
Even though abridged versions were circulated by Martin Secker in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York (in July and September 1929 respectively), Lawrence promptly produced a fuller version. The typescript was smuggled through English customs by Welsh novelist Rhys Davies. Printed in August 1929 by P.R. Stephenson of no. 41 Museum Street, London, an uncut edition of the book was published privately for an audience of 500 subscribers by Charles Lahr.
The Obscene Publications Act was passed in 1959. The bill intended to strengthen the law concerning hard-core material and divided such publications into the two categories of pornography and literature. It was left to a jury to decide whether a printed document (as a whole) had sufficient redeeming merit as literature to sanction its preservation.
The first test of the new Act was the Lady Chatterley trial. The prosecution failed. A less repressive regime was imminent. A mature society would no longer accept random censorship by the authorities. Following the dramatic court case, Penguin won the right to publish the novel in its entirety in October 1960. The first run of 200,000 copies was sold out on the first day of publication.
Exile is a double-edged experience. James Joyce and Ezra Pound stressed the intellectual necessity of being abroad, presenting exile as a vehicle for individuality and liberation. For others, exile was a bitter and frustrating experience. In his career Charles Lahr went through the whole gamut of emotions. He started his career in London as an ‘outsider’ with the courage to take on the authorities as a publisher and bookseller, but his later years were dark. By the 1930s he found himself in financial difficulties. Friends gathered a collection of stories together on his behalf, published in 1933 as Charles Wain, but his problems deepened.
In 1935, Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road reported theft from its stock. The thieves were caught and they claimed to have sold on the stolen books to the Progressive Bookshop. Lahr was arrested. Threatened with deportation to Germany – a terrifying prospect for a denaturalised citizen with a Jewish wife – he confessed and spent six months in Wandsworth Prison. His bookshop was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1941. He ended up selling books for the Independent Labour Party at King’s Cross. Lahr died in London in 1971 – an immigrant martyr for the freedom of expression.
Jaap Harskamp, PhD at Amsterdam University (Comparative Literature), Researcher at European University Institute (Florence), Curator Dutch & Flemish Collections at British Library (retired), Researcher at Cambridge UL. His work has been published by the Wellcome Institute, British Library, and Brill. He writes a weekly blog for the New York Almanack at
On Books, Streets & Migrant Footprints 