Next
Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 24 Aug 2023

Taken: 23 Aug 2023

0 favorites     1 comment    14 visits

See also...

Keywords

275 •
Image/Excerpt •
Dominion •
Author •
Peter Ackroyd •

Authorizations, license

Visible by: Everyone
All rights reserved
14 visits

Anne Besant

Anne Besant
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12085/pg12085-images.html
Translate into English
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
One of the most notable challengers, however, was Annie Besant. In 1877 she and Charles Bradiaugh en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bradlaugh were prosecuted under the Obscene Publication Act which had been passed twenty years before. Both of them might be described as professional agitators who delighted in turning the law and the world on its head. Bradlaugh was a professed atheist who would soon provoke uproar in the House of commons, while Besant gained national prominence as a supporter of female workers. . . .

Besant and Bradlaugh established a publishing company, one of whose first pamphlets ‘The Fruits of Philosophy’, was prosecuted as an obscene publication. It was a treatise on the methods and virtues of birth control, a subject hither so mysterious that 133,000 copies were sold between March and June 1887

An excerpt from the transcript of the trial may be illuminating:

SOLICITOR GENERAL: . . . . . . . . .

ANNE BESANT: Do you, gentlemen, think for one moment tha myself and my co-defendant are fighting the simple question of the sale or publication of this sixpenny volume of Dr. Knowltons?. . . .We have a much larger interest at stake, and one of vital interest to the public, one which we shall spend our whole lives in trying to uphold. . . there is no harm in gratifying the sexual instinct if it can be gratified without injury to anyone else, and without harm to morals of society. . . .

The name of Malthus was brought into the proceedings as testimony to the fact that the population was growing too rapidly and should be curtailed.

She then turned to the other Victorian misery, early death. She stated that the death rate in Manchester was 117 in 1,000, and in Liverpool it rose to 132 in 1,000

The prospect here was of early death. Another practice was of ‘overlying’ children, or in other words pressing them or suffocating them o death. . . . . Beasant then cited John Stuart Mill’s ‘Principles of Political Economy’ on the need for ‘plain language,’ especially when Mill ‘pressed on all those who marry the duty of limiting their families’.. . . . .

Besant and Bradlaugh were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and then deemed not guilty on appeal. There is a mingling here of Low Church piety, mid-century moralism, social prejudice and sexual h(8/29/2023)ypocrisy which seem to be thoroughly Victorian. ~ Page 282 / 284 (Excerpts only) ~ 8/29/2023
9 months ago. Edited 9 months ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.