Bureaucracy -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
Another improper subject, naturally, was Liberty. That needs no
explanation; it has always been improper in well-regulated countries,
like Eugenics, or the Poor, and has received no encouragement from
authority. Notwithstanding this, so many improper works upon it, in
every conceivable form, have always been produced, that the censors had
to engage a special clerk, who had just obtained a first class in
English Literature at Oxford, and who therefore had books and pamphlets
of all dates fresh in her memory, to check their researches and inform
them when their energies were superfluous. Not that all the books of
former centuries on this topic were to be encouraged, for, after all,
one period is in some respects singularly like another, and the same
reflections strangely germane to both. Naturally, therefore, when the
literary clerk, seeing advertised a new and cheap edition of Robert
Hall's "Sentiments proper to the present crisis," and, remembering the
trend of this work, sent for it (having sold her own copy at Blackwell's
when she went down), and read such remarks as "Freedom, driven from
every spot on the continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
always chose for her favourite abode, but she is pursued even here and
threatened with destruction.... It is for you to decide whether this
freedom shall yet survive, or be clothed with a funeral pall and be
wrapped in eternal gloom"--very properly she reported the matter to
headquarters, and the cheap edition was called in.
Equally naturally there perished (without the help of the literary
clerk, who was not asked to judge of twentieth century literature)
various collections of Free Verse, for which the Poetry Bookshop was
successfully raided, a tract of the sort which is dropped about trains,
published by the Evangelical Tract Society and called "Throw off your
Chains!", "Citizens of a Free City," which was found at Mowbray's, and
bore on its title page the statement "Jerusalem ... is free" (a manifest
and seditious untruth, as we, of course, held Jerusalem, in trust for
the Jews), and many others of like tendency, such as works on Free Food,
Free Drink, Free Housing, Free Love, Free Thought, and Labour, in
Chains. Even fiction was suspect. A novel entitled _The Dangers of
Dora_, by the well-known author of _The Perils of Pauline_ and _The
Exploits of Elaine_, was suppressed, in spite of what should have been
the reassuring fact that Dora, like Pauline and Elaine before her,
triumphantly worsted all her foes in the end, and emerged smiling and
safe on the last page. Publishers were known to demand the alteration of
a title if the name Dora occurred in it, such wholesome respect did the
Censor's methods inspire.
It will therefore be readily understood that even government departments
had to go warily in this matter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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