Categorical Censorship: Young Adult Fiction as the Guardian of Heteronormativity | Jane Armstrong

Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Jane Armstrong The cause celebre in censorship in the l920s in England was the banning of Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Its trial in 1928 has been described by one commentator as ‘perhaps the most famous in the history of British censorship law’. The notoriety surrounding the case overshadowed the banning of another novel, also by a female author, in the following year. This was Norah James’ Sleeveless Errand, published in 1929 by the Scholartis Press, run by expatriate ANZAC and later noted lexicographer, Eric Partridge. Unlike The Well of Loneliness, which at least had a run in the shops before being withdrawn, all of the stock of Sleeveless Errand was seized during a raid on the offices of the Scholartis Press the day after publication. Only a few copies escaped confiscation. In a court case a few weeks later, the presiding magistrate ordered that all remaining copies were to be pulped. The novel was banned ostensibly because of its overuse of profanities. It is more likely, however, that its censoring was due to its portrayal of dissolute bohemian life in post-war London. Passages especially when they were written by a woman, such as ‘we’re bored with people who aren’t bawdy. We call them prigs and prides if they don’t want to talk about copulation at lunchtime and buggery at dinner’ shocked the arbiters of moral taste, led by James Douglas of the Sunday Express, Because of the forced pulping, Partridge lost heavily on the book. However, its banning, as is so often the case, did not stop the circulation of the text. An edition in English was published in Paris in 1929, Morrow published an American edition with minor corrections in the same year, and there were also French and German editions. A 2003 article discussing the banning of both Hall and James’ novels laments the fact that there are no official records relating to the Sleeveless Errand case, suggesting that they were either lost or destroyed, However, the relevant court case file has recently come to light, having been only released by the National Archives Office in 2005. Using these court records, Partridge’s own account of the case, newspaper reports, and contemporary and later commentary on the novel’s banning, this paper will examine the censorship of Sleeveless Errand from a history of the book viewpoint.