Obscenity trial of Ulysses in The Little Review
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The obscenity trial over the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review, an American literary magazine, occurred in 1921 and effectively banned publication of Joyce's novel in the United States. After The Little Review published the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses in the 1920 July–August issue of the magazine, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated obscenity charges against Little Review editors Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap. The editors were found guilty under laws associated with the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to circulate materials deemed obscene in the U.S. mail. Anderson and Heap incurred a $100 fine, and were forced to cease publishing Ulysses in The Little Review.
Precedents in obscenity law
Legal conceptions of obscenity which influenced Anderson and Heap’s trial go back to an obscenity standard first articulated in the 1868 English case of Regina v. Hicklin. In this case, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn defined the "test of obscenity" as "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."
This standard, known as the Hicklin test, went on to influence American jurisprudence, first in United States v. Bennett (1879), upholding a court charge based upon the Hicklin obscenity test and allowing the test to be applied to passages of a text and not necessarily a text in its entirety. Following this, the Hicklin test was endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rosen v. United States (1896) and was adhered to by American courts well into the twentieth century.
In 1873, after the lobbying attempts of Anthony Comstock, head of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the U.S. Congress amended a pre-existing law and enacted the Comstock Act, which made it a crime to knowingly mail obscene materials or advertisements and information about obscene materials, abortion, or contraception. This act adopted the Hicklin test for deeming which materials would be considered obscene.
