Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England.

• Author: Schneider, Wendie Ellen
• Position: Review

Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. By Joss Marsh.(*) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 327. $18.95 (paper).

That Britain is (and has been) a class-conscious society verges on being a cliche.(1) Britons, it is often commented, think about class too much. Americans, on the other hand, think about class too little, and are rarely criticized for it. While stopping short of advocating heightened class consciousness, this Book Note suggests that by not thinking about class, we overlook ways in which class biases may influence legal decisions. American legal thought could stand to borrow a page from class-conscious British history, as exemplified in Joss Marsh's Word Crimes. Word Crimes is both an innovative work of literary and legal history and an example of how class-conscious analysis can illuminate the dilemmas inherent in regulating the manner of speech. Word Crimes brings to light the curious and largely neglected history of prosecutions for blasphemy in nineteenth-century England,(2) but its story is relevant to current American attempts to regulate offensive speech as well.

Marsh's work is the first book-length exploration of the two hundred or so blasphemy trials that occurred in England in the nineteenth century. Most readers will no doubt share her surprise that so many prosecutions could take place in an era commonly associated with the growth of secularism.(3) Marsh explains this apparent paradox, however, by pointing to class conflict. In Word Crimes, Marsh argues for recognition of blasphemy as a "class crime of language" (p. 8); in doing so, she takes nineteenth-century blasphemy out of its normal position as a cul-de-sac on the road to freedom of speech. However, to say Word Crimes is simply about blasphemy prosecutions is to underestimate the richness of theory and observation that Marsh presents. Marsh's work also takes the literary history of censorship into the nineteenth century,(4) revealing the crucial impact of literary strategies of "encoding, indirection, and strategic compensatory maneuvers" (p. 12) on the development of the Victorian novel and its characteristic employment of euphemism. Along the way, Marsh provides fascinating new information about the blaspheming predecessors of Dickens (pp. 51-60), the interwoven legal and literary worlds of Victorian England (pp. 94-98), and Thomas Hardy's concern with blasphemy (pp. 269-319). This Book Note, however, concentrates on Marsh's class-based description of blasphemy as an aspect of legal history with continuing relevance today.(5) While space limitations make this selection necessary, it also must be kept in mind that Word Crimes was not written primarily as a work of legal history and that this focus necessarily overlooks many of the insights Marsh offers.

I

Marsh identifies three waves of blasphemy prosecutions that correspond to periods of heightened class tension in England. The first took place between 1817 and 1825, when the publishers William Hone and Richard Carlile, along with the "volunteers" who managed Carlile's London print shop during his incarceration, were tried. These trials coincided with the era of the Peterloo protests, named after the 1819 march in Manchester at which unarmed working-class protesters were killed by the local constabulary.(6) A second wave occurred in the early 1840s, during which Henry Hetherington, the Chartist leader, and Jacob Holyoake and Charles Southwell, secularist journalists, were tried. This wave corresponded to the early years of Chartism, the largely working-class movement that demanded the passage of a Charter that included universal male suffrage and annual parliaments.(7) Finally, a third wave in the mid-1880s included, the trials of Charles Bradlaugh, England's first openly atheistic Member of Parliament, and George Foote, Bradlaugh's successor as president of the National Secular Society. These trials were contemporaneous with the agitation before the third reform bill of 1884, which extended working-class suffrage. In Marsh's narrative, the fates of blasphemy and political radicalism, influenced by the French Revolution and the writings of Thomas Paine, were closely entwined. The unrepentant blasphemers placed themselves in "a distinct tradition of conscious protest ... that stretches back to 1817 and beyond into the 1790s" (p. 6).(8)

All of these stories culminate in the trial Marsh selects as the central subject of her study: the 1883 blasphemy prosecution of George Foote, editor of the Freethinker, an avowedly secularist publication that prominently featured "Comic Bible" cartoons. Foote was brought to trial three times through private prosecutions for criminal blasphemy. He was convicted and sentenced to a year of hard labor in Holloway Gaol. In his defense, Foote pointed to Matthew Arnold, T.H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, and other upper-class doubters whose religious skepticism had not resulted in prosecutions for blasphemy. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, in the third and most famous trial, summarily rejected Foote's arguments, finding "a difference not only in degree, but in kind and nature. There is a grave and earnest tone, a reverent--perhaps I might even say a religious--spirit about the very attacks on Christianity itself which we find in the authors referred to...."(9) Coleridge then wrote the distinction between matter and manner into the law of England, proclaiming: "I now lay it down as law, that, if the decencies of controversy are observed, even the fundamentals of religion may be attacked without the writer being guilty of blasphemy."(10)

Coleridge's new definition of blasphemy was not without precedent. In 1841, a parliamentary commission had reported that application of the penal law against blasphemers was largely...