Kauffmann's "The Philanderer"
- Artist/Author/Producer: Kauffmann, Stanley (1916-?)
- Confronting Bodies: British Government
- Dates of action: 1954
- Location: England
- Description of the Art Work
- "The Philanderer", 1953: novel originally published in America under the
title of "The Tightrope", (1952).
- Description of incident
- 1954 England: "The Philanderer" was involved in British courts in a
nominal damage verdict brought against a lending library on the Isle of
Man. In London the Director of Public Prosecutions charged that the book
was "obscene in the sense that it tends to corrupt and deprave the minds
of those into whose hands it might fall, not only in certain passages but
in the whole tendency of the book." This charge was ordered to comply
with the traditional test of obscenity under British Law, Justice
Cockburn's decision in 1868 in Regina v. Hicklin. Justice Stable, in his
charge to the jury, emphasized that the 1868 test had had to be applied
in the light of modern standards. He pointed out that while there were
two schools of thought on the subject of sex which were "poles apart",
the stand taken by average, decent people was somewhere in between.
- Results of incident
- 1954 England: The Jury was given three days in which to read the book and
charged that their verdict would have great bearing on where the line was
to be drawn between liberty and license.
The publishers Secker & Warburg were found not guilty and Justice
Stable's charge was heralded as a fresh reappraisal of the 1868 decision.
Source: Banned Books 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D., by Anne Lyon Haight, and Chandler B.
Grannis, R.R. Bowker Co, 1978.
