In November 1880, members of the Malthusian League, Britain’s first organization dedicated to promoting contraception, gathered in London to honour D. M. Bennett, a vocal free-love advocate and editor of the radical American periodical The Truth Seeker. Bennett had just finished serving an eleven-month prison sentence in New York for publishing Cupid’s Yokes: or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life (1876), a tract that called for abolishing marriage. At the event, League members bonded with Bennett over their mutual “struggle for the freedom of the press.”Footnote ¹ In her toast to the hero of the evening, one of the League’s founders, Annie Besant, hammered home similarities between conditions in the United States and conditions in Britain, where the Hicklin test had made distributors of birth control pamphlets vulnerable to prosecution. Toward the end of her speech, she entreated the crowd to gaze at another League member, Edward Truelove. “He is crowned with the glory of the jail,” she declared, referring to a four-month sentence that the elderly bookseller had endured in 1878. To his company, Besant admitted “our friend (Mr. D.M. Bennett) … prison had to him no dread.”Footnote ²

While doctors were prosecuting irregulars for distributing obscene material as part of ongoing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery,” Britain was witnessing the rise of sex radicalism. During the second half of the nineteenth century, secularists, spiritualists, socialists, anarchists, and freethinkers took on a variety of causes associated with sex and reproduction, including contraception advocacy, legal equality for illegitimate children, more liberal divorce laws, and “free unions” outside traditional marriage. As Elizabeth Miller has emphasized, the emergence of this loose, diverse movement marked a major turn in Victorian radical politics, in which the domains of the body and sexuality became central to arguments for freedom of expression.Footnote ³ Early nineteenth-century radical agitators had railed against blinkered sexual ideologies. However, their arguments for freedom of speech and freedom of the press had primarily been oriented around their right to criticize the state and the Church, and this focus continued to dominate free speech discourse into the early 1870s. By the end of the 1870s, however, sex was framed in progressive circles as the primary domain of suppressed speech.

Few progressive causes became as strongly associated with suppressed speech as contraception advocacy. Yet, as the birth control campaigner Marie Stopes would announce in her 1922 history of the contraception movement in Britain, neither the state nor social purity groups mounted significant opposition to trade in contraception literature prior to this turn.Footnote ⁴ And after it, open trade in cheap, practical works on contraception increased exponentially. Some people were arrested for selling these works, and Truelove was imprisoned for it. However, as this chapter shows, arrests were rare, geographically scattered, and often entangled with attempts to crack down on the pornography trade, where birth control pamphlets like Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy continued to circulate. Why, then, did Victorian censorship become so tightly associated with contraception that Stopes was shocked when, while undertaking research for her book, she discovered open discussions of family planning in an 1868 copy of the London Daily Telegraph?Footnote ⁵

This chapter argues that the identification of contraception and censorship was partly the result of an audacious effort to rebrand the cause. At the beginning of the 1870s, many people, including many social protestors, associated contraception with promiscuity – an association that birth control pamphlets’ circulation through the pornography trade only encouraged. Framing contraception as a free speech issue offered a way for activists like Besant to distance it from sex itself, and situate it as a respectable cause that a diverse and often quarrelling body of social protestors supported by default. At the same time, this way of framing contraception attracted enormous publicity to the cause and helped brand its representatives as brave freedom-fighters, willing to take on a society that had lost its way. Although they disavowed their shared texts and histories with pornographers, social protestors like Besant were more than willing to exploit their shared understanding that censorship, or perceived censorship, could be useful.Footnote ⁶ From the 1870s, sex radicals took up a strategy that disreputable booksellers used to frame works like Aristotle’s Masterpiece as rare and desirable reading material to promote causes that they believed in and define a new identity for the contraception movement.

While I emphasize the benefits that framing contraception advocacy as a free speech issue had for birth controllers, it is important to recognize that they were not necessarily being disingenuous when they claimed to worry about arrest. The practical risks of selling literature on birth control methods depended on geographic context. They could also be difficult to gauge in the wake of the prosecutions against irregular practitioners examined in the previous chapter, and the police and anti-vice crusaders’ intermittent use of medical material as evidence in crackdowns on trade in pornography, which play a key role in this chapter. Tactical uses of the law, and news from the United States, where birth controllers were zealously prosecuted for distributing obscene material, sowed confusion about the risks of selling works on contraceptive techniques and shaped the Malthusian League’s publishing and advertising practices. Simultaneously, these uses of the law supported birth controllers’ claims that knowledge about contraception was being suppressed, and reshaped how the movement was understood in retrospect, even – perhaps especially – by its own members.

Reframing Contraception Literature

The Malthusian League was founded in 1877 by a number of figures affiliated with freethought, a worldview that rejected traditional social and religious systems as bases for personal beliefs and embraced skepticism and independent reasoning.Footnote ⁷ Like Holywell Street publishers, freethinkers traced their roots back to early nineteenth-century radical movements that had advocated the abolition of the aristocracy and universal suffrage; embraced deism, agnosticism, and atheism; and agitated for a print sphere freed from government regulation. Miller has argued that freethinkers were more skeptical about print’s facility for social change.Footnote ⁸ Even so, they celebrated their lineage to Republican heroes like Thomas Paine and Richard Carlile, and exalted their willingness to be censured for distributing incendiary material. The first number of the Secular Chronicle’s 1878 issue presents readers with a large woodcut of Carlile’s shop front “as it appeared during the imprisonment of that brave struggler for the liberty of the press.”Footnote ⁹ Freethinkers’ right to speak out against the influence of the Church was, the Chronicle argued in an accompanying article, a direct result of Carlile’s sacrifice.

That freethinkers issued works on contraception was another legacy of their roots in these circles. Through the mid-nineteenth century, as Holywell Street publishers printed their own editions of contraception manuals by Carlile, Robert Dale Owen, and Charles Knowlton, so, too, did a number of figures associated with freethought, including James Watson, Austin Holyoake, Edward Truelove, Charles Watts, and George Reddalls. They also dealt in a handful of new works on family planning.Footnote ¹⁰ They sold these works themselves and through a handful of retailers, advertising them in radical books and periodicals and, more sporadically, in mainstream newspapers.Footnote ¹¹ Compared to pornographers, however, freethinkers were small-time players in the sale of contraception literature. Michael Mason has estimated that they sold less than a thousand copies of Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, and even fewer of Owen’s Moral Physiology, annually.Footnote ¹²

This strand of the trade was modest partly because freethinkers disagreed about whether they should promote contraception at all, which discouraged those who did sell birth control pamphlets from making their dissemination a central focus of their work. Debate surrounding Truelove’s publication of the physician George Drysdale’s Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion (1855), which advocated both contraception and sex outside marriage, offers a good sense of arguments on both sides. Some freethinkers, including a number of feminists associated with the narrower Secularist movement established by George Jacob Holyoake in the 1850s, argued that conventional views about sexual morality stemmed from Christian ideologies that they rejected. Criticism of those ideologies was central to the movement’s purpose. Therefore, freethinkers should not shrink from debate about sex, marriage, and reproduction. Other freethinkers worried that supporting a book that advocated sexual emancipation was too dangerous. It would encourage outsiders to associate irreligion with immorality, crushing the movement’s hopes for meaningful social influence.Footnote ¹³

The pornography trade’s traffic in contraception literature seems to have exacerbated these concerns. By and large, early Victorian freethinkers had distanced themselves from men like William Dugdale, declaring that they were disgusted with the way such publishers “degrade[d] philosophy by allying it with obscenity.”Footnote ¹⁴ But outsiders often confused them. As Joss Marsh has noted, smutty and irreligious books often looked the same, and were regulated under similar laws: freethinking booksellers were often prosecuted for obscene libel’s sibling offence, blasphemous libel.Footnote ¹⁵ Pornographers and freethinkers also operated bookshops on the same streets, and sold many of the same works. Both dealt in radical and cheap literature, including “Flash Songsters” and “dirty milksop French novels,” and at least one freethinking bookseller was caught selling Dugdale’s racy periodical The Exquisite behind the counter (licentious publications, freethinkers grumbled, sold better than irreligious ones).Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, some freethinkers dabbled in provocative publicity stunts, such as advertising the Bible as an obscene book, that were easily misread. People would stop in at freethinkers’ shops and ask “not for ‘God v. Paterson,’ ‘Trinity of Trinities,’ [or] ‘God-ology,’” one bookseller complained in 1844, “… but for Fanny Hill, The Exquisite, Aristotle, &c.”Footnote ¹⁷ While some risks of identity confusion faded from the late 1850s, when the pornography trade shed most of the remnants of its roots in radical politics, contraception manuals remained tightly associated with the trade. People referred to Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book as a “Holywell-street publication” in the 1860s and early 1870s.Footnote ¹⁸ Concerns about being tainted by association lingered on in freethought circles. Holyoake initially refused to advertise Drysdale’s book in his periodical The Reasoner because he felt that its title was “liable to confound it with Holywell Street productions.”Footnote ¹⁹

The legality of publishing and distributing contraception manuals did not figure into these debates, nor was it questioned until the 1870s, when a series of events connected with these overlapping publishing histories pushed Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy into a series of obscenity trials.Footnote ²⁰ The second of these trials, R. v. Bradlaugh and Besant (1877), marked a major turning point in the history of birth control in Britain: the first significant step that freethinkers took to align the cause of contraception with the cause of free speech. Politicized as suppressed speech, contraception and other causes related to the body and sexuality quickly took on a central role in Victorian social protest. Although the collapse of these categories served different purposes, the events recounted here illustrate how contraception advocates initially used allegations of censorship as a way of repudiating birth control literature’s associations with sexual immorality, distancing it from the pornography trade, and reconciling freethinkers to support for it.

The chain of events began to unfold in the autumn of 1876, when a man named Henry Cook was arrested for selling a copy of Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy. Except for the date and location of the arrest, the story could have been ripped from newspaper reports on the Holywell Street raids of the 1850s. The proprietor of a “Book, Periodical, and Newspaper Depot” in Sims Alley, Bristol, Cook was a long-time seller of sexual material. The single-sheet catalogues and card advertisements that he sent to mail-order customers list the kinds of publications hawked by Holywell Street publishers twenty years earlier: descriptions of cheap medical works like Aristotle’s Masterpiece and Horace Goss’s Woman: Her Physiology and Functions jostle with listings for erotic prints, novels, and short stories, bawdy songsters, French letters, and sensational pamphlets, including an obscure title called Seduction by Chloroform (c. 1850) first issued by William Dugdale’s brother, John Lambert Dugdale.Footnote ²¹

Cook promoted this material by courting arrest. He openly distributed handbills that framed his Sims Alley depot as the site of “A BOOK REVOLUTION” (Figure 6.1) where anyone could get their hands on “racy gems” and “private somethings.”Footnote ²² The handbills also suggested that these items were suppressed – or would have been had the local authorities been any good at their jobs. Cook’s handbill for Fanny Hill excerpts a letter to the editor of the Bristol Gazette complaining that the police had done nothing to shut down his “infamous and demoralizing” trade.Footnote ²³ His handbill for Goss’s Woman: Her Physiology and Functions claims that the editor of the Bristol Mirror condemned the work as a “bad book” that “ought not to be circulated.”Footnote ²⁴ His handbills for Aristotle’s Masterpiece report that the work met with the “opposition of the prejudiced,” and that Cook had decided to sell it while “residing in Her Majesty’s gaol.”Footnote ²⁵ As this comment suggests, Cook was well known to the police. Prior to 1876, he had been arrested at least three times: in 1849, for displaying a “stunning spicy letter” in a shop window; in 1862, for selling “filthy books”; and in 1875, for hawking indecent prints at a railway platform.Footnote ²⁶

Figure 6.1 “A Book Revolution in Sims’s Alley!” Handbill (Bristol: Henry Cook, n.d.), 1 leaf, DA 676, oversize folder 5, item 83, MSCE.

Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

The Bristol police found themselves under pressure to arrest Cook again when a local upholsterer caught one of his employees with an envelope containing a fistful of Cook’s mail-order catalogues. He confiscated them, showed them to local police officers, and urged them to shut Cook’s trade down. An undercover officer dutifully visited Cook’s shop and asked for several of the works listed in the catalogues. Cook was immediately suspicious. He told the officer that he did not have the items in stock. The officer wandered around Cook’s shop and eventually picked up a copy of Fruits of Philosophy, which was openly displayed on the shelves. “You can take that book, and read it on the quiet,” Cook told him. Cook framed cheap works on reproduction and sexual health as containers of “secret,” even suppressed, knowledge in advertising material. However, he clearly did not anticipate that selling Fruits would get him into trouble. He was wrong. Fruits was enough for the police to charge Cook with distributing obscene material.Footnote ²⁷

That might have been the end of it. Dealers in sexual entertainment had been arrested for selling medical works before, and they would be again. But Cook’s connection with Charles Watts, one of the social reformers who printed Fruits, turned his arrest into a lit fuse. Cook had gotten interested in freethought in the late 1840s. He intermittently subscribed to and advertised his newspaper depot in several periodicals associated with the movement, and briefly distributed unsolicited copies of Holyoake’s Reasoner to ministers in the Bristol area. He also sold a handful of “Secular Works,” including, apparently, Watts’s edition of Fruits.Footnote ²⁸ It is not clear that the copy Cook was arrested for selling came from Watts. Cook had cut the imprint off the title page (it was thought that he did this so he could charge twenty pence for the pamphlet instead of six pence, as the publisher intended). His copy also reportedly contained two “obscene pictures,” while Watts’s edition did not have illustrations.Footnote ²⁹ Cook may have added images to the pamphlet. However, it seems more likely that the copy he was arrested for selling was an old Dugdale edition. Dugdale is the publisher of the only known editions to contain two anatomical plates.

Even so, Watts believed that the pamphlet came from his printshop. When he heard of Cook’s arrest, he hurried off to Bristol to defend it – and Cook. In court, he testified that Fruits was “a legal book used strictly and properly,” and emphasized that Cook was merely its seller. He was the publisher.Footnote ³⁰ Watts’s efforts backfired. Cook, who had no legal representation, was imprisoned for two years with hard labour, and the police were forced to arrest Watts and bring him back to London, where he was indicted for publishing Fruits.Footnote ³¹ Watts pled guilty and was released on the condition that he destroy his stock of pamphlets and the stereotype plates he had used to make them. He and many of his friends in freethinking circles worried that an obscenity trial in a London court, which would surely attract publicity, would hurt the movement.Footnote ³² Others, including Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, a prominent member of Bradlaugh and Watts’s National Secular Society, were furious at Watts for not defending his right to publish Fruits.Footnote ³³ Besant devised a plan: she and Bradlaugh would co-publish a 6d edition of the pamphlet, updated by Drysdale, with the aim of getting arrested and defending it in court themselves.

The preface to Bradlaugh and Besant’s 1877 edition of Fruits declares its publication a political act, endorsing all people’s “fullest right to free discussion.”

On March 23, 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh sent their edition to the local police, the Guildhall, and the solicitor for the City of London along with memorandums advising them when and where they would be selling it the following day. Given the pamphlet’s recent history in court, they were sure they would immediately be charged with distributing obscene material.

Nobody came to arrest them. After a few days, members of the Christian Evidence Society, a Christian apologist group that rented the National Secular Society’s headquarters for its weekly meetings, visited the Home Secretary and urged him to charge the pair with distributing an obscene book.Footnote ³⁵ Still, no warrant was issued for their arrest. Finally, on April 5, more than two weeks after they had begun to sell the pamphlet, the wait was over. Bradlaugh and Besant were summoned to the Guildhall Court, and, on April 17, they were committed to trial at the Old Bailey. Strangely, the identity of the prosecutor remained secret, even to the judge. Given the authorities’ obvious lack of enthusiasm for helping Bradlaugh and Besant with their protest, it is tempting to speculate that the secret prosecutor was an ally. Bradlaugh later hinted that it was the Christian Evidence Society. It is plausible that the Society would have done more to assist him: the Christian Evidence Society and the National Secular Society had a friendly relationship and worked together to advance their separate interests, often sparring in public to generate publicity for both organizations.Footnote ³⁶ Bradlaugh and Besant were certainly confident that they would be tried. By the morning of April 5, they had raised £390 to cover the defence of a crime that they had not yet been arrested for.Footnote ³⁷

Scholarship on Bradlaugh and Besant’s trial has largely focused on their powerful critique of the Hicklin test of obscenity. As the pair anticipated, the prosecution conceded that Knowlton’s pamphlet was “carefully guarded from any vulgarity of expression,” but took issue with its accessibility.Footnote ³⁸ A six-penny pamphlet giving “such a minute description of all that has relation to the sexual appetite” could easily fall into the hands of vulnerable youths.Footnote ³⁹ Bradlaugh and Besant countered that the concern for vulnerable readers enshrined in the Hicklin test was a paper-thin cover for elitism. In practice, they observed, courts destroyed works aimed at lower-middle and working-class audiences as obscene material, while ignoring comparably explicit works aimed at privileged readers, even in cases where they could easily fall into the hands of young people. The Lancet, the Medical Observer, and the Obstetrical Journal were freely sold by news vendors even though they were cheaper than Fruits and contained “medical details beside which Knowlton is chaste in extreme.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And while it was expensive at ten shillings, the physician William Benjamin Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology (1842), whose vivid descriptions of the adolescent female body Bradlaugh insisted were far more likely to corrupt youths than Fruits, was being given out as a prize-book to top pupils in state schools.Footnote ⁴¹

As Gowan Dawson has pointed out, Bradlaugh and Besant’s focus on Human Physiology, which was authored by a respected physician, issued by John Churchill, and widely acclaimed, was deliberately provocative.Footnote ⁴² Their mock indictment of the work was not only intended to demonstrate the elitism of the Hicklin definition of obscenity but also to lend support for the second part of their argument: that any legal definition of obscenity needed to take intent into account. Medical men like Carpenter had no practical reason to worry that their publications would be seized and destroyed as obscene material in 1877. Yet, as Bradlaugh went page-by-page through Human Physiology in the courtroom, theatrically reading out passages that appeared to demonstrate “the kind of feeling which might be awakened in some minds” by its text, he aimed to raise questions about what would happen if conditions changed.Footnote ⁴³ Although works like Human Physiology described sexual organs “with the intent of a useful purpose,” such works could be presented in ways that could lead to their destruction.Footnote ⁴⁴ Fruits was no different save for its price.

If Bradlaugh and Besant hoped to galvanize medical opposition to the Hicklin test, they failed utterly. Medical men were aghast at the way they dragged Carpenter’s name into the trial. The pair’s argument that the Hicklin test was flawed because it focused on the contexts of a work’s circulation instead of the intentions of its makers also fell flat before medical groups that had embraced the test as a means of cracking down on “obscene quackery,” and a wider medical community that was perennially suspicious of authors’ and publishers’ claims about their intentions. Before the trial ended, campaigning medical journals denounced Bradlaugh and Besant and aggressively distanced Fruits from medicine. The Lancet deemed the pamphlet different “in no apparent feature from obscene publications circulated under a cloak of excellent purpose, but pandering to the most depraved of tastes.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Medical Press and Circular evoked its promiscuous circulation, coyly opining that Fruits’ “title and contents … might almost be compared with those that used to be seen in the windows of the shops of Holywell Street.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Although Bradlaugh and Besant powerfully drew attention to the Hicklin test’s elitism, the trial was about more than their right to publish Fruits or any other work. It was also a publicity stunt aimed at rebranding birth control. As scholars have often pointed out, the pair used the trial as a stage to assert the moral authority of contraception advocacy by framing family planning as a solution to abject poverty that married couples needed to be taught to employ (“It is the advocacy of prudential checks after marriage that is now said to be a punishable offence,” the pair complained).Footnote ⁴⁷ At the same time, Bradlaugh and Besant used the trial to promote a publishing history for Fruits that so successfully implied that it was an exclusive product of freethought that histories of contraception have repeated it for a hundred and fifty years. Promoting this history enabled them to repudiate the pamphlet’s associations with the pornography trade, align freethought with contraception advocacy, and suggest that it was not Fruits, but freethought and its right to free speech, that was under attack.

Bradlaugh and Besant’s preface to Fruits, the following piece which Besant read aloud in court, tells readers that the pamphlet was authored by a freethinking American physician in 1832, and introduced to English readers the following year by James Watson, “who came to London and took up Richard Carlile’s work, when Carlile was in jail.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Watson, it tells us, then

This narrative omits Cook, who inconveniently sold sensational and erotic productions as well as “Secular Works.” It omits the Holywell Street publishers who had published, advertised, and sold Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy across the country in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. And it omits the new generation of pornographers who sold Fruits alongside erotic photographs.

It is extremely doubtful that Bradlaugh and Besant were ignorant of this aspect of Fruits’ history. Pornographers were regularly advertising the pamphlet in 1877. On the same day Bradlaugh and Besant were arrested, a Birmingham man was indicted for selling Fruits, Fanny Hill, and large quantities of “extremely spicy” photographs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, they moved in circles that had connections with the trade. The pair worked closely with Edward Truelove, whose stereotypes of works by Paine and Voltaire had come from William Dugdale’s print shop, and Bradlaugh had been a member of the Cannibal Club, a private dining club that included several members who collaborated with pornographers to produce some of the most incendiary erotic literature of the day.Footnote ⁵¹ They also clearly understood something of the pornography trade’s operations. During the trial, Besant drew on her knowledge of the trade to defend Fruits, asking the judge why, if the pamphlet was obscene, she and Bradlaugh had not omitted their names from their edition. “I understand that it is the usual thing,” she said, “where an obscene book is published, that the printer’s and publisher’s names are omitted, and they so evade responsibility.”Footnote ⁵²

Bradlaugh and Besant erased the pornography trade from Fruits’ history. By the end of the trial, which culminated in a guilty verdict and then an acquittal on a technicality, a new narrative had been born: the pamphlet was, and always had been, sold by freethinkers as Bradlaugh and Besant defined them (that is, not by men like Dugdale or Cook), and any attack on the pamphlet or any work like it was an attack on freethinkers’ free speech. Accomplishing this demanded that Bradlaugh and Besant adopt a position that fell short of endorsing the “fullest right to free discussion” for all, however. Ultimately, the pair called for an alteration to the Hicklin test that took “intent for useful purpose” into account. This was more likely to succeed than petitioning for the test’s abolishment. However, it was also necessary to avoid defending the other side of Cook’s trade. Just as regular practitioners feared that consulting surgeons tainted medicine’s public image, freethought’s shared texts and histories with the pornography trade threatened to undercut their argument that contraception was respectable. Bradlaugh and Besant protected their cause by framing Cook’s sale of the pamphlet as an anomaly best left forgotten, and abandoned free speech where it was put to the purpose of pleasure.

Plausible Deniability

Initially, many freethinkers were furious at Bradlaugh and Besant for engineering the Knowlton trial. “Charles Bradlaugh has dragged the standard of Freethought through the mire of Holywell Street!” one burst out at a meeting, to the horror of Bradlaugh’s supporters.Footnote ⁵³ In politicizing the acts of publishing and selling contraception manuals, however, the Knowlton trial gave birth to a movement.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, it attracted to that movement a stunning amount of publicity. Reports of the lengthy trial set off rapacious public curiosity about Fruits. The market was awash with piracies and imitations before it was over, and Besant and Bradlaugh’s edition reportedly sold more than 50,000 copies the following year.Footnote ⁵⁵ Examining the activities of the Malthusian League, the organization that Bradlaugh, Besant, and their allies set up to advocate contraception in the trial’s wake, offers an instructive look at how birth control advocates continued to represent contraception literature as suppressed speech even as they played an important role in expanding trade in it.

Figure 6.2 Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh on the front page of the Illustrated Police News, June 30, 1877.

Content provided by The British Library Board, with thanks to The British Newspaper Archive

The League’s mission statement oriented the organization around two causes that the trial had effectively collapsed: free speech and public education on “Malthusian principles” – roughly, economic arguments against overpopulation propounded by Thomas Robert Malthus and the philosopher John Stuart Mill:

The League rapidly developed infrastructure to recruit new members and spread its message. It held public meetings in several cities, published a monthly magazine, The Malthusian, and issued a series of pamphlets, the Malthusian Tracts, out of Besant’s Freethought Publishing Company at 28, Stonecutter Street, London. From the standpoint of price alone, these publications were extremely accessible.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, their appeal, and the appeal of membership in the League by association, was awfully limited. The tracts mostly consist of dry summaries of Malthus and Mill’s economic arguments, and provide no practical information about how to prevent conception.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Malthusian and the Malthusian League’s public lectures were just as bereft of practical instruction.

As the phrasing of the League’s second official aim, to spread knowledge of the laws of population through “all practicable means,” suggests, the League framed the omission of practical information from its publications as a necessity in the wake of the judgement against Bradlaugh and Besant and two actions against Edward Truelove for distributing Owen’s Moral Physiology (1830) and John Henry Palmer’s Individual, Family, and National Poverty (1875) in May 1877, and Fruits of Philosophy in 1878.Footnote ⁵⁹ These actions were brought by Charles Hastings Collette on behalf of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.Footnote ⁶⁰ Collette claimed that the Society aimed to prevent booksellers from profiting from Fruits’ notoriety in the wake of the Knowlton trial. Truelove’s solicitor claimed that Collette was aiming to profit from the Knowlton trial himself, attempting to generate publicity for his struggling organization by replicating it.Footnote ⁶¹ Either way, the elderly Truelove was fined fifty pounds and forced to serve four months in prison.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s Malthusians were justifiably worried that other prosecutions would follow Truelove’s. Early issues of the Malthusian rail against the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which the League framed as “one of the consequences of … failure in the organisation of English Criminal Law.”Footnote ⁶² When, in 1879, Collette was sued for embezzling from a young couple who had trusted him to invest their life savings, the Malthusian reported on the proceedings with palpable schadenfreude.Footnote ⁶³ Its editors continued to monitor the Society’s activities, and lobbied members of Parliament to legislate a new definition of obscenity that took the intentions of authors, publishers, and distributors into consideration.Footnote ⁶⁴ Additionally, the Malthusian League’s leaders baked caution into its policies. Until 1913, the League not only prohibited the publication of practical details about contraception in its own publications but also officially advised its members not to publish or sell instruction manuals of their own. Correspondents often urged the League to abandon these policies. However, its leaders insisted that it was “illegal to publish” practical advice.Footnote ⁶⁵

There was, however, a marked and ever-increasing disjuncture between the League’s official stance on distributing practical advice on contraception and its unofficial activities. From its establishment, the League informally sponsored a variety of works that contained practical information about contraception; promoted them within and outside its official publications; and advertised contraceptive devices. Initially, this activity was modest. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, when concern about prosecution was at its height among the League’s leadership, it confined itself to endorsing and advertising two works that provided such information in the Malthusian and the Malthusian Tracts: a version of Drysdale’s Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, now sporting the euphemistic title Elements of Social Science, and Besant’s pamphlet The Law of Population (1878). These works were not officially League publications but they were so tightly associated with the League that they might as well have been. Their authors and publisher were founding members of the League, and they were printed at the same London address as the Malthusian and the Malthusian Tracts, 28, Stonecutter Street.

Expanded prior to its publication under a new title, Drysdale’s four-part Elements frames sexual abstinence as physically and psychologically unhealthy. After presenting readers with a catalogue of blights supposedly caused by suppressed sexual desire, Drysdale proposes condoms and vaginal sponges as solutions to these problems, enabling people to express their desires within and outside marriage while avoiding venereal disease and unplanned pregnancies. Ideologically, Drysdale’s book was radical even by radical standards. For this reason, it did not carry his name until after he died. However, Elements was not designed to function as an instruction manual, and it was not an especially accessible alternative to one. Costing either two shillings and sixpence or three shillings, depending on its binding, it was also much more expensive than Besant and Bradlaugh’s Fruits. Although the Malthusian League promoted Elements in its publications for years and Truelove reportedly sold thousands of copies through his bookshop, it does not appear to have approached Fruits’ commercial success.Footnote ⁶⁶

Issued by the same publisher and sold by post for the same price as Fruits, sixpence, Besant’s Law of Population was arguably the more daring work. It is more socially conservative than Drysdale’s book, and most of its text is given over to the same dry economic theory that suffused the Malthusian and Malthusian Tracts. However, it also provides readers with an accessible introduction to contraceptive techniques. In one discrete section, the pamphlet offers a detailed description of the mechanics of conception, and discusses virtually all methods of limiting births known at the time: sponges, pessaries, and diaphragms of various types; douching with spermicidal agents; sheaths or condoms; withdrawal; the “safe period” or rhythm method; extended breastfeeding; and abortion.Footnote ⁶⁷ It also provides readers with brief evaluations of each technique. Besant did not recommend withdrawal, extended breastfeeding, or abortion as methods of controlling reproduction, on the grounds that they were ineffective, unhealthy, and immoral, respectively, and she was skeptical about the condom’s reliability.Footnote ⁶⁸ In her opinion, vaginal pessaries provided the most reliable check against conception, and (echoing Richard Carlile’s reasoning for advocating the contraceptive sponge) had “the enormous advantage of being entirely in the hands of the woman.”Footnote ⁶⁹ By Besant’s account, this approach was successful: she reported that she sold more than 40,000 copies of Law of Population within three years of its publication.Footnote ⁷⁰

Sellers of these works met with no discernible opposition, and, after a few years, the Malthusian League grew more daring. The early 1880s witnessed a rapid expansion in the production of contraceptive devices, partly as a result of the rubber industry’s growth following improvements to moulding and vulcanization processes, and partly, some scholars have argued, as a result of the attention that Bradlaugh and Besant’s trial drew to contraception.Footnote ⁷¹ By 1883, as Claire Jones has demonstrated, at least eight manufacturers of condoms, syringes, cervical caps, and rubber pessaries were operating out of Hackney Wick and Dalston in London’s East End, including James George Ingram, John George Franklin, and Edward Lambert and Son.Footnote ⁷² Beginning in 1885, endorsements of and advertisements for contraceptive devices made by several of these manufacturers, including the self-identified Malthusian W. J. Rendell, became tightly integrated into the Malthusian League’s unofficial publications, and, more discreetly, into its official ones.

Besant worked endorsements for contraceptive devices into a revised edition of The Law of Population, recommending soluble pessaries containing spermicidal agents from Rendell and India-rubber pessaries from Lambert and Son in the pamphlet’s chapter on contraceptive techniques. Her revised edition also directs readers to full-page advertisements at the back of the pamphlet, which provide these manufacturers’ addresses, further information about their products, and how to order them (Figure 6.3).Footnote ⁷³ These pages considerably expanded Law of Population’s utility, essentially turning it into a less salacious version of William Dugdale’s earlier pamphlet On the Use of Night Caps: an expert-endorsed catalogue for those interested in acquiring and learning how to use contraceptive devices. Indeed, John Peel has argued that the advertisements were “probably the most widely-read part” of such pamphlets.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 6.3 Advertisements for contraceptive devices and freethought literature in Annie Besant, The Law of Population: Its Consequences and Its Bearing upon Human Conduct and Morals (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1887), HB875.B47 1887, Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

By courtesy of The University of Toronto Libraries.

The Malthusian followed suit, publishing letters from members endorsing various contraceptive devices as well as advertisements: first for a contraceptives retailer, a Mr. Page of Bethnal Green, and then for a manufacturer, Lambert and Son. Lambert’s advertisements in the Malthusian highlight devices endorsed in The Law of Population and cite Besant’s endorsement.Footnote ⁷⁵ Together, these publications effectively created a promotional feedback loop in which an activist organization and a manufacturer reinforced trust in each other’s aims and expertise, and always brought readers back to the same techniques and products. As with Besant’s Law of Population, many people probably read the Malthusian for the advertisements. By the end of the nineteenth century, the League’s membership had hardly cracked 1,000 individuals. However, editors for the Malthusian reported receiving 2,000 requests monthly for information about devices advertised in the periodical.Footnote ⁷⁶ In practice, the periodical mainly functioned as a catalogue.

1886 witnessed the publication of a third League-supported work on contraception, The Wife’s Handbook, written by the physician and founding League member Henry Arthur Allbutt. This work further extended the unofficial partnership between the Malthusian League and contraceptive manufacturers. Like The Law of Population and Elements, The Wife’s Handbook was initially printed at Stonecutter Street and promoted in the Malthusian and Malthusian Tracts. However, its focus is quite different. As suggested by the unwieldy working title that Allbutt gave the manuscript, How a Woman should order herself during Pregnancy, in the Lying-in Room, and after Delivery; with Hints on the Management of the Baby, and on other matters of importance necessary to be known by Married Women, Allbutt was primarily interested in contraception’s efficacy as a preventive for maternal mortality, and had absolutely no interest in marching his readers through a tour of economic theory.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Wife’s Handbook is therefore focused on maternal health, outlining the processes of pregnancy, antenatal care, labour and delivery, post-natal recovery, menstruation, and menopause.Footnote ⁷⁸ Contraception, covered between chapters on post-natal recovery and menstruation, is framed as a crucial aspect of healthcare for married women, one that ensures that they have the strength to care for their families.

The Wife’s Handbook also has a stronger commercial flavour than previous League-supported publications. Early editions endorsed and advertised a wide variety of contraceptive devices, including condoms sold by Constantine and Jackson of Wych Street, London; a vaginal syringe manufactured by Lambert; Rendell’s pessaries; and the Mensinga pessary, sold by R. Vaughn out of Caledonian Road, Leeds.Footnote ⁷⁹ They also advertised a panorama of domestic products, such as Redhead’s Celebrated Household Salve, that had nothing to do with the work’s mission, but were aimed at its target audience. The appearance of both kinds of advertisements in the manual reflects Allbutt’s interest in making a meaningful income from it. He developed a particularly close advertising partnership with Rendell, whose pessaries, branded “Wife’s Friend,” mimicked the Handbook’s title. After 1891, following Rendell’s death and an exclusive advertising deal struck between Allbutt and the firm’s new owners, as Jones has argued, the Handbook became “little more than a promotional tool” for Rendell.Footnote ⁸⁰

The first serious blow to this publishing activity arrived later in 1886, when Joseph Williamson, a wandering minstrel, was arrested by local authorities first in Gainsborough and then in the nearby town Goole under the 1824 Vagrancy Act for selling copies of The Wife’s Handbook on the street.Footnote ⁸¹ He was fined and quickly released, but the secretary of a local social purity group got wind of the arrest and complained to the General Medical Council. The Council investigated, charged Allbutt with “conduct unbecoming of a physician,” and struck him from the Medical Register. These events are examined in the next section. In terms of the League’s involvement in the distribution of practical information on contraception, however, it is important to note that neither Williamson’s arrest nor Allbutt’s ejection from the Medical Register put an end to the League’s support for these kinds of works. In fact, it doubled down on its support. In the wake of Williamson’s arrest, the League not only sent its official literature to all of Gainsborough’s and Goole’s rate-payers but also launched a five-year campaign to promote The Wife’s Handbook and The Law of Population across the country in local newspapers.Footnote ⁸²

Paid for by the League but placed in the name of the publisher and League member W. H. Reynolds, these newspaper advertisements were fairly discreet: they simply urged readers to “READ ‘The Wife’s Handbook’ by Dr. ALLBUTT (Leeds), a work designed to induce married people to limit their family within the means of subsistence,” and to write to Reynolds to purchase a copy.Footnote ⁸³ Nevertheless, they were reportedly effective: in 1889, Reynolds claimed that he received 3,000 responses monthly.Footnote ⁸⁴ The League continued to fund advertising for The Wife’s Handbook in the 1890s, and supported the publication of The Malthusian Handbook (1893), conceived as a successor to The Law of Population after Besant converted to the esoteric religion Theosophy, abandoned Malthusianism, and stopped publishing her pamphlet in 1891.Footnote ⁸⁵ Like The Law of Population, The Malthusian Handbook was not an official League publication, but it sure looked like one. It was written by League members; it cost sixpence; it describes contraceptive devices and how to use them; it advertises “a complete List of Malthusian Appliances, with prices” that readers could send for by post; and Reynolds promoted it on the League’s behalf.Footnote ⁸⁶ Notably, the pamphlet also contains a lengthy history of Malthusianism in which League members are prominently featured, and two pages that identify the League’s executive members and describe the organization’s aims and rules.

The Malthusian League’s claim that it did not distribute practical information about contraception was deliberately misleading. The organization devoted increasing and by the late 1880s substantial resources to promoting publications written by its own leaders that offered people practical instruction in contraceptive techniques. Endorsements for contraceptives manufacturers were increasingly integrated into these works and into the League’s official publications, as were manufacturers’ advertisements. These methods of disseminating information about birth control were beneficial to the League financially, promotionally, and politically. Carrying advertisements for manufacturers underwrote the costs of publishing and promoting the League’s official literature, made it more desirable to readers who had little appetite for economic theory, and, because the manufacturers endorsed them, probably increased the sale of practical works unofficially associated with the League: Besant had reportedly sold 175,000 copies of The Law of Population in Britain alone by 1891, while Allbutt had sold 250,000 copies of The Wife’s Handbook by 1900.Footnote ⁸⁷ All the while, the League could claim that it did not offer practical advice on contraceptive techniques.

Rendell and Lambert benefitted from the League’s promotional work too. As Jones has shown, these and other contraceptives manufacturers quickly aligned themselves with the organization – not just by name-dropping its unofficial publications but also by choosing trade names for their products that echoed key words in its official literature. Lambert’s brand name for its condoms, for instance, was “Malthusian.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This web of affiliation made it increasingly difficult to distinguish where Malthusian activism ended and the contraceptive devices trade began. Lambert and Son published its own company pamphlets on the “Population Question,” representing itself as a medical bookseller, and even set up a lending library for works on family planning.Footnote ⁸⁹ Eventually, the company supplied birth control clinics run by the Malthusian League, Marie Stopes, and the National Birth Control Association/Family Planning Association.Footnote ⁹⁰

A Risky Business?

The Malthusian League and the manufacturers it worked with were far from isolated in their production, advertisement, and distribution of practical information about contraception. In the wake of the Knowlton trial, a wide variety of social protestors embraced the cause. Birth control manuals and contraceptive devices were advertised by and endorsed in radical periodicals that were not specifically Malthusian publications.Footnote ⁹¹ Some of these devices were manufactured by self-identified Malthusians, including J. Greevz Fyssher of Leeds and J. R. Holmes of Wantage, but the birth control manuals were increasingly issued by people who were affiliated with radical politics but not – to its leaders’ consternation – with the Malthusian League.Footnote ⁹² Two of these pamphlets, A Book for Married Women (1894), by Thomas Richard Allinson, an anti-vaccinationist doctor and vegetarian, and A True Remedy for Poverty! (1895), by W. J. Douse, a member of the left-wing Nottingham Society, were advertised heavily in the press. In the early 1890s, the activist Ernest May established a new periodical dedicated to promoting Malthusianism, The Malthusian Herald (1891).Footnote ⁹³

After just one issue, The Malthusian Herald was rebranded the Hygienic Advertiser to describe the content it ended up containing more accurately. One of the corollaries of birth control’s rapid upswing in popularity in radical circles was that its promotion was increasingly entangled with the promotion of many alternative lifestyles and medical perspectives, including anti-vaccination, vegetarianism, teetotalism, and hydropathy, and various products to support them. The Malthusian Herald advertised birth control manuals, condoms, pessaries, and spermicidal syringes, for example, alongside the Ida Nut Grinder, a device for “grinding all kinds of Nuts, Dried Bread, Vegetables,” India-rubber-tipped laundry gloves, and other domestic items.Footnote ⁹⁴ May was the inventor of many of these products, and endorsed them throughout the Herald’s main text. As well as helping May promote his inventions, advertisements for these items helped promote medical perspectives that May supported alongside Malthusianism. For instance, the Nut Grinder, a tool designed to facilitate a vegetarian diet, supported a theory of health promoted by Allinson’s Natural Living Society, which the Herald also endorsed.Footnote ⁹⁵

Trade in advice on how to practise contraception also flourished apart from radical circles. Manufacturers that were not associated with any radical group advertised widely in the press, instructing “persons who cannot afford to keep a large family” to send away for their own manuals on the “population question.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Booksellers with no evident connections with radical politics sold manuals written by Malthusian activists alongside older works on contraception, midwifery, and sexual health.Footnote ⁹⁷ As they did prior to the Knowlton trial, birth control manuals and contraceptive devices also circulated through the pornography trade, though they were now less tightly associated with it in the public imagination. C. J. Wilcox, “late of Holywell Street,” advertised contraceptive pessaries for sale alongside nude photographs in the Illustrated Police News throughout the 1880s, while G. Birt sold contraception manuals, including (likely pirated) editions of Besant’s Law of Population, alongside pornographic novels in the 1890s.Footnote ⁹⁸

In other words, trade in contraception manuals and devices was booming in the late-nineteenth century, and their promotion was often treated with the same (lack of) reverence as the promotion of laundry gloves. Yet, birth controllers continuously suggested that it was risky to sell them. A full-page advertisement for Truelove’s pamphlet on his 1878 trial, The Queen v. E. Truelove, printed on the back cover of his 1881 edition of Drysdale’s Elements of Social Science, frames Drysdale’s work as jeopardized by censorious forces: “… the fair and legitimate liberty of the Press has been imperilled by the attempt of the ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’ to bring such a work as the ‘Moral Physiology’ of R.D. Owen … within the scope of Lord Campbell’s Act and English Common Law,” it reads.Footnote ⁹⁹ This copy of Elements was issued only a handful of years after Truelove’s imprisonment for distributing birth control pamphlets, but more than a decade later radicals were still framing contraception literature as censored, or liable to be censored. Allinson’s 1895–6 advertisements for A Book for Married Women imply that he anticipated opposition, claiming “No book is written which goes so thoroughly into matters relating to married women. Some may think too much is told.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1897 advertisements for A True Remedy for Poverty!, Douse announced that he “invite[d] criticism and def[ied] prosecution”: “The truth shall be known!” his advertisements cried.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Published in 1893, The Malthusian Handbook portrays contraception as a cause blighted with legal struggle. Twenty-four pages of the pamphlet – a major portion of the work, which only runs to forty-six – furnish readers with an account of the opposition that Malthusians had encountered. Incorporating drawn-out excerpts from court reports and other documents, this section recounts Bradlaugh and Besant’s arrest and trial for selling Fruits, framing it as the immediate act of a censorious government; Truelove’s imprisonment; Allbutt’s clash with the General Medical Council over The Wife’s Handbook; and two other obscenity trials (one in Australia) involving birth control manuals. It also surveys reports of opposition to Malthusianism around the world, in countries as diverse as India, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. “Hence the task of the pioneers of the movement is rendered excessively difficult,” an 1898 edition of the pamphlet concludes, “but from the very inception of the Malthusian League, the work of propaganda has been carried forward with unfailing devotion and singleness of purpose.”Footnote ¹⁰²

In advertisements, in and on their publications, and in the radical press, Malthusians thus suggested that their plight was the same as their counterparts in the United States, who were zealously pursued for purveying obscene material in the late-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰³ Founded in 1873, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) crusaded against information on contraception, contraceptive devices, and abortion paraphernalia alongside other forms of “indecent” literature. Its success in lobbying for new laws against trade in indecent articles – and its tight alignment with law enforcement – facilitated these efforts. The same year in which it was founded, Anthony Comstock, the NYSSV’s secretary and the face of the American anti-vice movement, was made the United States Postmaster General.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By 1880, Comstock had had ninety-seven people arrested under federal laws for advertising or selling abortifacients or “indecent rubber articles” through the mail, and more for distributing books and pamphlets on contraception.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Under the Comstock Law, which prohibited distributing obscene material through the mail, sellers faced harsh penalties of up to 5,000 dollars in fines and prison terms of up to ten years.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Yet, prosecutions for distributing works on contraception were much rarer in Britain. The Home Office was concerned about freethought’s political influence, and laws against blasphemy were used against freethinkers with increasing frequency in the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, between 1879 and 1901, less than a dozen people were charged for selling works on contraception under obscenity laws.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Many of those people were itinerant booksellers, arrested in provincial towns by local authorities under the 1824 Vagrancy Act following complaints that they were hawking indecent works in public spaces. Most received small fines or spent a day in gaol. Accounting for people who sold contraception literature alongside erotic photographs and were arrested for selling both could as much as triple this number. However, police records emphasize that, like Cook, these dealers were targeted because they sold pornography.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Knowlton trial made contraception literature notorious and opposition to trade in it does seem to have increased, especially in the provinces. However, the scattered nature of the prosecutions and the absence of any records documenting organized efforts to suppress trade in contraception literature suggest that opposition to it was much weaker than Malthusians made it out to be.

Home Office records suggest that British authorities were reluctant to charge distributors of contraception literature even when complaints were made about them. The publicity that the Knowlton trial generated seems to have made them wary of being targets of another publicity stunt. They typically discouraged complainants from prosecuting distributors of medical material on the basis that a trial would simply publicize the works at issue. Officials also did not want to recommend – much less bring – prosecutions if they scented any risk of failure.Footnote ¹¹⁰ They had their own credibility to protect. Although some magistrates had supported actions against irregular practitioners under obscenity laws in the 1870s, government officials often had doubts that prosecutions involving medical material would be successful and advised against them on this basis too. In 1896, a group of medical practitioners seeking obscenity charges against Allinson for distributing his pamphlet A Book for Married Women received this response from an official:

The outcome of an 1898 case against Lambert and Son for selling a copy of its manual The Wife’s Medical Advertiser, a contraceptive device, and an illustrated price list affirmed this official’s doubts. The magistrate threw the Lambert case out on the grounds that if works advocating contraception could be sold widely, information about how to practise it could not be suppressed.Footnote ¹¹²

Anti-vice societies also mounted little opposition to trade in contraception literature. Apart from the actions against Truelove in 1877 and 1878, the Society for the Suppression of Vice did not prosecute distributors unless they sold pornography. The Society also did not survive for very long after Truelove’s trial: the bad publicity generated by Collette’s embezzlement case brought about the organization’s unofficial collapse in 1880.Footnote ¹¹³ The National Vigilance Association (1885–1953), often seen as a successor to the Society, was not especially interested in trying to suppress contraception literature, either. Like other late nineteenth-century social purity groups, it focused its efforts on combating prostitution, child abuse, and sexual assault. Although the Association joined medical practitioners in championing the Indecent Advertisements Act (1889), no discussion of contraception literature or other medical material appears in minutes from its meetings.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Association’s few actions to suppress obscene material, clustered in the years immediately following its establishment, focused on literary works, photographs, and artworks.Footnote ¹¹⁵ These actions were led by its secretary, William Coote, the mercurial journalist W. T. Stead, and Charles Hastings Collette, all of whom were eager to make (or, in Collette’s case, re-make) their names as moral crusaders – and make some money – under the Association’s banner.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Prosecution was not a priority for medical groups, either. Many regular practitioners thought that practising contraception was immoral. However, they were far more concerned about trade in abortifacients. Abortion remained a common method of controlling fertility in the late-nineteenth century, but it was illegal; methods to self-induce it were dangerous and unreliable; and abortions performed in secret by trained surgeons could be prohibitively expensive. William Hitchman, a Liverpool-based physician, reported in 1883 that prices ranged from three to thirty pounds.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This maintained a flourishing market for (sometimes deliberately fraudulent) patent medicines that promised safe, effective abortions.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Medical journalists railed at advertisements for these medicines, and, as we have seen, lobbied the government to crack down on them alongside advertisements for treatments for venereal disease. Trade in contraception literature did not command nearly the same level of opposition. This seems be partly because medical practitioners did not see contraception advocacy as a threat to public health, and partly because they had long argued that controlling fertility was not a medical issue.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Although the latter view began to change in the 1870s, medical men do not seem to have considered trade in advice on contraception a threat to their profession.

Medical opposition to Allbutt’s and Allinson’s publications had more to do with their style of medical practice than the fact that they sold contraception literature. As Ann Stuart has shown, the General Medical Council’s decision to strike Allbutt from the Medical Register for publishing The Wife’s Handbook was strongly influenced by its concern about the wide variety of “advertisements bound up with the book.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Allbutt claimed that the advertisements’ main purpose was to cover the cost of printing, and not to generate “monetary profit or with the view of attracting patients to himself.”Footnote ¹²¹ However, the sheer number of advertisements in the Handbook, and Allbutt’s endorsement of so many of the products they featured in its text, made this claim very dubious. As Stuart points out, the question that the committee set up to investigate Allbutt’s pamphlet ultimately asked the Council to rule on was “whether the book was a fair medical treatise or an indecent advertisement, and was it a book so injurious to the public in point of health as well as morals, and so evil in its tendency as regards to the profession, that its publication would be considered to be ‘infamous conduct in a professional respect’.”Footnote ¹²² We see, yet again, a conflation of indecency and quackery in this question: concerns about the effect that Allbutt’s commercialism could have on the profession’s reputation were collapsed with concerns about the Handbook’s moral effects.

The General Medical Council did not seek to censure Allbutt. However, after it was compelled to investigate The Wife’s Handbook, it seized the opportunity to make an example of a practitioner who not only advocated a practice that many medical men considered immoral but was also embracing partnerships with companies that sold drugs and medical devices during a period in which the Council was beginning to see this as a major problem for the profession. Many medical men took money from drug and medical device companies to endorse products in their own publications, in trade catalogues, and in company-produced pamphlets, handbills, and advertisements during the 1880s.Footnote ¹²³ These arrangements represented a welcome stream of revenue for medical practitioners. However, as Jones has shown, leading medical men considered them dangerous to patients, to medical careers, and to the medical profession. Endorsements for commercial products could “damage an individual practitioner’s career should the product prove to be useless or dangerous … by bringing their knowledge and expertise into question,” and they could arouse doubt in the medical profession’s commitment to health over profit.Footnote ¹²⁴ Opposition to endorsement deals mounted rapidly. By 1900, the General Medical Council had struck around thirty practitioners from its register for endorsing medical products in print.Footnote ¹²⁵

Efforts to get Allinson charged for selling A Book for Married Women throughout the last half of 1890s further suggest that it was not opposition to contraception but concern about defining medicine’s relationship with commerce that drove rare medical attempts to get practitioners in trouble with the law for distributing birth control literature. In 1892, Allinson was struck from the Medical Register for “systematically seeking to attract practice by a system of extensive public advertisements” which contained “his name, address, and qualifications, and invitations to persons in need of medical aid to consult him professionally.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Allinson refused to stop practising under the title Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons after his expulsion. Multiple actions against him for violating the Medical Act were ineffectual. In 1896, two years after A Book for Married Women was published, his former colleagues changed course and began to hound the authorities to charge Allinson with distributing obscene material.Footnote ¹²⁷ In 1901, these efforts finally succeeded: a police officer posing as a seventeen-year-old girl obtained one of Allinson’s pamphlets through the post, and charged him with distributing obscene material.Footnote ¹²⁸ Allinson was fined £250 and his stock was destroyed. However, the episode did not, as writers for the Lancet had hoped, stop Allinson from practising medicine.Footnote ¹²⁹

Malthusians presented the Hicklin test as a danger to free speech. However, its impact on the publication and distribution of works on contraception was largely indirect. In a context in which authorities had little interest in suppressing trade in contraception literature, the test’s influence is clearest in how it was used to authorize contraception advocacy. The fact that sellers of contraception literature could be charged with distributing obscene material does seem to have genuinely worried birth controllers, at least for a time. The Malthusian League’s publishing strategies, which maintained a kind of plausible deniability by keeping trade in practical information about contraception at arm’s length from the organization, evince careful thinking about how to protect the League during a period in which obscenity laws were applied creatively and haphazardly, and the risks of selling practical literature on contraception could be hard to gauge. However, the League’s integration of language that alluded to the test in its mission statement, and social protestors’ tireless framing of contraception pamphlets as illegal amid the massive expansion of the contraceptive devices industry and a booming trade in practical works on how to control reproduction, emphasize its powerful function as a framing device.

In 1877, it was a device that enabled Bradlaugh and Besant to distance contraception from the pornography trade, align it with a cause around which most social protestors could rally, and attract enormous publicity to the cause. During the 1880s and 1890s, it operated as a device that helped birth-controllers and contraceptives manufacturers frame themselves as different from the other medical entrepreneurs: they were not self-seekers, but visionaries, working tirelessly in the shadow of “the spirit of persecution” to save people from poverty and misery.Footnote ¹³⁰ Malthusians were ultimately unable to fully distance contraception from its associations with sexual immorality. As historians have often noted, their literature was never popular with working-class readers for this reason, and condoms seem to have retained their seedy reputation. Marie Stopes opined that Bradlaugh and Besant’s emphasis on birth-control pamphlets’ vulnerability to destruction under obscenity laws actually strengthened these associations and nearly “killed” the movement.Footnote ¹³¹ However, framing information about contraception as suppressed speech undeniably attracted support and publicity too.

Sexual scientists, whose circles overlapped with those of Malthusians and other sex radicals in the 1890s, faced a more difficult task than Bradlaugh and Besant had as they sought to establish sexuality in general and same-sex desire in particular as respectable foci of medical and scientific enquiry, to win the support of the public, and to galvanize social and legal change. The same concerns about damaging print associations that had plagued birth controllers and regular medical practitioners plagued sexual scientists, whose work was promoted, reprinted, compiled, and imitated by publishers who they worked with and often shared values with, but feared would imperil their ambitions. Sexual scientists took strategies for defining publications and causes examined in this and the previous chapters and adapted them for their own purposes.