Long Time Burning

Donald Thomas was an academic historian of crime. He was the author of several studies of the criminal underworld as well as biographies of Robert Browning, the Marquis de Sade, Henry Fielding, and Lewis Carroll.

Reviews of the first publication:‘A detailed, intelligent and readable account of the operation of literary censorship, particularly over the last two and a half centuries. It has useful bibliographies, and appendices which include some of the more important legal and official documents and extracts from material censored at various times.’— Richard Hoggart, New Statesman‘Donald Thomas’s history of literary censorship in England from the fifteenth century to the present day is a serious and largely entertaining book. For the most part he has steered a successful course between the aridity of legal history and evasiveness of grand generalizations about the “spirit of the age”. His narrative is crammed with facts, statistics and law. But it is enlivened, too, by the many exploits of those often eccentric extremists who campaigned for and against various forms of censorship; by some interesting pictures and by an appendix two hundred pages long containing illustrative materials.’— Michael Holroyd, The Times

• Preface 1. The Fear of Literature 2. Censorship before Publication: 1476–1695 3. Enemies of the State: 1695–1760 4. Blasphemy in an Age of Reason 5. Obscene Libel and the Reformation of Manners 6. Liberty versus Licentiousness: 1760–1792 7. Guardians of Public Morality 8. Political Censorship: A Fight to the Finish 1792–1832 9. Guardians of Public Morality 10. Victoria: (1) ‘If all Mankind minus One…’ J. S. Mill (1859) 11. Victoria: (2) ‘Smacks and Laughter echoed through the Grove…’ The Pearl (September 1879) 12. The Twentieth Century: ‘Plus Ca Change…’