ABSTRACT
There were also a plethora of high profile prosecutions and a steady stream of less high profile ones. It was partly the perceived repressiveness of this legal regime which provoked D. H. Lawrence to launch, early in the twentieth century, his blistering attack on 'the grey ones, left over from the last century, the century of mealy mouthed liars ... of purity and the dirty little secret'. 2 Our own more permissive age is often contrasted (favourably or unfavourably) with what is perceived in the popular imagination to be this repressed, repressive and yet hypocritical regimen. 3
Despite the hyperbole of the nineteenth century rhetoric it will be argued that the legal response to obscenity was in fact deeply equivocal and that
this ambivalence was largely due to anxieties and tensions which centred around the public/private dichotomy. It will be intimated, in passing, that many of the same tensions and anxieties which helped sculpt the Victorian legal response to pornography have affected, and still affect, our own.
