Kama Sutra - Lord Campbell's Act And The Kama Sutra

In 1857, the new sheriff made his play. Well, it was a Lord Chief Justice actually and it wasn't some wild west shoot out but you need to understand the point. Things were about to change in merry, old Great Britain. It seems a certain unsavory group of individuals had infiltrated the world of Victorian era Englishmen and deemed it necessary to bring such dangerous thoughts as sexual promiscuity or even that evil of evils, contraception, to the light of day.

These unsavory folks would later bring in such tomes as the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra and these books were a danger to the moral minds of the young and impressionable people of the English countryside. This was a dangerous poison to Lord Campell's way of thinking and he just was not going to let things go without doing something about it.

Lord Campbell assembled his posse, The Society for The Suppression of Vice, a group formed in 1802 for a stated purpose 'to check the spread of open vice and immorality, and more especially to preserve the minds of the young from contamination by exposure to the corrupting influence of impure and licentious books, prints and other publications.'

The group, like most societies for change, was pretty much powerless. They had no true control over the vices they were trying to eradicate and were not even allowed to destroy these corrupting influences when they found them. Lord Campbell was going to change that. He had to protect his people from this poison 'more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic.

Lord Campbell Makes A Play

Lord Campbell was presiding over a trial for the sale of pornography in his court one day as the House of Lords was debating how to restrict the sale of certain poisons. The coincidence struck him and he decided to make his play. He originated the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and brought this before the House of Commons to argue the case for making it law.

Despite opposition from a few who recognized how dangerous such laws can truly be, Lord Campbell did get the act passed into law after assurances that it was intended only to root out 'works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind.'

This new act provided teeth for the formerly impotent Society for The Suppression of Vice. With their new found fangs, they could tear at the throat of promiscuous encroacher's to society. Lord Campbell had opened a way to allow destruction of materials deemed inappropriate and dangerous to the minds of 'the youth, the women and the feeble minded.'

Books such as Burton's Kama Sutra would never see the light of day with this new found power. This act gave them further power in that it was now a crime, punishable by severe penalty including prison terms and hard labor, to even publish such a book.

The Quick And The Dead

Lord Campbell assumed his law had made the world right again. He used it to quickly send away people he considered a threat including William Dugdale. Mister Dugdale was a fighter as well and in the court room he protested he was innocent, made pleas for mercy based on his children's need for a father and even went so far as to threaten the court with a knife. His pleas fell on deaf ears and stone hearts, however. William Dugdale was sentenced and later died in the Clerkenwell house of correction.

These occurrences did not go without notice to the folks that Lord Campbell considered so unsavory. Humans have a tendency to guard their own necks and imprisonment is not usually sought after. So they had to make a play of their own. People such as Sir Richard Burton thought long and hard about the best ways to circumvent these irritating restrictions on their freedom.

In the end, they devised a plan. Secret societies such as the Kama Shastra Society were formed with an aim of publishing such works as the Kama Sutra under the guise of scholarly research for society members. Further pains were taken to insure anonymity of those involved such as publishing title pages with the authors initial transposed to throw off the vice hunters of the day.

In the end, who won? That is hard to say. Richard Burton's Kama Sutra is perfectly legal to own, publish or sell today but it didn't become so until long after his death. Lord Campbell's Act has been revised several times but still maintains a semblance of it's original fire. So maybe what we learned in the end is this, life is too short to worry over what another mans vices are.

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