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BOOK REVIEW: Joss Marsh. WORD CRIMES: BLASPHEMY, CULTURE, AND LITERATURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

1999; Indiana University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.1999.42.3.544

1527-2052

Kate Flint,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Reviewed by: Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England Kate Flint (bio) Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, by Joss Marsh; pp. xii + 431. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, $55.00, $22.50 paper, £43.95, £17.95 paper. In After Strange Gods (1934), T. S. Eliot lamented that the concept of blasphemy had, by the twentieth century, lost its force. Rather than signifying heresy, taking the name of God in vain, it now meant no more than a breach of good taste, a lapse in language. The story which Joss Marsh’s Word Crimes has to tell is, in short, the story of blasphemy’s shift from religious sinfulness to class crime, a shift coterminous with the rise of respectability as a Victorian value. But the narrative, as this fascinating book demonstrates, is a far more complex one than such a summary would suggest. Blasphemy is hard to identify with precision, located as it is between obscenity, and treason and sedition, between private and public contexts. “Like Michel Foucault’s deceptively simple concept of transgression, blasphemy marks the moving boundary line between the permissible and the prohibited” (7). Necessarily, Marsh traces its relations to sexual language (whilst firmly resisting the trap of relating everything to Victorian desires to control sexuality), to euphemism and innuendo on the one hand, and to radical politics on the other. Like any act of utterance—or silence— [End Page 544] blasphemy is also inevitably bound up with issues of authority. The second major narrative tells of the shift from the Bible to literature as the preeminent source of cultural and social value, with literature becoming an authority with the backing of the law far earlier than has previously been recognised. By mid-century, the decisive schism was between “taste” and “vulgarity.” The question of style came to count for more than religious content per se. The clear correlation was that to write in a plain manner, so that one would be widely understood, was also to have no “literary” standard—or excuse sanctioned by class-based access to education—behind which to shelter. The fact that, by the 1880s, doubt and unbelief were in fact widespread counted for nothing when it came to the opportunity for the exercise of “class discrimination, property thinking, and political motives” that the invocation of the blasphemy laws allowed (154). Blasphemy’s legal status provides, in the form of trials, the perfect petits récits through which these somewhat grander narratives can be told. Marsh moves from the case of William Hone, tried three times on three consecutive days in 1817 for three parodies of the catechism, the creed, and the litany; through Richard Carlile, publisher of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1793–96); Henry Hetherington; Edward Moxon, publisher of Shelley’s Complete Works (1840), including the atheistical Queen Mab; and George Holyoake, connected both to Owenite socialism and the Oracle of Reason, the first openly atheist journal to be brought out in England, in the early 1840s. She gives very full weight to the Freethinker case of 1883, when G. W. Foote was prosecuted for this comic penny paper. Throughout all this, familiar texts suddenly take on new resonances. Culture and Anarchy (1869) is placed in the context of the formation of the National Secular Society and the threats to High Culture offered by Charles Bradlaugh; the title of Leslie Stephen’s Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking (1873) is revealed to be a homage to the labels chosen by Foote’s mid-century descendants. Above all, in a chapter of its own, the scandal caused by Jude the Obscure (1895), in which blasphemy “is both subject and willed effect” (269), is convincingly reconstituted. Marsh links the book’s hero back to the case of Thomas Pooley, who, in 1857, became blasphemy’s one rural legal martyr. More broadly, she uses Jude to bring together the strands dealing with demotic voice and with plain speaking, with class crime and with offense against literary values, which run through her whole study. Apart from a few minor errors (a “Dicken’s” and a “Wasteland”) and some occasional over-simplifications...