Hannah Roche

Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless accounts of The Well and its trials, with Douglas’s “resonant acid sound bite” generally and mistakenly taken as evidence of widespread homophobia and mainstream moral panic. For Hall, however, the “poison” part of Douglas’s comment—which he borrowed from Lord Campbell, orchestrator of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act—may not have been as remarkable or as objectionable as the “healthy boy or a healthy girl.” Responding to an enquiry from literary critic Gorham Munson in 1934, six years after The Well’s publication and UK ban, Hall made it quite clear that her novel had not been written for children, healthy or otherwise: “I consider that the young should be guarded in their homes, that parents and guardians should be the only censors. I, personally, have never set out to write books that are suitable for the nursery.” Hall’s acerbic (if belated) rejoinder to Douglas is followed by an unexpected leap from reality into metaphor. Having considered parental responsibilities toward real-life child readers, Hall goes on to denounce the irresponsible creation of “dirty, unloved, lewd” book-babies: