Books have always been rude and tendentious and apt to make people mad. Deploy a sense of perspective and our own times, in which Roald Dahl is rewritten and Charles Dickens is excommunicated, don’t seem special at all. In 1925, to take just one example, rumours reached the authorities in Cambridge that a young university lecturer called FR Leavis was intending to discuss Ulysses by James Joyce with his students – a novel that had fallen foul of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. And sure enough, the police soon arrived in college to examine this wunderkind’s bookshelves, a scene that’s really quite funny if you picture it (all those tooled leather volumes by Jane Austen and Henry James). But they weren’t laughing, and nor was the home secretary, who now threatened the university with prosecution. Leavis’s little seminar, then, did not go ahead – and nor did any others, anywhere, or not for a long time. When John Sutherland, who relates this story in his new book, was a teenager in the 1950s, his local library still kept its copy of Ulysses, complete with five pages razored out of it, carefully hidden from public view.
But still, it does feel to me, and to many others, that we are once again growing less liberal, and it’s into this territory that Sutherland now steps with Triggered Literature: Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare. In some ways, of course, this is an obvious place for him to loiter awhile. The so-called trigger warnings lately issued by some institutions – Mansfield Park will upset you! Macbeth will make you feel ill! – are bound to be of interest to a man like him, after all. In the years after the Chatterley trial in 1960, he was a groovy young fellow, taking full advantage of all the new freedoms; as he rose up the academic ranks, it was his job to oversee the curriculum (he is emeritus Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London); the novels of his beloved William Makepeace Thackeray are now deemed to be horribly racist.
