C Censorship and Controversy

Censorship and Controversy

Not everything committed to print meets with universal approval, and sometimes readers register their dislike of an author’s opinion directly on the pages of a book. Such interventions add richness to a book’s story, and show how ideas have been received, negotiated and contested.

An example is found in a magnificent de-luxe folio of the works of the Roman writer Seneca, edited by the renowned humanist scholar Justus Lipsius, and published in Antwerp in 1615. Despite being an exemplary work of scholarship, an early reader has taken issue with the portrait of Lipsius ahead of the text. This portrait, based upon a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, has been mutilated, the eyes scratched out by a sharp point. It is impossible to say exactly why the admired Lipsius should be thus attacked in effigy, except to note that he switched between Catholicism and Protestantism several times over the course of his career. Perhaps in an age of confessional upheaval (the Thirty Years’ War broke out in 1618), such fluidity in religious conviction was likely to attract contempt.

Another example comes from the English Civil War. Joshua Sprigg, chaplain to the parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax, published an admiring account of his master’s campaigns up to the year 1647. Partial in tone, Anglia Rediviva was aimed at readers on one side of the political divide, but inevitably fell into the hands of those on the other. In the copy owned by the College, a Royalist sympathiser offers acerbic comments upon Sprigg’s text. Where the title page describes Fairfax as ‘Captain General of all the Parliaments Forces in England’, the disgruntled Royalist adds ‘Being a Pack of Presbyterian Knaves’. When it informs the reader that it has been ‘Compiled for the Publique good by Joshua Sprigge, M. A.’, the same hand snipes ‘who Murder’d the Best of Kings’. But the Royalist does not have the last say, because his comments have been scribbled out by a later reader. The same pattern of comment and censorship continues in the dedicatory letter which Sprigg directs ‘To the Honourable William Lenthal, Speaker of the Honourable House of Commons’ – to which the Royalist responds ‘Who Dethron’d the Best of Kings’. Again, this has been scored out, and glossed ‘as ye Lying Jacobits and Torys say’. The handwriting and vocabulary of this rebuff date from the 1690s or early 1700s, half a century after the Civil War – an illustration of how long political recriminations can linger. The controversy was still bitter in 1802, the date of William Butler’s Arithmetical Questions for ‘The Use of Young Ladies’. Butler was a progressive teacher, delivering lessons on history, commerce, geography and science, then posing mathematical questions based upon dates or statistics. But as a Quaker, Butler described kings such as Charles I or James II as tyrants, a view alarming to the monarchist owner of the College’s copy of Butler’s book who expunged whole passages of the author’s nonconformist commentary in thick, black ink. (Ironically, one of the censored passages concerns the freedom of the press). The book bears the signature of a certain Ann Elizabeth Cunningham. Did one of Ann’s parents take umbrage at Butler’s opinions, and seek to protect her from radical views? Or was it rather Ann herself who wanted to blot out Butler’s troubling ideas?