Ninety years before the Lady Chatterley trial, the Old Bailey was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Fruits of Philosophy was the sort of thing that would corrupt wives and servants. Written in simple, unshowy language by an American physician, Fruits set out the basics of contraception, principally by means of “the female” self-administering a spermicidal douche post-coitus. The tone was sensible and brisk, and about as far from a turn-on as could be imagined.
Still, as far as the British authorities were concerned, the suggestion that married couples might want to have sex for any purpose other than making babies was downright obscene. The biggest fear, so horrible that it could barely be articulated in polite company, was that, armed with the wherewithal to avoid pregnancy, women might choose to steer clear of the drudgery of marriage while still enjoying “sensual passions”. Rather like men, then, who had been doing something similar for centuries (mostly minus the prophylactic) using the services of sex workers, without anyone suggesting that civilisation was about to crumble.
Standing in the dock was Annie Besant, a pretty, intelligent, public-spirited clergyman’s wife, the sort of woman whom any gentleman of the press or, indeed, the jury bench was likely to admire. Besant was charged, along with her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh, with selling The Fruits of Philosophy at the modest cost of six pence, making it easily available to all who needed it. Besant conducted her own defence with extraordinary assurance, calling expert medical witnesses to give heart-rending testimony as to the consequences for working-class families of being unable to control their fertility.
It wasn’t just having too many mouths to feed that was the problem, but also the results of cramming too many bodies into too small a space – diphtheria, tuberculosis and, ironically, given that this trial was all about “immorality”, incestuous sexual relations, too. And then there was the havoc wreaked on women by continually giving birth – painful prolapses and simmering infections. In measured and elegant rhetoric, Besant laid out a Malthusian nightmare for the court, one in which thousands of poorly nourished children were culled each year by disease and starvation. How much better to stop the misery arising in the first place.
The Fruits of Philosophy trial is one of the great set pieces of Victorian social history, a collision of all its major themes and tropes. There’s the court setting with its Gilbert and Sullivan overtones, overseen by the louche lord chief justice Sir Alexander Cockburn, who could double as a comic baritone. Then there’s the chorus of the jury, all sensible fellows who come ready to condemn this filthy book but who end up falling in love with the delightful and radiantly pure Besant. There’s even Besant’s high-minded co-defendant, Bradlaugh, a man from the wrong side of the tracks who has raised himself by ceaseless study and self-improvement. (If this really were a Gilbert and Sullivan opera then Bradlaugh would have discovered in the last five minutes that he was actually nobly born. He wasn’t, although he did eventually manage to get into parliament.)
Michael Meyer plays up to all these stereotypes and even adds a comic commentary of his own. Thus, the Victorians enjoyed “shagging like rabbits” while Besant was “a badass”. This effortful attempt to sound relevant is unnecessary, though. Besant’s story is quite powerful enough without all the trimmings. Despite her extraordinary appearance in court, which won plaudits nationwide, she and Bradlaugh lost their case on a technicality. The following year Besant’s husband, from whom she was legally separated, successfully applied to remove her much-loved daughter from her, on the grounds that she was an unfit mother. That she managed to endure and even thrive in these intolerably coercive conditions makes her far too interesting and admirable to reduce to a clumsy contemporary epithet. At a time when reproductive rights are being rolled back globally, as well as worryingly close to home, her story needs retelling until its message is set in stone.
• A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer is published by WH Allen (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
