James Longenbach at The Nation:
On November 13, 1915, following a hearing at London’s Bow Street magistrates’ court, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was suppressed under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The magistrate, Sir John Dickinson, ordered that the 1,011 copies of the novel seized from the publisher be destroyed. Speaking for the prosecution, Herbert Muskett expressed “the most profound regret that it should have been necessary…to bring this disgusting, detestable and pernicious work under the notice of the Court.” The publisher was ordered to pay court costs of £10, 10s.
By the time The Rainbow was pulped, its 30-year-old author had published four novels, a play, a book of short stories and a volume of poems. Undaunted by the novel’s suppression, David Herbert Lawrence would in the next decade alone publish another play; two more books of stories; two travel books about Italy; two translations of the Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga; a groundbreaking work of criticism about a national literature of which not only most Englishmen but many Americans were unaware (Studies in Classic American Literature); two works of speculative psychology (Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious); five novels, including his greatest, a sequel to The Rainbow called Women in Love; and five books of poems, including one of the most brilliant books written by an English-language poet in the twentieth century, Birds, Beasts and Flowers.
more here.
