My thanks
once more for the opportunity to be your guest blogger this month. This will be
my final post.
The
Strange Symbiosis of Libel and the Popular Press
In late
1920, London daily newspapers had a field day recounting the scene before the
King’s Bench and a special jury. A slander case pitted writer Marguerite
Radclyffe-Hall against St. George Lane Fox-Pitt, son of famed archeologist
Augustus Pitt-Rivers. Fox-Pitt had recently learned from Admiral Troubridge
that Radclyffe-Hall had taken up with the Admiral’s estranged wife. Fox-Pitt
used this information to discredit Radclyffe-Hall at the Society of Psychical
Research, purportedly calling her a “grossly immoral woman.” In court, Fox-Pitt
denied that he had ever called the plaintiff “immoral.” Or, he equivocated, if
he had done so, he had not meant it maliciously. Indeed, if he meant it at all,
the claim pertained to her work, not to Radclyffe-Hall herself. According to
the Daily Mirror, the courtroom burst
into laughter as Fox-Pitt attempted to describe the immorality implicit in
Radclyffe-Hall’s psychic account of a “spook horse” bathing in heaven. Not even
the judge seemed able to move past the strangeness of spiritualist study to
follow Fox-Pitt’s point [1]. Radclyffe-Hall won her slander suit, receiving
£500 damages, a decision upheld on appeal in 1921 [2]. She won thanks to the
little-known 1891 Slander of Women Act that allowed women (and only women) in
England and Wales to sue for sexual slander without having to prove damages.
The law would remain on the books until 2013.
I
have been thinking quite a bit about this Act since starting research on
reputation. It gets mentioned regularly in legal primers as one of the few
caveats in British defamation law. Whereas the law generally requires proof of
financial damages in cases of oral slander, the 1891 Act exempted women, since the
quintessential middle-class Victorian woman presumably had no market income to
lose. There are only a few hits when one searches for cases in the law reports,
not leaving the historian much to draw from. If one shifts one’s view from law
reports to the newspapers, however, one finds several dozen cases over the
law’s 122-year life, the bulk of them taking place between its 1891 passage and
1940. With each expansion of the online British Newspaper Archive, I find more.
Some of the stories are set up as general-interest stories, while other slander
of women cases were less visible. Editors clearly deemed Radclyffe-Hall’s trial
to be good entertainment for readers, and covered it on the first or second
pages of their papers.
As
a historical repository of courtroom drama, newspapers are unparalleled sources.
But they are far from being neutral parties, of course. It is perhaps hard to
find an area of research in which this is more the case than in questions
surrounding defamation. Members of the press were outspoken in their critique of
libel law at every stage. Nevertheless, journalist critics of libel laws rarely
advocated the outright abolition of defamation law. Radclyffe-Hall’s case and Kelly v. Sherlock (see my previous post) offer useful ways of
thinking about newspapers’ relationship with defamation cases and how
historians might take the relationship into account.
Radclyffe-Hall’s
case was a society case. It was entertaining, and it would sell well. Thanks to
amendments to the libel laws in the 1880s, news outlets could report on court
proceedings so long as the reporting was done accurately and without malice. Targeting
an ever-wider readership, especially among women, mass newspapers could bank on
the appeal of a social celebrity like Radclyffe-Hall. The seeming
ridiculousness of the whole affair likely made the courtroom drama all the more
appealing. The laughter in the courtroom stood in for newspaper editorializing,
which would have been off limits—or, rather, open to libel charges in turn.
Indeed, the entire scene underscores an implicit agreement about the bounds of
civility in the period. It was permissible to laugh at Fox-Pitt for his unchivalrous
and inept condemnation of Radclyffe-Hall. His inhibitions about addressing her
sexuality in the courtroom can be attributed to the Slander of Women Act’s
blanket prohibition on criticism of a woman’s virtue. But the courtroom and
wider public also seemed remarkably at ease with Radclyffe-Hall’s well-known lesbianism
a decade before she published her seminal (and censored) Well of Loneliness. It helped, of course, that the case involved a
psychical society, not politics; the stakes were lower. This could not be said
about Kelly v. Sherlock.
Sherlock
got into trouble not because he published about Kelly but because of the manner
in which he discussed Kelly. Kelly was indeed fair game. He’d made himself a
target of public interest, as Baron Bramwell ruled in the trial at the
Manchester assizes in August 1865. While there might be a privilege in
sermonizing to one’s flock (Bramwell was doubtful, but upheld it), there was no
pastoral privilege to criticize civil officials. By so doing, Bramwell held,
Kelly opened himself to public rebuke [3]. Sherlock’s infraction, then, was not
criticizing Kelly, but doing so in an overly vitriolic manner. It was a
contemptuous attack on his professional persona. Newspapers that reported on
Kelly and Sherlock could do so without feeling that they were betraying their
profession or inviting trouble themselves because, to them, the case helped
clarify the boundaries of legitimate journalistic practice. Journalists were
not unqualified defenders of journalistic latitude, and saw no reason to be so.
They were comfortable with a legally-enforced code of journalistic civility.
It
is significant when even those with an interest in criticizing a norm assent to
it in principle, since this reflects the power of a social norm. On my bus ride
home today, I was reading the 1967 Report of the Joint Committee on Censorship
of the Theatre. In his testimony to the committee, Kenneth Tynan, then fighting to have Hochhuth’s Soldiers staged,
demanded the end of censorship. His phrasing early in his testimony is of note:
“there should be no restriction short of libel on the presentation of
historical characters living or dead” [4].
[1]
Daily Express, November 19, 1920, p.
1; Daily Mirror, November 19, 1920,
p. 2.
[2]
"Court
of Appeal." Times, March 16, 1921, p. 5.
[3]
686 Kelly v
Sherlock, Queen's Bench Division, 13 June 1866, (1865-66) L.R. 1 Q.B. 686, 689.
[4]
Testimony of Kenneth Tynan January 24, 1967, as found in the Minutes of
Evidence appended to the Joint Committee on Censorship of the Theatre, p. 80.
--Caroline Shaw
