Culture in the United Kingdom
Novels, plays, films and songs that put sin, morality and censorship on stage.
All topics · 10
Measure for Measure: Shakespeare's play about a law against fornication
In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, first recorded at the court of James I on 26 December 1604, the deputy Angelo revives a long-unused Viennese law and condemns Claudio to death for getting his betrothed, Juliet, pregnant before their marriage was made public. The play uses the case to question strict moral law, hypocrisy and mercy.
View the topic →Tess of the d'Urbervilles: why Hardy called his 'fallen' heroine 'a pure woman'
Thomas Hardy subtitled his 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented' to argue that his heroine, who bears a child outside marriage after Alec d'Urberville's assault or seduction, remained morally innocent. The serial in The Graphic was bowdlerised, and critics condemned the novel as immoral. It remains a key text on the Victorian double standard.
View the topic →Jude the Obscure: the novel that made Thomas Hardy stop writing novels
Published in 1895 after an abridged serial titled Hearts Insurgent, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure follows Jude Fawley and his cousin Sue Bridehead, who leaves her husband to live with Jude and has children with him outside marriage. Its sexual frankness and attacks on marriage and the Church shocked readers, and Hardy wrote no more fiction.
View the topic →Lady Chatterley on trial: the 1960 case that changed British publishing
In October 1960 Penguin Books was prosecuted at the Old Bailey under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a 1928 novel about an aristocrat's affair with her husband's gamekeeper. The defence invoked the Act's 'public good' clause, and on 2 November the jury acquitted Penguin. The Lords debated the case that December.
View the topic →A Harlot's Progress: Hogarth's moral tale of eighteenth-century London
A Harlot's Progress is a 1732 series by William Hogarth, issued as engravings, that follows Moll Hackabout, a young woman who arrives in London from the country, falls into prostitution and dies young. Hogarth used it to satirise the moral corruption and social injustice of Georgian England. Its success made his name, and A Rake's Progress followed.
View the topic →Holy Willie's Prayer: Burns against the kirk session
Holy Willie's Prayer, written by Robert Burns in 1785, is a Scots dramatic monologue in which a self-righteous elder praises his own salvation while condemning his neighbours. It mocks William Fisher, a Mauchline elder who pursued Burns's friend Gavin Hamilton before the kirk session. Burns himself was summoned by that session in 1786 over Jean Armour's pregnancy.
View the topic →The 'fallen woman' in Victorian painting: Hunt, Egg and the double standard
The 'fallen woman' was a woman shown as ruined by sex outside marriage, a favourite subject of Victorian moral painting. In The Awakening Conscience (1853) William Holman Hunt depicts a kept mistress rising from her lover's lap, a reading Ruskin explained in The Times. Augustus Egg's triptych Past and Present (1858) traces a family's collapse after a wife's adultery.
View the topic →A Taste of Honey and the kitchen sink: unmarried pregnancy on the British stage
Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey at 19; the 1958 play, set in the industrial north of England, portrays an illegitimate pregnancy with humour and sadness. Tony Richardson filmed it in 1961. With Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (novel 1958, film 1960), it brought working-class sex and relationships outside marriage into mainstream British culture.
View the topic →Virtue, seduction and foundlings in the English novel of the 1700s
The early English novel was obsessed with virtue and its loss. Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) boasts of a heroine five times a wife and twelve years a whore who dies penitent. Richardson's Pamela (1740) rewards a servant's resistance, while Clarissa (1747–48) ends in tragedy. Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) makes a foundling, presumed illegitimate, its hero.
View the topic →Seduced and abandoned: fallen women in the Victorian novel
Victorian novelists often told the story of the 'fallen woman', seduced and abandoned, to test their readers' sympathy. George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) follows Hetty Sorrel's ruin after an affair with the squire's heir. Thomas Hardy returned to the theme in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and, most boldly, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
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