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What You Can Learn from a Pirate Edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

July 25, 2010 in intellectual property, literature, modernism, obscenity

All images here are taken of from a copy Lady Chatterley’s Lover, owned and housed by Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. The images here presented in no way infringe on the copyright of the work and are consistent with the “Use, Reproduction, and Publication of Materials” guidelines outlined by the Special Collection Library.

Rare Book School

I was recently fortunate enough to attend a course during the first session of UVA’s Rare Book School on Printed Books Since 1800. The course was great and I highly recommend it; the particular advantage of the course (and, from what I understand, of all RBS courses) is the hands-on experience with a broad variety of materials. Most of the material covered in the course is presented with greater thoroughness in Philip Gaskell’s monumental A New Introduction to Bibliography. But what even the most attentive reading of Gaskell can’t get you is the experience of handling type, or of seeing a variety of different items arranged all in one place for comparison and handling: different bindings, different illustration processes, et cetera. This is the great strength of RBS. The diversity of the audience was also a virtue of the class; scholars, librarians, and book-sellers are all in attendance, and their different attitudes proved genuinely surprising.

The hands-on nature of RBS makes it difficult to pass the experience along (in tweets, for example, or a blog post). Part of the week, though, is spent on an independent bibliography project, attending to the bibliographic detail of a single book object. I used the opportunity afforded by the RBS class to have a look at a pirate edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The result, I think, helped deepen my understanding of Lawrence’s fascinating appeal to the materiality of printed books in his essay A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and also provided an interesting insight into the intersection between the history of obscenity and the history of reading.

A Funereal Volume

Book piracy is a fascinating topic in general and it is crucially important to any understanding of the history of obscenity. While many works were pirated with great frequency (Sherlock Holmes stories, the Oxford Edition of the Bible, etc; major British works were ripe for American piracy throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though an informal courtesy system among publishers kept this from growing out of control), book piracy and obscenity thrived together in the early twentieth century. In part this is because they both used the same semi-legitimate channels of distribution and sale. It was also a peculiar effect of Anglo-American copyright law which offered no protection for “obscene” works.

No individual case better illustrates this confluence of obscenity law and copyright than that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The market in pirate editions of Lawrence’s novel which emerged immediately after the first, 1928 Florentine edition of the novel was printed, prompted Lawrence to authorize a “popular edition” of the novel, printed in Paris and selling for (the relatively cheap) 60 francs. (The political geography of censorship in the early twentieth century is itself a topic worthy of analysis.) This cheap edition, bound in paper wrappers, vied (mostly unsuccessfully) with pirate editions for readers in England and America where, technically, none of the editions could be legally sold.

The popular edition was printed from a photographic copy of the Florentine edition (ironic given the way Lawrence picks out photographic reproduction for particular scorn in his discussion of piracies). To the photographically reproduced text of the novel, Lawrence prepended an essay, “My Skirmish with Jolly Roger: Written Especially as an Introduction to this Popular Edition.” This essay, in turn, would form the basis for Lawrence’s much longer reflection on Lady Chatterley, A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. (This fact alone is worthy of greater comment; but I’ll abstain here so I can get to the pictures). In the essay Lawrence explains how the emergence of piracies necessitated the release of the Popular Edition. The essay offers a uniquely fascinating historical moment where literary history and book history (and, I’d insist, the history of obscenity) crucially inform one another.

The essay is fascinating for the degree of engagement Lawrence has with the materiality of the different volumes he discusses. Because most of these piracies were reproduced photographically from the Florentine edition, their text is identical to that of the Florentine and popular editions (they are all, in Gaskell’s terms, the same “edition,” a fact recognized in Gertzman’s truly impressive bibliography). And so, in distinguishing them, Lawrence appeals to the physical properties of the book itself, drawing distinctions between the various states and issues (though Lawrence doesn’t use these terms) based on the quality of printing and the physical experience of holding the volume.

I spend quite a bit of time with this interesting argument in my dissertation. At RBS, though, I wanted to focus on just one of these piracies; the one of which Lawrence writes:

I have had in my hand a very funereal volume, bound in black and elongated to look like a Bible or long hymn-book, gloomy . . . it is a sinister volume―like Captain Kidd with his face blackened, reading a sermon to those about to walk the plank. Why the pirate should have elongated the page, by adding a false page-heading, I don’t know. The effect is peculiarly depressing, high-brow. (305)

UVA’s Special Collections owns a number of pirate editions of Lady Chatterley including the “Faro” edition published by Samuel Roth (which has a reasonable claim to being the chief way in which the novel reached the American reading public during the period between 1928 and 1959). They are also in possession of the New York piracy which Lawrence describes as “Funereal.”

In discussing piracies, Lawrence at no point appeals to the discourse of intellectual property. This may be simply tactical: because the work was obscene, US and British copyright law offered no real avenue for Lawrence to assert his rights (additionally, the work was not printed in the US as required by US copyright law at the time making any such claim moot… but these are tertiary issues I think). In my dissertation I argue that Lawrence’s focus on the book’s materiality is not simply a tactical response to piracy. But whatever the undergirding logic of Lawrence’s appeal to the materiality of these volumes, it is fascinating to see the “Priest of Love” suddenly turn bibliographer (without losing any of the vehemence of his convictions).

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

Here, for instance, are the running heads which the New York piracy has added to the text (note the lack of alignment between the pages; an instance of the shoddiness of work Lawrence complains of elsewhere in “My Skirmish”). Lawrence celebrates the simple craftsmanship of the Florentine edition. The running heads adulterate that simplicity by unnecessarily complicating the page. While I haven’t been able to do a side by side comparison with the Florentine edition (the UVA library does not own this rare item), the “Funereal” edition does expand the size of the pages slightly (Gertzman measures the leaves of the piracy at 9 5/8″ x 6 1/4″ while Roberts measures the Florentine editions at 8 15/16″ x 6 3/8″, a discrepancy of nearly three quarters of an inch in page height; I think one would need direct examination to compare whether the type-size was at all affected by the process of reproduction.)

Title Page of New York Piracy of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

The title page features a truly bizarre eagle vignette which seems to oddly echo Lawrence’s own phoenix. It seems more appropriate to an elementary school American History textbook than to Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Smeary Printing in New York Pirate Edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

And as Lawrence complains elsewhere in the essay, the printing is rather shabbily done, resulting in a smeary text. It is these differences (rather than any difference in the text itself) which for Lawrence mark the piracy as “gloomy” and “high brow.”

How to Read Obscenely

I spent some time with this volume largely because of the ire it elicited from Lawrence. But this particular copy proved interesting for some other reasons. Folded and placed between pages 200 and 201 is a newspaper clipping from the Washington Herald (Dec. 24, 1929) with the headline “Smoot to Read Racy Books in Plea for Ban: Senate to Conduct Secret Session When He Takes the Floor” and a penciled list made on the rear end-paper.

The clipping details Senator Reed Smoot’s plan to read selections from a number of books books to a private session of the Senate. Smoot was interested in reversing an amedment to US Tariff passed the previous year which effectively removed the censorship authority of Customs agents. The change had been advocated by Senator Bronson Cutting of New Mexico (who corresponded with Ezra Pound on precisely this issue). (Further details about the debate can be found in this article from Time). Smoot hoped this reading would senators of the perniciousness of works that had previously been “excluded by the customs authorities” (chief among them a work the clipping describes as “Lady Chatterton’s Lover”). Echoing James Douglas’s infamous statement two years earlier (that he would rather give a child prussic acid than a copy of The Well of Loneliness), Smoot claimed that he would “rather have a child of mine use opium than read these books.”

In the end Smoot never read his selections to a closed Senate committee. Instead a compromise was reached, by which customs officers could turn books over to district courts who could pursue censorship through existing obscene statutes.

The clipping however notes the following: “The tall, austere, Mormon elder will read to the Senate—in secret session—passages he has culled from the racy and spicy books…” (my emphasis).

This strategy, of culling particularly “racy” and “spicy” passages from books in order to prove that they are “obscene” was a common among those who wished to censor books. The larger tendency throughout the twentieth century was in the opposite direction. The gradual process by which controversial works (from Ulysses to Lolita and Naked Lunch) were admitted into the domain of “literature” proceeded first by insisting on the unity of the work as a whole. Judge Woolsey, deciding that Ulysses is not obscene in 1933, writes: “reading ‘Ulysses’ in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts” (xiii, my emphasis). (One wonders, could any novel of 800 pages manage to so excite “in its entirety”?). The process of art/literature and pornography becoming antithetical by definition (to be obscene a work must, in the language of Miller v. California “lack[] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”) proceeds by first insisting that (again, the language of the Miller test) be “taken as a whole.”

What, of course, this suggests is that the question of obscenity is less a question about a work than it is about a way of reading. To ask, therefore, whether or not a particular work is obscene reifies a question which is really about how a work was read. The question of obscenity is not chiefly a matter of gauging the sexual explicitness of a text, but of understanding the uses to which literature is put and the types of reading that are recognized as literary (and those which are a priori non-literary). At least one hallmark of obscene reading is its disregard for the whole.

Pencil List on Rear End-Paper of Pirate Copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover (PR6023 .A93 L28 1928e). Special Collections, University of Virginia.

And, turning to the rear end papers of this particular copy of Lawrence’s novel, one finds evidence of exactly this sort of reading: a list of penciled in numbers which, a casual perusal suggests, correspond to the “spicier” moments in the novel.

The tantalizing question is who made this list and to what end? In their style of reading, at least, the reader looking simply for pornographic enjoyment and the antivice crusader share a similar disregard for regarding the work “in its entirety.” This penciled list of passages culled from this edition, together with the clipping describing Sen. Smoot’s own culling, suggests a practice of reading at odds with that which would be recieve the blessing of judicial authority first, three years later, by Judge Woolsey and later enshrined in U. S. obscenity law.

Works Cited

  • Gertzman, Jay. A Descriptive Bibliography of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: With Essays Toward A Publishing History of the Novel. NY: Greenwood P, 1989.
  • Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Apropos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Edited by Michael Squires. Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.
  • Roberts, Warren and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of the D. H. Lawrence. 3rd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Woolsey, John M. Decision in United States v. One Book called “Ulysses.” In Ulysses by James Joyce. New York: Vintage International, 1990. ix – xiv.

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Update: Comstock’s “Morals Versus Art”

June 26, 2010 in literature, obscenity

Morals Versus Art, Title Page

Earlier I posted this PDF of Anthony Comstock’s 1887 Morals Versus Art. Here you can find an HTML version which has been proofread. This HTML version is produced from a TEI version that I am currently working on. I’ll be trying to improve the document structure and adding some scholarly annotations as well. But together with the PDF it should help anyone interested in this text who is having a hard time finding a copy (OCLC Worldcat lists 4 print copies).

The document is a minor but very interesting part of the larger debates about obscenity around the turn of the twentieth century. This period itself sits at the middle of a larger history history beginning with the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in Great Britain in 1857 (and the famous Regina v. Hicklin case in 1868) and the effective “End of Obscenity” (as Charles Rembar calls it in his excellent book [Amazon link] of that title) in 1966 with the exoneration Fanny Hill from charges of obscenity. (The 1960s American rulings on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill, in which Rembar played a crucial role, evolved by arguing that the Roth obscenity test included special protections for works of art; this concept was formalized in the 1973 case Miller v. California which established the three-pronged obscenity test that remains the law of the land. The conflation of British and American law in the preceding paragraph is intentional; while interesting disagreements emerged, the law itself was largely similar on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both cases quite different from Continental obscenity law. This conflation is equally evident in Morals Versus Art, where Comstock draws on both American precedent and the history of British obscenity law.)

Some Quick Background

I am still putting together the complete story behind this pamphlet which I hope to integrate into the TEI version. But for anyone interested, here is the basic background behind this pamphlet and why I think it is interesting enough to merit greater attention and a wider audience.

Morals Versus Art has its origin in a raid on the Knoedler & Company art gallery (located at Fifth Ave. and Twenty-Second St.) reported on November 13, 1887 in the New York Times. (Knoedler’s customers “were among the most refined and intelligent people in the country” the Times assures us). An agent of Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice purchased “117 photographs of original paintings by such artists as Cabanel, Bougereau, Gerome, Le Fevre, Henner, and others of the modern French school.” These pictures were brought to Comstock who then had Edmund L. Knoedler and his clerk arrested on a charge “of trafficking in improper pictures.” At the heart the debate is the issue which emerges through the modern history of obscenity: can art be obscene? Already in 1887, before Roth and Miller, in the initial response to the raid on Knoedler’s Gallery there was a distinct sense that these images were a priori not obscene because they were art. The concluding paragraph of the Nov 13,1887 story reads:

Daniel Huntington, President of the Academy of Design, said he did not think it was within the capacity of any man to draw the line sharply between pictures which were intentionally obscene and those which were classically artistic and pure. Much lay in the character of the person judging the picture. The pictures upon which the prosecution in this case was based were classically artistic, and he thought Mr. Comstock had made a mistake. T. J. Blakeslee and several other art critics gave like expression to their views upon the subject. The general declaration was the Anthony Comstock had exercised an uncultivated and awkward discrimination and had committed and unwarrantable assault upon the domain of legitimate art.

In the following weeks newspapers continued to follow the story; Comstock appeared in a number of editorial cartoons in venues such as Life, and a group of American artists published a protest against Comstock’s raid (Comstock includes the full text of the protest in Morals Versus Art.

The pamphlet Morals Versus Art is a direct response to this broader enviroment of debate about the border between art and obscenity or, as Comstock puts it, between art and morals. It is a defense of the raid on Knoedler’s in particular, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of censorship in general. Certain aspects of the pamphlet are interesting but predictable: Comstock consistently insists on the foreign character of these French works; he employs a predictable (and now humorous) rhetoric of “manliness” to describe morally grounded censorship (rather than the feminized, enervating effects of “art for art’s sake”). Comstock’s attitude toward the lower classes is outright infantilizing: “the nude art has not its proper place. But we do in all sincerity appeal to the public, that the proper place is not before the eyes of the uncultured and inexperienced?” Later on the same page he asks “By what right does a few selfish men enter that privacy and denude women for the inspection of others or seek to put these representations of nudity upon the open market for all classes to gaze upon?” (10)

Comstock’s pamphlet provides ample bread and butter for academic treatments of gender and class in the period. Equally interesting, and perhaps more surprising, is the way that Comstock’s position seems to hypersensitize him to the complexities of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Comstock’s contemporary critics tended to ignore Comstock’s insistence that context determined obscenity, that a painting in a museum may not be obscene but a photographic reproduction of it might be. Comstock intuits the far reaching effects which changes in the media landscape of the late nineteenth century will have: increasing literacy, the advent of photography, and advances in lithographic and (ultimately) half-tone printing techniques. Undergirding this sensitivity are a series of assumptions that are products of their time and strike us as absurd in their old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy conservatism; chief among these being the insistence that obscene texts corrupt the moral well-being of young men and, thereby, of the nation itself (and there is no small amount of the discourse surrounding “self-abuse” mixed in here). (This pamphlet is interesting in the concern it shows for the fate of young men while remaining essentially quiet on the group traditionally thought to be susceptible to the influence of the novel—young women.)

These out-moded assumptions, however, had the strange effect of sensitizing Comstock to the complexities of textual circulation and reproduction in ways that his contemporary critics are not. Before celebrating Comstock, it is worthy of remembering the enormous, negative impact on the lives of actual people that Comstock had, particularly on early advocates of birth control. Nevertheless Morals Versus Art offers, in a sort of encrypted, mirrored way, one of the most insightful portraits of the changing textual landscape at the turn of the century, decades ahead of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Comstock we have an early account of the disappearance of “aura.” (I have plenty more to say here…)

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Comstock in Morals Versus Art uncannily anticipates the controversy surrounding September Morn (which is of course a preoccupation of mine). At the heart of the Knoedler case are French academic nudes, many of which were exhibited at the Salon—precisely the genre of Paul Chabas’s Matinée de Septembre (1912). Comstock even invokes the scene at the window which would come to play such a crucial role in the reception of September Morn, “It is said the exposing to public view of nude figures of women is ‘an educator of the public mind.’ It may educate the public mind as the forms of beautiful women, but it creates an appetite for the immoral; its tendency is downward… As proof of this, note the throngs about windows where nude or partly nude figures are exposed” (9 – 10). Indeed, note them:

September Morn Postcard

Works Cited

  • Comstock, Anthony. Morals Versus Art. An Electronic Edition. Edited by Chris Forster. Web.
  • “Mr. Comstock’s Work: Beginning a Prosecution Against a Prominent Art Firm.” New York Times. Nov. 13, 1887: 3. Proquest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1857 – 1922). Web. April 30, 2010.

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Anthony Comstock, “Morals Versus Art”

April 27, 2010 in literature, modernism, obscenity, public domain | 1 comment

Anthony Comstock is one of the figures who orbits just slightly beyond the primary concerns of my dissertation, alongside other fascinating, but lesser known, figures of literary history, like Samuel Roth (book pirate), Jack Kahane (founder of Obelisk Press), or Norman Douglas (whose book on the obscene limerick is considered the first). Comstock (1844 – 1915) was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and US Postal Inspector, and one of the most notorious figures of turn of the century America.

Comstock is hardly the only turn-of-the-century vice crusader; Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, headed by John Chase was, if anything more “successful” in suppressing works than Comstock’s organization (the list of works that the Watch and Ward Society managed to have suppressed is truly stunning; it is through their efforts that “Banned in Boston” achieved popularity—that, and its lovely alliteration). Comstock’s successor in the Society for the Suppression of Vice, John Sumner (the key figure in the banning of many modernist texts), was widely discussed in the press (and was a key figure in the suppression of the Little Review and works by D. H. Lawrence). And Britain certainly didn’t lack its own anti-obscenity crusaders from James Buchanan (author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry”) to James Douglas (who compared The Well of Loneliness to prussic acid, to the benefit of the latter) and William Joynson-Hicks.

But Comstock is the figure who best captured the Puritanical spirit of Victorian vice societies. The obscenity statutes of the United States, which prohibit the mailing or importation of “obscene” material (I’m papering over some complexities here) were called the “Comstock laws” (though Pound, apparently, wasn’t aware of this nomenclature, referring to the laws as “Section 211″ when he commented on them in essays). George Bernard Shaw famously decried “Comstockery” as the “the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States” (see OED definition of “Comstockery”). (Shaw here draws on an implicit geography of censorship standards, with Paris as the frequently decried source of all obscenity, America as awash in puritanism and Comstockery, and England standing firm between them. While there is some truth to this image, it is worth insisting that some works which were banned in England were, in fact, published in the United States—The Well of Loneliness and Sleeveless Errand come to mind immediately. British law held not only the publisher, but the printer, open to prosecution for obscenity, with the predictably chilling effect.)

It is, however, Comstock’s pugnacity that makes him stand head and shoulders above Sumner, Jix, or his other fellow vice crusaders. Like his contemporary, Carrie Nation, Comstock was not simply opposed to vice or offended by it; he was militantly attacking it.

My own interest in Comstock comes primarily from his role in the history of September Morn (which I am still working on recording at the September Morn Archive; will be adding more stuff there in coming weeks actually). The immediate popularity of the painting was implicitly a reaction against the excesses of Comstockery; a way of rejecting such censorship by laughing at it. Indeed, the entire history of Chabas’s academic nude has far more to do with Comstock than it does with Chabas.

For this reason it is unfortunate that Comstock’s short 1887 pamphlet Art Versus Morals is so rare. I have been unable to locate a copy through online booksellers. WorldCat lists only 10 copies of the work (and of those 6 are either photocopies or microfillm copies of the original work). I imagine that so few copies of the work have survived because it appears to have been a pamphlet; it is only 39 pages long, in a rather small format.

But the indefatigable folks in UVA’s interlibrary loan department were able to get me one of the photocopies, which I in turn copied and scanned.

The work is fascinating. Comstock in particular (and, to a lesser extent the anti-Vice crusaders as a whole) was far more sensitive to the changes on a work’s reception wreaked by mechanical reproduction. As early as 1887 (more than 25 years before September Morn came to his, and everyone else’s, attention), Comstock was noting the importance of context on reception; the painting “exhibited to cultured minds in an art gallery, where it legitimately belongs, is a very different thing from what it appears to be to the common mind upon the public street in the shape of a photograph” (Morals Versus Art 9). He even asks us to “note the throngs about windows where nude or partly nude figures are exposed” (Morals Versus Art 9 – 10). The sharp distinction between the “common” and the “cultured mind” is what likely leaps out at us here. But I’d like to stress that Comstock was decades ahead of his opponents in his attention the effects of mechanical reproduction on art.

I am currently checking the OCR on the document and marking it up. Once it is all set I’ll post a nice clean copy of this fascinating document, with some annotation and introductory material. Along the way I may post some more about Comstock here. But if there is (heaven help you) another person fascinated by Comstock out there in the world, I hope google has somehow led you here; the raw, ugly, hideous PDF is yours for the taking.

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Mining Obscenity III: Failure, with Visualizations

January 26, 2010 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity | 7 comments

So, lately I’ve been writing about my interest in the changing semantics of the word bitch, trying to pin down when it went from a term meaning primarily “female dog” to being primarily an obscenity. I still don’t have a good answer. In this post I’ll try to explain why.

Along the way I’ll talk about:

That might seem like a lot of stuff, especially if you’re the poor soul reading this; those links above can hopefully get you where you might be interested in going (and of course, there are more entertaining places on the internet anyway you know).

I need to make very clear here though that, despite all that follows, there is nothing even approaching an answer to the question with which I began in what follows. I will share a sort of dummy visualization of the changing semantics of “bitch,” but it is worthless as an answer to the question with which I started—G.I.G.O..

Last time on “Mining Obscenity”. . .

So, as I’ve written about before, I became interested in tracing the changing definitions of the word “bitch,” of trying to get some idea about when the shift occurred from bitch being used in print to mean “a female dog” (and, I learned, sometimes other animals) to its being a (mildly) obscene obloquy. (This is, of course, just one change in the term’s meanings—more recently, for instance, one could chart the way the term comes increasingly to be used by men to emasculate other men.)

But I think (and hope) the general premise is clear enough: to provide some sense about when, historically, the obscene/derogatory meaning took precedence over “female dog”, at least as reflected in print (which itself raises questions about how one gets a historically valid sample, et cetera, et cetera).


Exploring Project Gutenberg

So one source of textual data is Project Gutenberg. The amount of data ready to hand at Gutenberg, as well as its availability in vanilla plaintext, has made it attractive to folks doing stylometric analyses. And the very kind folks at Gutenberg have even included a very helpful way of getting all their ebooks. (Zipped up, that is something like 14.5 gigabytes according to the PG website).

Project Gutenberg also makes available its catalog data in one big RDF file. As a preliminary step I decided to start with this catalog file just to get some sense of the distribution of texts in the Gutenberg archive. So, using Python to extract data from the RDF and Processing to visualize it, I produced this picture of the distribution of texts.

Graph of Authors in Project Gutenberg

Authors in Project Gutenberg

Each gray horizontal line represents the lifespan of an author who has at least one work in the Project Gutenberg archive. Authors with more than 50 works in the archive get more than a line—they get a box with their name in it. These “major authors” are then color coded: authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box; authors with between 100 and 150 get a blue box; and authors with more than 50, but less than 100, get a green box. The lines are stacked (using a very crude algorithm; “major authors” aren’t stacked the same way—they’re just chucked at some height), so that the height of the stacked lines gives some insight into the number of authors writing at a certain period.

It isn’t especially pretty (and some boxes are less visible because they have been drawn over), mostly because my programming ability is pretty limited. But it offers some insight into the historical distribution of PG’s authors. There are a lot of authors in the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, because the novel (with the predictable exception of Shakespeare) dominates PG’s holdings. (I’ve focused on the period from 1500 – 2000 here; PG includes some works in the period before 1500—some translations of the classics, some Li Po, some Confucius, and so on, but not too many by comparison).

But there are still lots of problems. If you were paying attention you’ll note that I said that authors with more than 150 works in PG get a red box, which would seem to suggest that Shakespeare was even more prolific than you remembered. This inflated number is because PG’s Shakespeare holdings include a number of different versions of each of Shakespeare’s plays, translations of some of them, as well as a version of The Complete Works. So what gets tallied up as a “work” is not really a work. (Of course what exactly defines “a work” —how we define its unity and its singularity—is just one more of those thorny questions that I’m trying to shunt aside to get some heuristic peek into literary history.)

This is (I hope) somewhat interesting, at least as a glimpse into PG. But if you’ve been paying attention you should be asking—by now you’re probably screaming in frustration—why are you visualizing the lifetimes of authors rather than publication dates of individual works? Well, that is simple. PG’s catalog data does not include publication date in its catalog data. (For that matter, it doesn’t include any data about what edition a particular etext represents at all).

Well, that’s certainly a problem.


But what if we just ignored all that: Visualizing the Semantics of Bitch (with Bad Data)

Okay, so that’s a problem. But let’s say we ignored this problem and tried to forge ahead anyway. Maybe you could take Gutenberg’s textual data and get metadata about the works from some other source. Great idea! But this solution proved more difficult than I could easily manage.

Well you could always just make the data up. Let’s just take each author’s birth year, add it to the year in which s/he dies, and divide by 2, effectively assuming that each author produced all of their work in one great burst of creativity midway on life’s journey.

This would be an assumption so ugly as to call any resulting visualization severely into question, as least in terms of its philological accuracy. But as proof-of-concept, I decided to make the assumption anyway.

So, after waiting for the massive 15 gig-ish download of PG’s etexts, how would one proceed? Well, I imagine that there are other ways to approach this, perhaps better ways, but I used used rgrep to search all the files for instances of the (case insensitive) string “bitch.” Using arguments you can have rgrep return a line on either side of the occurrence of the searched for term. The results will look something like this:

./etext97/itwls10.txt-4218-of the stag; but, partaking more of the nature of the domestic than
./etext97/itwls10.txt:4219:of the wild animal, it remained with the herd of cattle.  A bitch
./etext97/itwls10.txt-4220-also was pregnant by a monkey, and produced a litter of whelps
--
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62244-"Yes; yes, by the stitching 'tis plain to be seen
./etext05/8cptm10.txt:62245:"It was made by that Bourbonite bitch, VICTORINE!"
./etext05/8cptm10.txt-62246-What a word for a hero!--but heroes _will_ err,

Above are two results from such a search, the middle line of each contains the searched for term. At the beginning of each line is the file in which the grepped-for term occurs, followed by the line number, and then a line of text. Pipe all those results into a text file and you have the raw material you need. The file info (by way of etext number) can connect the text to its entry in the RDF catalog (and thence to the author, title, and birth/death date info).

Determining the meaning of “bitch” in these passages though is not an easy task. One can imagine a machine learning solution—but on such small samples it seems unlikely to work well and would introduce a whole other level of complexity. You could try simply searching for selected key terms within a certain proximity of the occurrence “bitch” (like “dog” or “litter”) and come to a conclusion based on the result. But since the number of results was relatively low (around 400 results), I thought it would be easier and better to just do it manually. To ease the task I wrote a quick Python script to display each extract and accept as input a number (0 – 4) to classify the term. Here is what it looked like:

There are certainly other ways to break up the meanings, but after surveying the data this seemed sufficient. With this scheme, one could skip an entry if it was a false positive (for example, the name Bitchov or similar—there were actually a couple of these). I ranked “son-of-bitch” separately only because it occurred so frequently that it might be worth keeping an eye on it (as a specialized instance of the range of the term’s obscene meaning); and I left open the possibility of ranking a term as “ambiguous” since, even with 3 lines of context, the term’s meaning might not be obvious. (By keeping ambiguous results separate from false positives, “0″, one could go back and grab more context to resolve the ambiguity).

So, for a couple days I left this simple program running. Whenever I had a few free minutes to do some simple classifying while talking on the phone or waiting for water to boil, I classified some occurrences of the term “bitch.” Once all of them had been classified and the output written to a file, it was time to return to Processing to try to visualize this. After some futzing around, here is what all that bitch data looked like.

Visualization of the Relative Obscenity of "Bitch"

Let me first reiterate that this visualization does not really show anything—that the data it represents is fundamentally flawed. As I noted above, because date of publication was not easily available, the dates used here are effectively inventions. (They are accurate within a tolerance of, say, half three score and ten.) Moreover, even with all that text downloaded from Gutenberg, we still have a pretty small number of points to draw any conclusions from. (You’ll note that, for purposes of visualization, I’ve grouped occurrences by the decade in which they occur, fudging the dates still further). And, as if that weren’t enough, let’s recall that the same “work” can appear more than once in PG leading to double-counting. (I went through the data by hand to try to remove these, but I could have missed some).

So, this sure seems like a long blog post for a useless visualization, isn’t it?

Well, here is what I like: this visualization divides the two meanings of bitch horizontally—points appearing below the center, horizontal line represent instances of the term being used in its obscene sense (the color-code gives some further insight into how these break down using the 4-part division discussed above), points above the line represent instances where the term is used in a non-obscene way (to mean “female dog”). This is simple, but has the advantage of allowing that both meanings might be equally available, or available in some mixed proportion, at any historical moment. With a larger data set, and with correct publication dates, this seems to me to be a elegant way of answering the admittedly amorphous question with which I began (though I’m certainly open to criticism of this entire approach).

It could also be improved upon. You could keep in memory the text samples from which these points were derived so that one could mouse-over each point and get data about what author/work that point represents, a keyword in context sort of view, and even a link to the full-text.

With a sufficiently complete data set, I would expect expect that we’d see that, during the twentieth century, the occurrences of the term as obscene would greatly increase while the occurrences of the term as meaning “female dog” would decrease. Exactly where the obscene meanings takes precedence would be the interesting thing to know. (Indeed, it is the thing I was interested in originally.)


A Final Thought

While I want to stress once again that this exercise in digital philological visualization (does that sound suitably buzzword-worthy to win me a prize of some sort?) fails, it fails because the data is not readily available; to get a meaningful result would require more, and better, data than is available from PG at present. (I’ll be putting this little toy problem on the back burner now, but would be interested in exploring other sources of data—Google Books is the obvious choice, but after spending some time playing with the Books API, I’m not sure the necessary data is currently available [nor am I confident that such a use is even permissible within the terms of use]) .

If you will grant that ferreting out the historical contours of the changing uses of the term “bitch” is worthwhile (and maybe it isn’t; perhaps this whole post reeks of sheer pedantry), a visualization like this one seems to illustrate that change (or at least one aspect of). And if you’ll grant all that, there is a final point worth making. This sort of visualization answers the question posed simply and without oversimplification, but it is tailor made to this particular problem. This recalls something I recently read on the Humanist discussion list in a message by Richard Lewis. He wrote:

…I’m increasingly of the opinion that end user application style software is not really what scholars who are serious about exploring the possibilities of using technology to enhance their research or open new avenues of research require. Rather, I’m beginning to feel that a good grounding in programming, a simple, expressive language, and good provision of libraries for abstracting over data encodings and difficult algorithms required in each discipline will be much more conducive to interesting computational scholarship.

The things that make computational scholarship interesting can’t, I think, be packaged up in an end user application. Like scholarship conducted in any paradigm, computational scholarship is interesting and worthwhile when it’s exploratory. But the restrictions of an end user application seriously stiffle any possibility for exploration.

Such a statement has the potential to stir up a debate I’ve seen elsewhere about whether “Digital Humanists” should learn to program, which I have no interest in doing. Nevertheless, at least for tasks like the one I’ve (painfully) described here, I think the perspective Lewis describes is helpful. Insofar as I even made half a stab at solving this little riddle, it is because of the availability of a set of tools that are easy enough to be picked up by a nonspecialist, but supple enough to be used in unanticipated ways. In particular I would single out Python, the Natural Language Toolkit, and Processing. As has been been noted elsewhere, Python’s simplicity, makes it fun to work with and perfect for these sort of problems. In addition to Python’s native facility with strings, the NLTK makes all sorts of text analysis tasks (frequency counts, etc) very simple (and it is all wonderfully well documented). And Processing does for visualization what the NLTK does for text analysis.

Using them as I have here produces an admittedly heterogeneous solution, cobbled together out of what one can learn on the fly (biggest challenge—figuring out SAX processing to handle PG’s massive RDF catalog file). One could simply do everything I’ve done here using rgrep, Python, and Processing, within a single language: there are graphics libraries for Python, and one could do all the string/data manipulation by way of Processing (perhaps with some help from native Java libraries). But it seems that using a language in a task-specific way provides a helpful midway point between spending too much time trying to learn how to code, and just waiting for the exact right tool to appear (in this case, the obscene-semantics-historical-separator—surely it’s next from Google Labs).

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Mining Obscenity II: Google “Bitch”

November 18, 2009 in Digital Humanities, literature, obscenity | 1 comment

"Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in."

Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.—Fur News, 1918

So, continuing from last time, I’m interested in trying to understand exactly what Pound means in his famous description of European civilization as “an old bitch gone in the teeth” in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Comparing the line to one later in the Cantos, I suggested that Pound’s use of the term “bitch” in Mauberley channels some of the term’s obscene force while nevertheless referring primarily to an elderly female canine (and therefore being beyond reproach… or at least beyond threat of censorship).

An interesting theory but how would you prove it? In the next post I’ll begin to try some (slightly) more sophisticated solutions (and I am very open to suggestions, dear reader, so don’t hesitate to offer ‘em below).

So, let’s start simple. Geoffery Hughes’s An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World devotes about two pages to “bitch.” The term, he notes, “has the longest history among animal terms as an insult, extending from the fourteenth century to the present, during which time it has steadily lost force through generalization” (23). Originally it referred to “a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat” (24). The term begins to be applied to men around 1500. (Hughes doesn’t spend much time breaking down the gender differences in the semantics of contemporary uses of the term.)

But alongside its obscene meaning, and (as Hughes notes) not entirely unrelated to it, “bitch” continues to mean “female dog.” So, to reformulate my original question: Would Pound and his readers have seen “an old bitch gone in the teeth” as obviously and indisputably offensive? Conversely, might they have seen it simply as a description of a dog, with the obscene meanings safely segregated? For that matter—how do we read this line? Is there any reason to assume readers, ninety years ago, would have read it any differently, with any more or less unanimity of reference than is available when we read it?

Hughes’s analysis provides a basic framework, but offers little help on the competing place of the obscene and non-obscene meanings of the term. So let’s try some easy (read: lazy) solutions. Googling “bitch” reveals some interesting things—but all far too contemporary to answer this question (save, perhaps, the wikipedia page for bitch, which draws on Hughes and seem to be quite good). Urban dictionary surveys contemporary uses of “bitch” as a noun and a verb—though it doesn’t do any better than Hughes in addressing the gender disparities in the word’s meanings.

Let’s narrow this down by doing a Google Books search on the phrase “old bitch” (I use the phrase “old bitch,” rather than “bitch,” both to find instances with greater similarity to Pound’s usage, and to reduce the sheer number of results). The results largely corroborate what one would suspect: older uses (in, for example, the materials old enough to be in the public domain) tend to be technical sounding references to canines, while more recent usage is frequently the sexist term of derogation we all know so well.

Here are some of the more interesting examples Google Books offers, listed in ascending chronological order, and offered here provisionally, without any regard to the representativeness of the sample (of which, more below):

  • The Revised and Enlarged, Second Edition of The Courser’s Companion and Breeder’s Guide (1834) by Thomas Thacker gives this advice to the would-be dog breeder: “Most authors agree, that a similarity and maturity of age of sire and dam is requisite, as a general principle, to breed good whelps. Markham and others, however, admit, that ‘to breed with a young dogge and an old bitch, may bring forth an excellent whelp;’ but, on the contrary, it is contended, that when bred from an old dog and a young bitch, the whelps will never be good ones.” [1834, canine]
  • The 1867 Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor includes a story in which, “there’s no telling who’s constable until the election is over; it will be like the old bitch and the rabbit, nip and tack every jump, and sometimes the bitch a leetle ahead.” [1867, canine]
  • Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce reports a husband who “habitually called [his wife] an old bitch, a bloody or blasted old bitch, an old bawd, and the like opprobrious name.” [1881, obscene]
  • An article in the May 1884 Journal of the American Medical Association describes a rather horrifying experiment on a dog described as a “Large, fat and old bitch.” (The “experiments” involved anesthetizing dogs and then shooting them with various caliber guns in order to determine the best methods for treating such wounds.) [1884, canine]
  • A 1916 issue of Fur News (!) describes a hunt, noting “The dogs all opened up at once nearly, but one of my dogs left the others . . . Well, he made so much fuss that all the other dogs but Hence’s old bitch came in.” [1916, canine]
  • The 1918 Pacific Reporter (which seems to collect court cases from states along the Pacific coast) includes a reference to a woman who called someone “an old wretch and an old bitch, and said she ought to go to hell” in the court of reporting a case. [1918, obscene]
  • In Noel Coward’s comedy “Fumed Oak,” Henry Gow recalls “My only regret is that I didn’t come to the boil a long time ago, and tell you to your face, Dorrie, what I think of you, what I’ve been thinking of you for years, and this horrid little kid, and that old bitch of a mother of yours,” Mrs Rockett exclaims (shrilly!): “Henry Gow!”; Henry insists, “You heard me, old bitch was what I said and old bitch was what I meant.” [1935, obscene]
  • The narrator of Tennessee Williams’s story “Gift of an Apple” describes an “old woman . . . making herself some suffer. She would eat it alone. Fat elbows planted on either side of the tin plate and her shoulders crouched way over. Wheezing a little. Washing it down with scalding black coffee. . . The old bitch. Oh, well. She would die some day. Some ugly disease like cancer. It might be already started inside her dark flesh. Just as well. A stingly old bitch like that . . . ” (last ellipsis original). [c.1935 , obscene]
  • William Carlos Williams’s “To a Lovely Old Bitch,” a poem addressed to Sappho. [1948, obscene]

All of which is interesting. But the data, particularly in this format, seems too anecdotal. One can used the advanced search features to limit the search to certain dates (although the quality of Google Books’s metadata sure ain’t what it could be).
The breadth of Google Books is both a strength and a weakness. In the results above (admittedly culled from a larger set) we find a poem by W. C. Williams and a play by Noel Coward alongside such oddities as the Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor or the Pacific Reporter, which collects court decisions of the Pacific states (I think). And while we have access to wonderful publications like Fur News (finally!), it seems dangerous to draw any broad conclusions about linguistic usage from a publication that, I assume, has a very limited readership and addresses niche topic.

What we’d like, I think, is to see how the word “bitch” was being used in a wider context that is roughly historically contemporary with Pound’s Mauberley. Ideally, it would be nice to have, ready-to-hand, every published occurrence of the word “bitch” in 1920 (the year of Mauberley? Depending on the size of this set of references we could then manually inspect it, or further mine it to try to breakdown what percentage of occurrences were primarily obscene in denotation. And, since we’re speaking in ideal terms, wouldn’t it be nice to have every use of of the term in English language poetry from 1890 through 1950, to get some sense of how poetry and obscenity (and references to dogs) interacted.

Well, neither of those “ideal” cases seems tractable at present. But there are some practicable solutions that may shed at least some light on the question. That’s for next time…

Works Cited
Hughes, Geoffery. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006.

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