Book Review

What the hell is blasphemy, anyway, and have I just committed it? As Joss Marsh points out in Word Crimes, her deeply researched and enormously clever study of the cultural work performed by blasphemy in nineteenth-century England, the offense resists easy definition; indeed, "[n]o authoritative interpretation of the law of blasphemy has ever been given" (7). Yet despite its legal vagary, we layfolk find in blasphemy an auditory equivalent to obscenity: we know it when we hear it. Further, most of us would probably agree that the offense has a little to do with words and a lot to do with religion. And, twenty-First-century Westerners might add, to prosecute it as a civil offense seems, at the very least, anti-modern: a throwback to the theocratic intolerance of an earlier age.	1
With great narrative subtlety and interpretive flair, Word Crimes explodes these would-be truths about blasphemy. In nineteenth-century England, Marsh demonstrates, a spate of blasphemy prosecutions--she counts more than two hundred between 1817 and 1883--accompanied the birth pangs of modernity. In these trials, blasphemy law was no mere shield for the vulnerable heart of religion. Instead, prosecutions for blasphemy defined the more elusive category of the unspeakable: "what you may not say" and how you cannot say it (7). What the Victorians held sacred, Marsh makes clear, was less the Bible than Literature, less creed than class. By the century's end, blasphemy had become, quite simply, "a class crime of language," a means to establish "a single standard for public discourse that it was impossible for the less educated to observe." The law of blasphemy, in sum, had "criminalized vulgarity" and sacrilized taste (8).	2
Marsh sets out this provocative argument in five chapters that move chronologically from the 1810s to the late Victorian period; a long final chapter offers a close reading of Hardy's Jude the Obscure as a paradigm instance of the blasphemousness of the modern. Drawing on a wide range of sources--legal opinions, cheap pamphlets, newspapers, images, and examples of "respectable" Literature, to name just a few--Marsh centers her analysis on three moments during which, she asserts, "political stress and cultural pressure" led blasphemy to claim a heightened share of English attention (9). From 1817 to 1830, a score of prosecutions redefined the offense in the wake of widespread anxieties about revolution abroad and social unrest at home. By the end of this period, blasphemy was more political than religious; widely reported judicial opinions proclaimed, in essence, "a legal veto on profane laughter; a taboo on vulgar ridicule" (34). The piety that would henceforth be protected at the bar, trials such as that of the printer-publisher William Hone in 1817 made clear, was the "coming piety of taste" (36).	3
The tumultuous decade of the 1840s marked another surge in blasphemy prosecutions and a further step along the offense's steady march toward politicization. In this second period, however, accused blasphemers struck back, constructing themselves as "free press campaigners"--if not martyrs--who made blasphemy into a purposeful strategy of "linguistic insurrection" (83). In so doing, they forced the legal and cultural authorities of the day to articulate what had previously remained unspoken: that "High Literature was truth, the rest was an imposture" (107). Blasphemy law thus worked hand in hand with statutes restricting the franchise to the propertied; both legal domains confirmed that "the poor man had no right . . . to language" in the form of a text, a voice, or a vote (120).	4
These long and tangled strands of class, words, and culture came together in the celebrated trials of G. W. Foote, publisher of the cheap, satirical, and militantly secularist Freethinker, in 1883. Marsh devotes three full chapters--over half her book--to Foote, a pivotal figure whose persecution crystallized the politics, literary history, and deep linguistic meanings of blasphemy in the late Victorian era. These trials publicly defined blasphemy as what Foote himself called "skepticism expressed in plain language and sold at the people's price" (156). In turn, Foote's trials also defined the sacred not as the Bible, per se, but as Literature itself--of which Scripture was reduced to a prime example. Foote's trials, in other words, demonstrated that England had made a new state religion of its national language. In the 1880s, "English, the Imperial English of an empire that became a faith, became a language against which one could sin" (206). The title of Defender of the Faith, in this sense, belonged less to the queen and the archbishop of Canterbury, than to the blasphemy judge and the editors of the newborn Oxford English Dictionary.	5
As Marsh herself acknowledges, the elegant and compelling interpretation she advances in Word Crimes has distinct limitations; it is bounded, in particular, by gender and place. Her book centers primarily on men (the main actors in the trials she surveys) and exclusively on England. Although her decision to draw these boundaries around a study that is already ambitious and wide-ranging is understandable, it is nonetheless regrettable. As much as speaking the unspeakable emerges in Marsh's capable hands as a class-driven offense, it was surely also a gendered one: a way, throughout history, of transgressing and enscribing linguistic norms of masculinity and femininity. The gendered dimensions of blasphemy--even as a crime committed by men--would have been well worth discovering. So, too, would some cross-cultural analysis have been welcome in Word Crimes. I wonder, in particular, about the comparisons a scholar of Marsh's talents might have drawn between the very different linguistic orders of Victorian England and the early national United States, a young nation that, to a degree, embraced in its standard English a fractiousness that one prominent scholar in the field aptly labels "democratic eloquence."	6
These relatively minor quibbles, though, ultimately attest to the persuasiveness of Marsh's argument, a fresh and nuanced interpretation that left me wanting still more. Historians and legal scholars who turn to Word Crimes may find themselves on foreign disciplinary soil, a territory where the wisdom of William Blackstone is pitted against that of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. In Marsh's capable hands, it is a journey worth taking, one that marvelously elucidates law, society, and culture, as well as the mutual dependence of all three.	7
Jane Kamensky Brandeis University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.