Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

FORBIDDEN READING
n 1660, Charles II of England, son of the king who had so unfortunately consulted Virgil’s oracle,
known to his subjects as the Merrie Monarch for his love of pleasure and loathing of business, decreed
that the Council for Foreign Plantations should instruct natives, servants and slaves of the British colonies
in the precepts of Christianity. Dr. Johnson, who from the vantage point of the following century admired
the king, said that “he had the merit of endeavouring to do what he thought was for the salvation of the
souls of his subjects, till he lost a great empire.” The historian Macaulay, who from a distance of two
centuries did not, argued that for Charles “the love of God, the love of country, the love of family, the love
of friends, were phrases of the same sort, delicate and convenient synonyms for the love of self.”
It isn’t clear why Charles issued this decree in the first year of his reign, except that he imagined it to be
a way of laying out new grounds for religious tolerance, which Parliament opposed. Charles, who in spite
of his pro-Catholic tendencies proclaimed himself loyal to the Protestant faith, believed (as far as he
believed anything) that, as Luther had taught, the salvation of the soul depended on each individual’s
ability to read God’s word for himself or herself. But British slave-owners were not convinced. They
feared the very idea of a “literate black population” who might find dangerous revolutionary ideas in
books. They did not believe those who argued that a literacy restricted to the Bible would strengthen the
bonds of society; they realized that if slaves could read the Bible, they could also read abolitionist tracts,
and that even in the Scriptures the slaves might find inflammatory notions of revolt and freedom. The
opposition to Charles’s decree was strongest in the American colonies, and strongest of all in South
Carolina, where, a century later, strict laws were proclaimed forbidding all blacks, whether slaves or free
men, to be taught to read. These laws were in effect until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
For centuries, Afro-American slaves learned to read against extraordinary odds, risking their lives in a
process that, because of the difficulties set in their way, sometimes took several years. The accounts of
their learning are many and heroic. Ninety-year-old Belle Myers Carothers — interviewed by the Federal
Writers’ Project, a commission set up in the 1930s to record, among other things, the personal narratives
of former slaves — recalled that she had learned her letters while looking after the plantation owner’s
baby, who was playing with alphabet blocks. The owner, seeing what she was doing, kicked her with his
boots. Myers persisted, secretly studying the child’s letters as well as a few words in a speller she had
found. One day, she said, “I found a hymn book … and spelled out ‘When I Can Read My Title Clear’. I was
so happy when I saw that I could really read, that I ran around telling all the other slaves.” Leonard
Black’s master once found him with a book and whipped him so severely “that he overcame my thirst for
knowledge, and I relinquished its pursuit until after I absconded”. Doc Daniel Dowdy recalled that “the
first time you was caught trying to read or write you was whipped with a cow-hide, the next time with a
cat-o-nine-tails and the third time they cut the first joint off your forefinger.” Throughout the South, it was
common for plantation owners to hang any slave who tried to teach the others how to spell.
Under these circumstances, slaves who wanted to be literate were forced to find devious methods of
learning, either from other slaves or from sympathetic white teachers, or by inventing devices that
allowed them to study unobserved. The American writer Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery
and became one of the most eloquent abolitionists of his day, as well as founder of several political
journals, recalled in his autobiography: “The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible
aloud … awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to
learn. Up to this time I had known nothing whatever of this wonderful art, and my ignorance and
inexperience of what it could do for me, as well as my confidence in my mistress, emboldened me to ask
her to teach me to read.… In an incredibly short time, by her kind assistance, I had mastered the alphabet
and could spell words of three or four letters.… [My master] forbade her to give me any further
instruction … [but] the determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance only rendered me the
more resolute to seek intelligence. In learning to read, therefore, I am not sure that I do not owe quite as
much to the opposition of my master as to the kindly assistance of my amiable mistress.” Thomas
Johnson, a slave who later became a well-known missionary preacher in England, explained that he had
learned to read by studying the letters in a Bible he had stolen. Since his master read aloud a chapter
from the New Testament every night, Johnson would coax him to read the same chapter over and over,
until he knew it by heart and was able to find the same words on the printed page. Also, when the
master’s son was studying, Johnson would suggest that the boy read part of his lesson out loud. “Lor’s
over me,” Johnson would say to encourage him, “read that again,” which the boy often did, believing that
Johnson was admiring his performance. Through repetition, he learned enough to be able to read the

---

newspapers by the time the Civil War broke out, and later set up a school of his own to teach others to
read.
Learning to read was, for slaves, not an immediate passport to freedom but rather a way of gaining
access to one of the powerful instruments of their oppressors: the book. The slave-owners (like dictators,
tyrants, absolute monarchs and other illicit holders of power) were strong believers in the power of the
written word. They knew, far better than some readers, that reading is a strength that requires barely a
few first words to become overwhelming. Someone able to read one sentence is able to read all; more
important, that reader has now the possibility of reflecting upon the sentence, of acting upon it, of giving
it a meaning. “You can play dumb with a sentence,” said the Austrian playwright Peter Handke. “Assert
yourself with the sentence against other sentences. Name everything that gets in your way and move it
out of the way. Familiarize yourself with all objects. Make all objects into a sentence with the sentence.
You can make all objects into your sentence. With this sentence, all objects belong to you. With this
sentence, all objects are yours.” For all these reasons, reading had to be forbidden.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading
cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope. Therefore,
like no other human creation, books have been the bane of dictatorships. Absolute power requires that all
reading be official reading; instead of whole libraries of opinions, the ruler’s word should suffice. Books,
wrote Voltaire in a satirical pamphlet called “Concerning the Horrible Danger of Reading”, “dissipate
ignorance, the custodian and safeguard of well-policed states”. Censorship, therefore, in some form or
another, is the corollary of all power, and the history of reading is lit by a seemingly endless line of
censors’ bonfires, from the earliest papyrus scrolls to the books of our time. The works of Protagoras
were burned in 411 BC in Athens. In the year 213 BC the Chinese emperor Shih Huang-ti tried to put an
end to reading by burning all the books in his realm. In 168 BC, the Jewish Library in Jerusalem was
deliberately destroyed during the Maccabean uprising. In the first century AD, Augustus exiled the poets
Cornelius Gallus and Ovid and banned their works. The emperor Caligula ordered that all books by
Homer, Virgil and Livy be burned (but his edict was not carried out). In 303, Diocletian condemned all
Christian books to the fire. And these were only the beginning. The young Goethe, witnessing the burning
of a book in Frankfurt, felt that he was attending an execution. “To see an inanimate object being
punished,” he wrote, “is in and of itself something truly terrible.” The illusion cherished by those who
burn books is that, in doing so, they are able to cancel history and abolish the past. On May 10, 1933, in
Berlin, as the cameras rolled, propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels spoke during the burning of
more than twenty thousand books, in front of a cheering crowd of more than one hundred thousand
people: “Tonight you do well to throw in the fire these obscenities from the past. This is a powerful, huge
and symbolic action that will tell the entire world that the old spirit is dead. From these ashes will rise the
phoenix of the new spirit.” A twelve-year-old boy, Hans Pauker, later head of the Leo Baeck Institute for
Jewish Studies in London, was present at the burning, and recalled that, as the books were thrown into
the flames, speeches were made to add solemnity to the occasion. “Against the exaggeration of
unconscious urges based on destructive analysis of the psyche, for the nobility of the human soul, I
commit to the flames the works of Sigmund Freud,” one of the censors would declaim before burning
Freud’s books. Steinbeck, Marx, Zola, Hemingway, Einstein, Proust, H.G. Wells, Heinrich Mann, Jack
London, Bertolt Brecht and hundreds of others received the homage of similar epitaphs.
A sixteenth-century Chinese woodblock depicting the burning of books by the First Emperor Shih Huang-
ti. (photo credit 20.1)
The Nazi burning of books in Berlin, 10 May 1933. (photo credit 20.2)
In 1872, a little over two centuries after Charles II’s optimistic decree, Anthony Comstock — a
descendant of the old colonialists who had objected to their sovereign’s educating urges — founded in
New York the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first effective censorship board in the United
States. All things considered, Comstock would have preferred that reading had never been invented (“Our
father Adam could not read in Paradise,” he once affirmed), but since it had, he was determined to
regulate its use. Comstock saw himself as a reader’s reader, who knew what was good literature and what
was bad, and did everything in his power to impose his views on others. “As for me,” he wrote in his
journal a year before the society’s founding, “I am resolved that I will not in God’s strength yield to other
people’s opinion but will if I feel and believe I am right stand firm. Jesus was never moved from the path
of duty, however hard, by public opinion. Why should I be?”

---

Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, on March 7, 1844. He was a hefty man, and in
the course of his censoring career he many times used his size to defeat his opponents physically. One of
his contemporaries described him in these terms: “Standing about five feet in his shoes, he carries his
two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone so well that you would judge him to weigh not over a
hundred and eighty. His Atlas shoulders of enormous girth, surmounted by a bull-like neck, are in keeping
with a biceps and a calf of exceptional size and iron solidarity. His legs are short, and remind one
somewhat of tree trunks.”
Comstock was in his twenties when he arrived in New York with $3.45 in his pocket. He found a job as a
dry-goods salesman and was soon able to save the $500 necessary to buy a little house in Brooklyn. A few
years later, he met the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, ten years his elder, and married her. In New
York, Comstock discovered much that he found objectionable. In 1868, after a friend told him how he had
been “led astray and corrupted and diseased” by a certain book (the title of this powerful work has not
come down to us), Comstock bought a copy at the store and then, accompanied by a policeman, had the
shopkeeper arrested and the stock seized. The success of his first raid was such that he decided to
continue, regularly causing the arrest of small publishers and printers of titillating material.
With the assistance of friends in the YMCA, who supplied him with $8,500, Comstock was able to set up
the society for which he became famous. Two years before his death, he told an interviewer in New York,
“In the forty-one years I have been here, I have convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-
one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty passengers each and the sixty-first almost full. I have
destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.”
A contemporary American caricature of the self-appointed censor Anthony Comstock. (photo credit 20.3)
Comstock’s fervour was also responsible for at least fifteen suicides. After he had a former Irish surgeon,
William Haynes, thrown in prison “for publishing 165 different kinds of lewd literature”, Haynes killed
himself. Shortly afterwards, Comstock was about to catch the Brooklyn ferry (he later recalled) when “a
Voice” told him to proceed to Haynes’s house. He arrived as the widow was unloading the printing-plates
of the forbidden books from a delivery wagon. With great agility Comstock leapt onto the wagoner’s seat
and rushed the wagon to the YMCA, where the plates were destroyed.
A justification for censorship in a nineteenth-century American comic strip entitled “The Influence of the
Press”. (photo credit 20.4)
What books did Comstock read? He was an unwitting follower of Oscar Wilde’s facetious advice: “I never
read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.” Sometimes, however, he dipped into the books before
destroying them, and was aghast at what he read. He found the literature of France and Italy “little better
than histories of brothels and prostitutes in these lust-crazed nations. How often are found in these
villainous stories, heroines, lovely, excellent, cultivated, wealthy, and charming in every way, who have for
their lovers married men; or, after marriage, lovers flock about the charming young wife, enjoying
privileges belonging only to the husband!” Even the classics were not above reproach. “Take, for
instance, a well-known book written by Boccaccio,” he wrote in his book, Traps for the Young. The book
was so filthy that he would do anything “to prevent this, like a wild beast, from breaking loose and
destroying the youth of the country.” Balzac, Rabelais, Walt Whitman, Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy were
among his victims. Comstock’s everyday reading was, he said, the Bible.
Comstock’s methods were savage but superficial. He lacked the perception and patience of more
sophisticated censors, who will mine a text with excruciating care in search of buried messages. In 1981,
for instance, the military junta led by General Pinochet banned Don Quixote in Chile, because the general
believed (quite rightly) that it contained a plea for individual freedom and an attack on conventional
authority.
Comstock’s censoring limited itself to placing suspect works, in a rage of abuse, on a catalogue of the
damned. His access to books was also limited; he could only chase them as they appeared in public, by
which time many had escaped into the hands of eager readers. The Catholic Church was far ahead of him.
In 1559, the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition had published the first Index of Forbidden