...seen that in 1900, the year of Sister Carrie's publication, a text could be found obscene if it might "corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."3 As the editors at Harper and Brothers apparently discerned,...

...British Hicklin doctrine of 1868, for example, the test for obscenity was whether material had a tendency to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." The Hicklin test left the freedom of expression of writers to the real or imagined effects that a work...

...obscenity in the Hicklin case was to determine . . .whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscene is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral instances and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall. . .it is quite certain that it...

...distribution networks most notably included the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and an 1868 ruling that the 'test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged is to deprave and corrupt'. A further commercial battle concerned the advocacy of free trade in bibles,...

...famous case of Regina v. Hicklin. The Hicklin standard, which American courts soon adopted, turned on whether "the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity...open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."6 The publication at issue in Hicklin was an anti-clerical pamphlet,...

...libel and found that "the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged [. . .] is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."27 This finding established a legal precedent for obscenity convictions...

...precedent, Regina v. Hicklin. 5 ® In that case, Lord Cockburn defined obscenity as material with a tendency to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." 51 The Hicklin test for obscenity is not so much about obscene...

...different. By then, a work counted as obscene is treated as a toxic substance having 'a tendency ... to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publications of this sort may fall'. If the publication is dangerous enough to be deemed a social...

...Hicklin, Judge Alexander Cockburn defined "obscenity" as the tendency of any portion of the material to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." Comstock led the United States in its adoption of the Hicklin standard. His intense lobbying effort...

...the Lord Chamberlain, Britain's censoring agency, to see whether they contained anything that would "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and of a nature calculated to shock common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind." Included within...