Technology
From beginning to end, the case of The Well of Loneliness is one dominated by print technology. This exhibit contains only a few notable examples of the copious amount of paper-and-ink records produced by this controversy: from newspaper articles, to letters of support, to Jonathon Cape’s incriminatory telegrams, the involvement of the law in the case of The Well has made it so that great importance has been attached to each piece of printed material, first as legal evidence and later as important artifacts of LGTBQ + history. Appropriately, the story of The Well is a testimony to the power of print; it was well-known that lesbianism existed long before Radclyffe Hall wrote about it in The Well of Loneliness, however, only once these ideas were put into print and began to be read did they become powerful, and, according to Christian moralists like James Douglas and judges like Chartres Biron, dangerous. The physical form of these ideas in a printed work made it possible for the law to seize and destroy them, as they did in 1928 with Hill and Cape’s Pegasus Press stashes, but also had the result of causing them to be reproduced in a way that allowed The Well to evade the law. This was made possible by the technology of the printing press, and in particular, the technology of stereotyping.
Stereotyping is the practice of making plates to be used in a letter press - the type of printing press used to print The Well of Loneliness in the 1920s. The letter press allowed the quick and efficient printing of many copies of one text, as the paper is repeatedly pressed against plates coated with ink with limited human assistance (Britannica.com). When Jonathon Cape instructed his printers to make moulds of the type, he was referring to the practice of pressing a tablet of an impressionable medium, such as clay or papier mache, onto a type form (Kubler 58). This mould, sometimes called a flong, could be easily transported and used to recast new plates. In order to evade obscenity laws in England, Cape had the moulds sent to Paris, where new printing plates could be produced, and where more relaxed laws would allow The Well of Loneliness to be printed and distributed (McCleery 44), thereby evading the order of suppression.
This technology was not without its limits. As Howard wrote to Hall in 1928, there was a possibility of the plates deteriorating from poor use, which would slow, if not halt production. More broadly, the production of moulds depended on access to expensive and cumbersome type forms, so only those involved in the publishing industry would likely be able to use them to print the text. The technology made the novel’s production possible, but also contributed to its scarcity, making its highly sought- after copies more valuable and increasing financial incentive for publishers to produce them. While this may have limited the number of copies in circulation, it did increase the notoriety of the novel. Allistair McCleery, in his paper on the trial of The Well, includes this quote from a letter which testifies to the high value attributed to copies of The Well:
It may be interesting to know that Radclyffe Hall’s novel about Lesbians, The Well of Loneliness, though banned in England and under fire in
New York, has escaped condemnation in France, where it now enjoys a
local printing. Its biggest daily sale takes place from the news vendor’s
cart serving the de luxe train for London, La Flèche d’Or, at the Gare
du Nord. The price is one hundred and twenty-five francs a copy. For
first English editions, dealers in the Rue de Castiglione offer to buy for
as high as six thousand francs, and to sell at as high as anything you are
silly enough to pay.
—Janet Flanner, “Letter from Paris” (48), qtd. in McCleery 35
It is evident that the attractive “risque” nature of the novel was due not entirely to its contents but to the illegal nature of the physical book object itself - McCleery quotes “The thrill of smuggling these books on the liner from Le Havre to New York or the ferry from Dover to Calais matched any anticipated titillation from the reading of it” (Rose 453 qtd in McCleery 44). Neil Gaiman was correct in his statement that “repressing ideas spreads ideas”; it also appears that repressing print spreads print.