This project aims to compile information about obscenity trials in nineteenth-century Britain and the people involved in them, drawing on court and prison records, news reports, tax and voting records, and other primary sources.

There are many studies of famous obscenity trials in Britain. However, because they took place in a wide variety of jurisdictions and involved a wide variety of different laws, to my knowledge no list of such trials exists. I’ve long wanted to know, even in ball park terms, how many of these trials took place, be able to see some real data to support claims that they increased over time, and have a more solid sense of what a ‘typical’ obscenity trial looked like. This project aims to make progress toward addressing those issues, while also furnishing more information about some of the figures identified in my other dataset project, Advertising Pornography, 1822-1870.

As of September 2025, I had catalogued around 860 trials. My research assistant Cameron Wheeler and I are now working on filling in missing information about those trials and looking for records of trials that I missed on my first pass. Technically, this project will never be ‘complete’ — it’s now clear that some records (especially for cases that were not treated as very important) have not survived, and that finding some others, especially those involving proceedings in local courts outside London, would require a much bigger project with more people power. However, I plan to publish the dataset we’re working on as a resource that others can use and build on once it’s gotten as ‘complete’ as I can get it, likely in 2027 or 2028. If you’d like a sense of some of the data, hop over to look at Obscenity Trade Networks, a network visualization that draws heavily on connections between individuals identified through this project.