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 variety of jurisdictions and involved a variety of different laws, to my knowledge no list of such trials exists. I’ve long wanted to know, even in ballpark terms, how many of these trials took place, whether they increased or decreased over time, and what a ‘typical’ obscenity trial looked like. This project aims to address these issues, while also furnishing information that will help fill in gaps in knowledge 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. With my research assistant Cameron Wheeler, I’m now working on filling in missing information about those trials and figuring out what I have missed. This project will never be ‘complete’: the ways the trials were documented varied wildly, and I don’t have a means of validating the comprehensiveness of my data. However, I plan to publish it 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.