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 different 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 ball park terms, how many of these trials took place; to have more data to test claims that they increased over time; and to 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 860 trials. With the help of research assistant extraordinaire Cameron Wheeler, that number had risen to 899 by April 2026. The search for more information about the trials in the list—and trials we may have missed—continues. Technically, this project will never be ‘complete.’ It’s now clear that records of some cases have not survived, and that finding some others, especially those involving proceedings in local courts outside London, could prove difficult. However, the plan is to publish the dataset as a resource that others can use and build on once it’s gotten as ‘complete’ as we can get it, likely in the next couple of years. If you’d like a sense of some of the data, hop over to look at Obscenity Trade Networks, a network visualization of relationships among people involved in the nineteenth-century pornography trade that draws heavily on connections between individuals identified through this project.