the atmosphere of this island is thick enough to choke all artists dead.  You can walk up and down the Strand and see photographs of celebrated living harlots all over the place.  You can buy them on picture post cards for your daughter.  You can see their names even on the posters of high-class weekly papers.  You can entertain them at the most select fashionable restaurants.  Indeed, the shareholders of fashionable restaurants would look very blue without the said harlots.  (Only they aren’t called harlots.) But if you desire to read a masterpiece of social fiction, some mirror of crass stupidity in a circulating library will try to save you from yourself.

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[24 Feb. ’10]

Up Yorkshire way the opponents of freedom have been dealing some effective blows at the Libraries Censorship.  They doubtless imagine that they have been supporting the Libraries Censorship; but they are mistaken.  Hull has distinguished itself.  It is a strange, interesting place.  I only set foot in it once; the day was Sunday, and I arrived by sea.  I was informed that a man could not get a shave in Hull on Sunday.  But I got one.  At the last meeting of the Hull Libraries Committee, when “Ann Veronica” was under discussion, Canon Lambert procured for the name of Lambert a free advertisement throughout the length and breadth of the country by saying:  “I would just as soon send a daughter of mine to a house infected with diphtheria or typhoid fever as put that book into her hands.”  I doubt it.  I can conceive that, if it came to the point, Canon Lambert’s fear of infection and regard for his own canonical skin might move him to offer his daughter “Ann Veronica” in preference to diphtheria and typhoid fever.  Canons who give expression to this kind of babblement must expect what they get in the way of responses.  Let the Canon now turn the other cheek, in a Christian spirit, and I will see what I can do for him.

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Needless to say, “Ann Veronica” was banned from the Free Public Libraries of free Hull.  But I cull the following from the Hull Daily Mail:  “A local bookseller had thirteen orders for ‘Ann Veronica’ on Monday, thirty on Tuesday, and scores since.  Previously he had no demand.”  A Canon Lambert in every town would demolish the censorship in less time than it took the Hebrew deity to create the world and the fig-tree.

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Canon Lambert, doubtless unconsciously, went wide of the point.  The point was not a code for the parental treatment of canons’ daughters.  England was not waiting for information as to what Canon Lambert would do to a Miss Lambert in a given dilemma.  H.G.  Wells did not turn up in Hull with a Gatling gun and, turning it on the Canon’s abode, threaten to blow the ecclesiastical wigwam to pieces if the canon did not immediately buy a copy of “Ann Veronica” for his daughter to read.  Nobody wants to interfere between the Canon and a Miss Lambert.  All that quiet people want is to be left alone to treat their daughters according to their lights.  Does Canon Lambert hold that the Hull libraries are to contain no volumes which he would not care for his daughter to read?