In February 1926, a long essay on ‘The Poisoning of Youth’ appeared in the English Review. John Rudd, a librarian at a boy's school, simply refused to provide the books that the students asked for, books by ‘the most advertised moderns’ – including H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rose Macaulay, John Galsworthy and Warwick Deeping. For Rudd, the treatment of love and sex in modern fiction made it unsuitable for teenage boys. The imagery of food and health runs throughout the essay: boys have been ‘brought up on the healthy diet of Kipling, Marryat, Ian Hay, Wells (early period)’ and they ‘want diet more suitable to their years’. But the lack of morality in modern books risked poisoning the ‘bright and clever and healthy lad’. Rudd gives the example of Deeping's 1925 bestseller Sorrell & Son, a novel with ‘immoral’ and ‘rebellious’ female characters. Reading this kind of fiction could give the boys the impression that emancipated women have sexual desires and want to ‘have a good time’. To prevent corrupting young readers, Rudd asked novelists to write cleaner books and publishers to fulfil their educational mission. His essay shows that issues of obscenity and censorship applied to all kinds of texts, including texts that we now see as ‘middlebrow’. If Rudd could present Deeping as a problematic writer, it is not difficult to imagine what he would have thought of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence.

Of course, Rudd was not the first one to denounce the poisonous effect of modern fiction. Rachel Potter notes that ‘prussic acid, strychnine, and arsenic; leprosy, excrement, and open sewers’ were ‘some of the more colourful images conjured up by nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators to capture the noxious effects of obscene literature’. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857, and the subsequent ‘Hicklin ruling’ that defined obscenity as the tendency ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’, were used to censor a wide range of books. This official censorship was complemented by actions from members of the book trade (printers, publishers, booksellers, librarians) to prevent the diffusion of questionable books. Despite these strict controls, concerns over obscenity did not disappear. In early 1926, the debate between the home secretary William Joynson-Hicks and the MP Joseph Kenworthy led to a series of articles on indecent books and plays.