Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: the cultivation of inner life and the dangers of reading
  • Inventing fragile readers: the origins of scular obscenity law, 1788-1830
  • Dubious sources, dangerous spaces, porous geographies: understanding the bookseller's crime, 1811-1840
  • Defending forbidden texts: the strategies of editors, publishers, and authors
  • Liberalism and the codification of obscenity laws in the 1830s and 1840s
  • Redifining obscenity in anera of "progress," 1848-1880
  • Conclusion.