The US’s first literary obscenity trial dated again to 1821, when John Cleland’s 1779 novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Girl of Pleasure, concerning the lifetime of a intercourse employee, was banned. Because the nineteenth Century, US obscenity legislation had been modelled on that in Britain, which itself was based on the 1868 Regina v Hicklin case, centred on an anti-Catholic pamphlet. The Hicklin Check decreed “the check of obscenity is whether or not the tendency… is to corrupt and corrupt these whose minds are open to such immoral influences”. Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and DH Lawrence all had books partly or absolutely banned within the US consequently.
