Holywell Street, London
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“We have in this country a free press, and, as the price of that incalculable boon we must be content to take the attendant evils. When, however, the liberty is so abused that common decency is infringed upon, and public morality gradually undermined, the law, especially as amended by Lord Campbell’s recent act, will interfere. It has done so just lately, and several of the Holywell Street shops were unceremoniously entered by the police, and large quantities of abominable books confiscated and burnt by order of the magistrates; but it is only in such flagrant cases as these that the law can interpose. The real remedy lies in the power of public opinion, in the enlightenment of the masses, and in the gradual improvement of popular taste.”--Pernicious Literature "Strange and Vickers had been associated with cheap literature all their lives, the fathers of both young publishers were among the radical unstamped pressmen of the 1830's and were acquaintances and neighbours of Holywell Street pornographer William Dugdale, a Regency veteran. Strange Sr. had published an unstamped newspaper, Truth, and an obscene and Anti-Papist work, The Confessional Unmasked. Vickers Sr. was responsible for the racy James Lindridge romance, The Merry Wives of London a Romance of Metropolitan Life."[1] |
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Holywell Street was a brief, secondary, northern carriageway of part of the Strand, London. It was accordingly subsumed in name when the Strand was widened in 1900.
A lower grade of publishing was promoted at the east end of Strand where Holywell Street was the hub of Victorian pornography trade, until the street was physically eliminated by the Strand road widening in 1900. After passing the 1857 Act John Campbell informed his diary that half of the Holywell Street shops had closed down and the other half were stocking only respectable wares." (Pease).
The street also housed the offices of The Oracle of Reason and those of William Dugdale.
