Natasha Kee

The Act for preventing abuses in printing seditious, treasonable and unlicenced books and pamphlets, and for regulating of printing and printing-presses received royal assent on 19 May 1662 . It established a system of pre-publication licencing that endured (excepting a lapse from 1679 to 1685) until 1695. The Act has been held in posterity as, paradoxically, a sign of both the zenith and inevitable failure of state censorship in England, aligning its fate with that of the restored and subsequently expelled Stuart regime. Some 150 years later, Thomas Macaulay would celebrate 1695 as the moment 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever'. Although Macaulay’s interpretation of the 1695 lapse of the Printing Act is no longer tenable for historians, it speaks to the importance of the Restoration censorship regime. My research explores the mechanisms of censorship and surveillance. It adopts a ground level approach to uncover the lived experience of the printers, booksellers, and authors imposed upon by and responding to censorship. It is these details which are missing from the historiography of seventeenth-century censorship. How did censorship actually operate? Who was involved? How did censors conduct their business? My emphasis on the machinations and processes of surveillance and examination uncovers the unusually personal element of English press censorship, whilst also demonstrating the significance of censorship and censors in wider questions of state formation and political participation.