Outrages

At once, dissent and morality, deviancy and normalcy, became modern legal concepts: if writers, editors, printers and booksellers did not uphold the law and the morals of society they faced serious repercussions.
Wolf depicts the ways this censorship played out - decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde - among a bohemian group of ´sexual dissidents´, including Walt Whitman in America and the English critic John Addington Symonds, who fell in love with Whitman´s homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass. This was a dangerous love, even if only expressed on the page.