Society for Suppression of Vice

The Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded by William Wilberforce, who is better known for his involvement in the abolition of the U.K. slave trade.

The Society began with King George III's Royal Proclamation, in 1787, "For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality," made at Wilberforce's suggestion. The Proclamation led to the formation of a Proclamation Society, which became the Society for the Suppression of Vice, in 1802.

M.J.D. Roberts writes that the Jacobin ideas, from the French Revolution, raised fears of atheism, which led establishment people to set up organisations like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, to campaign for tough application of the law against indiscipline by the radicals. [M.J.D. Roberts, "Making English Morals: Voluntary Association And Moral Reform In England, 1787-1886 (Cambridge: CUP 2004)"] One who suffered from the attentions of the Society for the Suppression of Vice was the campaigner for free speech, Richard Carlile. [http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/gorsky.html]

The "News Ltd" website remarks on the role of the SSV in enforcing the stamp duty on newspapers. The campaign to abolish the stamp duty was led by the radical press. Other more establishment figures like Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor, 1834, also argued against it. The stamp duty was reduced to 1d in 1836 and abolished in 1855. [http://www.kirkbytimes.co.uk/knowsley_council/news_ltd_chapter_1.html]

The Obscene Publications Act was introduced in September 1857 (superseding the 1787 Proclamation). One effect of the Act was to forbid the distribution of information about contraception and human biology to the working classes. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A679016]

The Society for the Suppression of Vice was still in operation in the 1870s. It was the means of suppressing "low and vicious periodicals", and of bringing the dealers to punishment, by imprisonment, hard labor and fines. The article reproduced on the Victorian London site records a list of items seized and destroyed. This included "large quantities of infidel and blasphemous publications." [http://www.victorianlondon.org/crime/suppression.htm]

The Society for the Suppression of Vice was merged with the National Vigilance Association, in August 1885. [http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search2?coll_id=6844&inst_id=65]

A different organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was active in the earlier part of the 20th Century.

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