Criminal Law

Regina v. Hicklin

(1868) LR 3 QB 360

Facts

Henry Scott distributed copies of a pamphlet titled The Confessional Unmasked.
The pamphlet attacked practices of the Roman Catholic Church.
It reproduced explicit questions and material concerning sexual matters allegedly associated with confession.
Authorities sought seizure and destruction of the pamphlets under legislation dealing with obscene publications.
Scott argued that:
his motive was religious criticism rather than sexual corruption;
the work should be assessed according to its overall purpose.
A lower court accepted the importance of his motive.
The Queen’s Bench reviewed the proper legal test for obscenity.

The Court formulated the Hicklin test:
material is obscene if its tendency is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influence and into whose hands it may fall.
The test focused on particularly susceptible readers, including the young or vulnerable.
Isolated passages could be examined rather than assessing the dominant effect of the work as a whole.
The publisher’s motive was not decisive where the material objectively possessed a corrupting tendency.
This became a highly restrictive obscenity standard.

The pamphlet contained explicit sexual descriptions capable of reaching readers beyond the intended adult political audience.
The Court considered whether such passages could morally corrupt susceptible persons.
It did not ask primarily:
how an average adult reader would react;
whether the work possessed serious social value as a whole;
whether the explicit passages were justified by context.
Scott’s anti-clerical objective could not neutralise the potential effect of the words.
By focusing on vulnerable minds, the test allowed suppression whenever any portion might corrupt a particularly impressionable reader.
The approach gave courts broad power to isolate offensive passages and disregard the work’s larger message.
This test later influenced Indian obscenity law through Ranjit D. Udeshi.
Modern courts have criticised it for being:
excessively paternalistic;
context-insensitive;
based on the most vulnerable audience rather than contemporary community standards.
In India, Aveek Sarkar expressly moved away from the Hicklin approach.

The Queen’s Bench held that the pamphlet could be treated as obscene despite Scott’s claimed reformative motive.
The tendency of the material to corrupt susceptible minds was the controlling test.
The Hicklin test is historically important but is no longer the governing Indian standard.
Use this case for: the old obscenity test based on isolated material’s tendency to deprave particularly susceptible readers.