Censorship of Old Books and Literature

The World State’s censorship of old books and literature is a deliberate instrument of social stability: it keeps works such as Othello and Shakespeare’s plays out of ordinary readers’ reach because their beauty and emotional demands could awaken attachments the regime cannot safely accommodate. The policy reaches beyond banning texts. It restricts the conditions under which people might encounter solitude, religious thought, grief, and tragic conflict, replacing difficult art with distraction and agreeable sensation.

Institutional Control of Reading

The exclusion of old literature is visible in the institutions that shape reading from childhood. When John asks whether students read Shakespeare, the Head Mistress blushes and says they do not. Dr. Gaffney explains that the library contains only reference books; young people who want distraction can go to the feelies, and solitary amusements are discouraged. The library is not presented as a neutral storehouse with a few missing classics: its limited holdings and prescribed alternatives make literary reading itself an activity outside ordinary education.

Mustapha Mond later makes clear that the restriction is not caused by ignorance at the top. He keeps old books in a private collection, including religious works, while the public shelves hold books and reading-machine bobbins suited to the present order. He calls the older volumes “pornographic old books,” a dismissive label that reduces their intellectual and spiritual contents to something socially disallowed. The contrast between the books he can privately consult and the material made available to the population shows that censorship is selective access, not the disappearance of the past from every memory.

Why Beauty and Age Are Suppressed

When John asks why Shakespeare is prohibited, Mond gives age as the chief reason: the World State has no use for old things. John challenges the rule by asking whether it applies even when the works are beautiful. Mond answers that beauty makes the danger greater, because beauty attracts people to the past, while the authorities want them to like new things. The censorship therefore targets not only outdated information but also the power of art to make the old desirable.

The exchange over Othello makes the rule concrete. John asks why people are not allowed to see it, and Mond replies that it is old and that the population would not understand it. John recognizes the second objection in Helmholtz’s laughter at Romeo and Juliet: even an unusually capable listener, moved by the play’s verbal craft, finds its lovers’ intensity difficult to take seriously. The gap between the plays and their audience is not merely a failure of instruction; it reflects a society that has conditioned people away from the emotional experience the works require.

Stability Against Tragedy

Mond connects the ban on tragedy to the structure of World State life. Tragedies such as Othello belong to a world of divided loyalties, strong attachments, temptation, and risk; the present society, he argues, has removed the instability that makes such conflicts possible. People get what they want, are conditioned to behave as required, and can take soma when anything unpleasant occurs. In this account, the social order has not simply prohibited tragic art after the fact: it has eliminated many of the circumstances that tragedy represents, then uses that changed way of life to justify withholding the plays.

He states the trade-off openly: Othello is better than the feelies, but stability requires sacrificing high art in favor of sensory entertainments such as feelies and the scent organ. The contrast is sharpened by what each form asks of its audience. A tragedy gives meaning to suffering, conflict, and attachment; the feelies provide agreeable sensations that, in Mond’s formulation, mean themselves. Censorship thus helps replace interpretive and emotional engagement with consumption that does not lead beyond its immediate pleasure.

Religion, Soma, and the Price of the Ban

The censorship also extends to religious writing. John asks why Mond does not give people books about God, and Mond answers that they are old books about God in the past, not God in the present; people have changed. When John insists that God does not change, Mond replies that the difference lies in human life. His answer treats religious thought as inseparable from social conditions and makes the changed population a reason to withhold inherited texts rather than a reason to reconsider those conditions.

Mond’s defense of soma gives the policy a moral and emotional dimension. The World State has no need, he says, for nobility or heroism, because it has removed wars, divided allegiances, powerful attachments, and temptations to resist. If anything unpleasant happens, soma offers a holiday from facts, calms anger, reconciles enemies, and makes people patient. Where older moral practice required effort and training, he claims that two or three half-gramme tablets can make anyone virtuous; soma is “Christianity without tears.” John objects that tears are necessary and recalls Othello’s wish for calms after tempests. Their disagreement exposes the cost of censorship: the regime blocks both the literature that gives suffering form and the religious or moral traditions that might treat suffering as consequential. By withholding old books while presenting social stability as proof that they are unnecessary, the World State makes the absence of tragedy seem like a reason to forget what tragedy can reveal.