@article{ntn 1650, author = {Karen Hunt}, title = {Censorship and Self-Censorship: Revisiting the Belt Case in the Making of Dora Montefiore (1851–1933)}, volume = {0}, year = {2018}, url = {http://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1650/}, issue = {27}, doi = {10.16995/ntn.811}, abstract = {<p>The Belt Case was a series of events that occurred in 1899 and 1900. At their heart sat gossip about Dora Montefiore (1851–1933) and an ‘inappropriate relationship’ she was rumoured to be having with a married, working-class socialist, George Belt, fifteen years her junior. The case led to him losing his job, her being forced to step down from a prestigious role in the women’s movement, and to a court case for slander. Prominent figures such as Lady Aberdeen, a future Labour prime minister, and many leading socialists of the time were swept up in the Belt Case which centred on whether socialists should censor the private behaviour of their comrades. This article takes as its focus an episode which was crucial to the making of Dora Montefiore as a socialist woman and considers how it affected her subsequent self-representation. Dora Montefiore produced various life writings. Her journalism (newspaper columns, letters, and poems) appeared in a range of progressive newspapers and periodicals. Here she drew on her own experiences to develop a distinctive political practice as a socialist, suffragist, and later, communist. Later, she looked back on her life to construct a narrative which formed her autobiography, <em>From a Victorian to a Modern </em>(1927). Across her life she experienced surveillance and even censorship — both formal and informal. The authorities read and archived her mail when she was travelling in Australia in 1923 after the British government initially denied her a passport because she was a communist. She also complained at her misrepresentation within the dominant narrative of suffrage history which was being constructed by suffragists before the vote was won. However, the Belt Case involves different kinds of censorship and self-censorship. In revisiting the case, the article focuses in particular on the peculiar role of letters — stolen and misappropriated ones; lost and saved ones — as a means to censor public and private behaviour. It can be argued that these events were crucial to Montefiore’s construction of herself as a socialist woman, as she journeyed from ‘a Victorian to a Modern’. Yet the Belt Case is absent from her published life writing. This article uses a range of archival sources to reconstruct the Belt Case in order to explore the role of censorship in Montefiore’s self-representation and the challenges that this presents to her biographer.</p>}, month = {12}, keywords = {Dora Montefiore,letters,life-writing.,censorship,gossip,socialists}, issn = {1755-1560}, publisher={Open Library of Humanities}, journal = {19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century} }