It's Always More Complicated

(Do people read the Pollyanna books or watch the movie any more? is she still a byeword for finding some sweet sugary good in the most adverse circumstance? enquiring mind wishes to know.)

But anyway: I was thinking, following a discussion to do with an event that went somewhat pearshaped and its repercussions, that sometimes the things that did not go right and were not famous victories nonetheless served a valuable purpose.

And the valuable purpose was not merely as An Awful Warning or a Horrid Example, but that although the thing that did not go right was not very agreeable for the particular people directly involved, its wider effects may have been more benign in the sense of a creation of visibility, an opening of discussion and conversation -

E.g. The Well of Loneliness may have been condemned as a work of obscene literature in 1928, and - actually I am not sure if in that year of grace such works were still ceremoniously burnt at Bow Street -

[T]he author’s own papers, which are set to be digitised, reveal the outpouring of support Hall received from members of the public around the world, who wrote to thank her for creating, in her heroine Stephen Gordon, a character with whom they could identify.

(It was subsequently published in Paris and there was a brisk trade in smuggled copies, as with other works of the era deemed unsuitable for publication on the chaste shores of the British Isles.)

I am very like to suppose that many people first learnt of e.g. matters such as birth control through shock-horror stories in the press, sermons, etc.