POLICEMAN OF THE LORD: A Political Satire.

First trade edition. Publisher's original pink card wrappers with title printed in black. Illustrated with 7 black and white full-page drawings by Beresford Egan. A near very good copy, the binding firm with dust soiling to the covers, wear to the extremities and chipping to the spine. The contents with a previous owner's bookplate to the front pastedown, foxing to the endpapers and the occasional mark to page margins are otherwise in good order. The drawings remain clean and bright.

Percy Reginald Stephensen (1901-1965) was an Australian writer, publisher and political activist, first for the Communists and later for far-right groups. In this satirical work he mocks the Conservative politician Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who was well-known for his authoritarianism, his campaigns against Communism and his attempts to clamp down on nightclubs and what he saw as the indecent literature of the roaring twenties (or, what he termed "the flood of filth coming across the Channel"). Notably, he was heavily implicated in the banning of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), as well as in forcing the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in an expurgated version. As D.H. Lawrence was a good friend of Stephensen, this was perhaps part of the reason for the present satire. Egan's drawings, greatly influenced by the work of Aubrey Beardsley and imbued with the spirit of 1920s decadence, provide the perfect riposte to Joynson-Hick's reactionary moralising. Provenance: from the library of Martin Stone.