It amended the Vagrancy Act 1824 to provide that any person discharged from custody pending an appeal against a conviction under that Act who did not then reappear to prosecute the appeal could be recommitted.

[2] This latter part of the Act was to prove significant in a number of prosecutions of artists for allegedly exhibiting obscene works of art, even when those exhibitions took place in a private space such as an art gallery.

One of the most notorious successful prosecutions of an artist under the act was in 1929, when thirteen paintings by D. H. Lawrence at the Warren Gallery, London, were seized by the police.

Again a ban was placed on showing the offending paintings and drawings in England, which is also still legally valid.

[6] For example the advertising of contraceptives was considered obscene from 1857, but fell under the ambit of the new act of 1981.