Fanny Hill was hauled into court Wednesday and charged by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with being "obscene, impure, and indecent."

After a full day of testimony, Judge Donald Macaulay of Suffolk County Superior Court took the case under advisement until mid-summer. Final briefs will be filled on June 19.

A confident prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General John E. Sullivan, called but one witness in the effort to ban the book, while publisher G. P. Putnam's Sons enlisted the aid of five Boston-area English professors, including John M. Bullitt '43, Master of Quincy House

Charles I. Rembar '35, counsel for Putnam's, based his defense of Fanny Hill on the contention that no work of art may be kept from the public as long as it has "social value." In Massachusetts' last major censorship case, involving Tropic of Cancer, the state's Supreme Judicial Court declared that "anything with literary attributes" or "redeeming social importance" cannot be banned.

In his testimony Bullitt stated "The book is a deliberate work of art, not a great one by any means, but an effort to portray a complex character. It presents a theme common to the eighteenth century, the education of a woman as she learns the value of love."

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"But does it contain the type of language you would use over the breakfast table?" asked Sullivan in his cross-examination of Bullitt.

"There's not a single dirty word in the book," answered Bullitt.

"That's not what I asked," Sullivan retorted. "Would you use this kind of language over the breakfast table?"

"Yes, definitely."

The lone prosecution witness was John E. Collins, headmaster of Newman Preparatory School and a former professor of English at Boston State College. "The book lacks any literary merit that might lift it up above the level of hard-core pornography," he declared.

Collins told the Court he had read the book the night before the hearing. Reminded by Rembar that the book ends with Fanny's marrage, Collins asked, "Oh, that was supposed to be the moral?" Rembar, charged that Collins was not sufficiently familiar with the novel to be a qualified witness.

Another defense witness, Ira Konigsberg, assistant professor of English at Brandeis University, called Fanny Hill a "novel that succeeds."

"I should be saddened to be deprived of it as a document" of the eighteenth century "battle between a restricted Puritan ethic and a freer, more generous attitude toward life," he said.

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