Lawrence · 1960
Lady Chatterley acquitted
Penguin Books published the unexpurgated text of D. H. Lawrence's *Lady Chatterley's Lover* in Britain on the sixteenth of August 1960. Lawrence had died in 1930. The novel had been printed in Florence in 1928 and had circulated in unexpurgated foreign editions for thirty-two years. Penguin's first British printing was 200,000 copies; not one was distributed; the firm sent twelve copies to the Director of Public Prosecutions on publication day. The DPP charged Penguin under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which for the first time allowed an obscenity defence on grounds of literary merit. The trial at the Old Bailey ran from the twentieth of October to the second of November. The prosecution called no expert witnesses. The defence called thirty-five, including E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, the Bishop of Woolwich, and a 25-year-old Cambridge don called Helen Gardner. The jury of three women and nine men returned not guilty in three hours. Penguin sold two hundred thousand copies on the third of November and three million copies in the next twelve months. The verdict ended literary censorship in Britain.
It is twenty-five minutes past three on the afternoon of the second of November 1960, in Court Number One of the Old Bailey. He is forty-two years old. He is Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Senior Treasury Counsel, prosecuting on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd. He is in a horsehair wig and silk gown. He has finished his closing speech twenty minutes ago. The judge, Mr Justice Byrne, has summed up to the jury for forty minutes, finishing about a quarter past three. The jury is now out.
He has, on the eighth day of this trial, asked the jury what is now the most-quoted question of his career. Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? Several of the jurors had laughed, audibly. The defence afterwards, in their cross-examinations, had treated the question as a class slip; Bernard Levin in the Spectator had treated it as the moment the case turned. The jury has gone out at twenty-five past three.
He thinks: I called no expert witnesses because I did not believe a jury would be persuaded by professors against their own eyes.
He thinks: the defence has called thirty-five experts. Forster, Hoggart, the Bishop of Woolwich. They have spoken to the jury for six days. The jury has heard six days of professors and bishops telling them the book is literature.
He thinks: they will be back in three hours.
They are back in three hours and five minutes.
Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin, is at the back of the court in a tweed jacket. The defence team, under Gerald Gardiner QC, is at the front. The literary witnesses are gone, called and cross-examined and sent home. The jury comes back in. The foreman is asked the question. The foreman says: not guilty. The verdict comes through to the back of the court before the press benches understand. There is a cheer. Mr Justice Byrne calls for order.
The unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover is in Penguin's warehouse in Harmondsworth, two hundred thousand copies, packed and labelled and ready to go to the bookshops. The shipment goes out within forty-eight hours. The first edition sells out in one day. The reprints come off the press in batches of fifty thousand for the next eight weeks. By the end of 1960 Penguin has shifted two million copies of the book. By the end of 1961, three million. The book has not been out of print in the British Isles since the second of November 1960.
By the assessment of the literary historians of the next two generations, the verdict effectively ended literary censorship in Britain. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which had set the merit defence, had its first major test under the Chatterley prosecution; the test was conclusive. No major British publisher was successfully prosecuted for obscenity again. The 1960s as a literary culture, the Penguin Modern Classics paperbacks, the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, the abolition of stage-censorship in 1968, are not all caused by the Old Bailey verdict, but the verdict is the doorway. Helen Gardner of Cambridge wrote the verdict's history later as the moment a particular kind of upper-class confidence in its own taste lost the right to speak for the country in court. Mervyn Griffith-Jones went on to be the Common Serjeant of the City of London. Lawrence himself had died in Vence in 1930, of tuberculosis, aged forty-four; the body lay in the cemetery at Vence for five years before the ashes were taken to Taos in New Mexico to lie in the small chapel his widow Frieda built for him on a hillside above the Rockies. He had been mostly out of fashion in England in the 1930s. The book the Treasury Counsel had asked the jury about in 1960 had carried his name back into the centre of the language, by accident, on a question about wives and servants.