In 1960, the Old Bailey hosted a trial that garnered more attention
from around the world than any of Britain’s hundreds of elected officials.
Its impact may still be felt in modern British society.
On Friday, October 21, the Crown versus Penguin Books trial began.
Nine men and three women were given copies of what would become
one of the most infamous novels of the century.
However, they were forbidden to remove the book from the jury room.
Distribution would be allowed only if Penguin
were cleared of violating the Obscene Publications Act.
As one observer put it, “no one that sat throughout the entire
six days would ever forget them” because the ensuing “circus”
was “so amazing, interesting, stressful, and thrilling.”
So join me now as we look at the very strange case of
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
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Few in the 1920s could have imagined that the novel Lawrence penned
would one day inspire an international sex industry
that would grow to be worth over £26 billion annually.
The man behind this publication could not have imaged
the furore that would arrive in the years ahead.
The second half of Lawrence’s life was spent in a voluntary exile,
which he called a “savage enough pilgrimage,” as he was persecuted
for his ideas and artistic preferences and saw his work misrepresented.
At the time of his death, he was widely regarded
as a pornographer who had squandered a promising career.
It’s difficult to imagine what it was like to live in a time when public obscenity
was rare and books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned
because they would “deprave and corrupt” their readers.
Even though only 60 years have passed since Harold Macmillan’s Britain,
it is easy to forget how different the world was then.
D. H. Lawrence’s book was one of many that threatened
public morals in Britain, where men wore heavy grey suits,
women worked in relatively small numbers, and the Empire was still a going concern.
The early 1960s may seem archaic to us,
but they were a time of unprecedented upheaval.
Just one year before the trial, Roy Jenkins had successfully lobbied
for enacting a new Obscene Publications Act,
which included a critical loophole the question of literary merit—that
could allow some works to avoid prohibition.
This resulted in May of 1960, Penguin books recognised its opportunity
and said it would produce 200,000 paperback copies.
The trial is typically portrayed as a direct conflict
between the old, oppressive establishment and the new, progressive,
enlightened generation.
However, this needs to be more balanced.
To comply with Jenkins’s law, the Crown was required to bring charges;
as prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, explained
to the director of public prosecutions,
“If no action is taken in respect of this publication,
it will make actions against any future novel very difficult.”
And contrary to popular belief, the establishment,
if there ever was one, was on the publishers’ side.
The country’s newspapers widely panned the trial.
The Daily Telegraph, for example, argued that police resources would be better
spent tracking down “truly vile” pornography than it does on D. H. Lawrence.
The much-heralded landmark trial was, in many ways, a mockery.
Gerald Gardiner, a founding member of CND, and his team of 35
prominent witnesses testified to the book’s literary worth.
These witnesses included
E. M. Forster, Cecil Day-Lewis, Rebecca West, and Richard Hoggart.
When asked if it was a book that “Christians ought to read,”
the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, the archetypal trendy Anglican priest,
told the court that Lawrence depicted sex as “an act of holy communion.”
The Crown’s case, however, had problems from the get-go.
Even though the prosecution had a long list of potential witnesses
who may testify that Lawrence’s book was obscene,
not a single one showed up to testify.
An American literary critic who previously called the book “a gloomy,
melancholy performance with occasional parts of unintended, hilarious, low
comedy” was almost flown over at one time, but the idea was dropped.
Instead, the prosecution spent time before the trial by going through the book
line by line with a pencil, recording the obscenities.
A veteran of North Africa and Italy Military Cross
recipient Mervyn Griffith-Jones was entirely at sea.
Nearly at the end of his rope, he asked the jurors in a very Victorian
way, “Would approval be given to your young sons,
young daughters - since girls can read as well as boys?
Do you consider it a book that belongs on your coffee table?
Is this something you’d want your wife or your servants to read?
There was no turning back after he said those things.
After deliberating for only three hours, the jury acquitted
Penguin Books on all charges on November 2.
Shortly after its release, the book was widely acclaimed.
Three hundred copies were sold, and a further 3,000 copies
were ordered in under 15 minutes at Foyles.
Within 40 minutes, Hatchards sold out, while within half
an hour, Selfridges moved 250 copies.
and one astute butcher in Yorkshire sold books alongside his lamb chops.
Still, there was an angle to the story that historians usually needed to cover.
Aside from the elite academic community, the general populace remained staunchly
conservative in 1960, and the Home Office received hundreds of angry letters.
Edinburgh residents burned copies of the book in the streets,
while female librarians in South Wales
requested special permission to avoid working with it.
A mother in Surrey wrote to the home secretary, expressing her anxiety that her
daughter’s boarding school might introduce the “vile book” to the other students.
Despite Philip Larkin’s famous poem, “Sex between the termination
of the Chatterley ban and the release of the Beatles’ first album,”
the years that followed were marked by an unusually chaste
and conservative atmosphere in Britain.
Although many people associate the sexual revolution with the 1960s,
it wasn’t until the early 1970s that issues like divorce, homosexuality,
and abortion were accepted as standard parts of life for most people.
Yet, in retrospect, the lifting of the Chatterley ban
was hugely symbolic.
Over the next twenty years, there were numerous other obscenity cases,
but they all ended up with the same general outcome:
a win for freedom and a loss for censorship.
After October 1960, it is safe to claim
that most restrictions were lifted.
After 60 years, the Lady Chatterley trial
has become a cliche of the familiar story of the Sixties,
a triumph of youth and freedom over the oppressive establishment.
But in a culture
where pre-pubescent girls wear T-shirts emblazoned with the moniker “Porn star,”
We have to ask if its legacy is more complex than that.
Most of us today would find it insufferable to go back to a time
when the state-controlled what we could and could not write in Britain,
but that was a different era.
There aren’t many people here
who would have preferred a different outcome in the Chatterley trial.
But will history say that we made the most of our liberation?
Pretty unlikely.
As evidenced by the murals of Pompeii, erotica
and pornography have always been part of human culture.
You don’t have to be a complete prude to feel unhappy about how young girls
are portrayed as ready and available sex objects in porn or to question
how porn has entered the mainstream of our culture.
Those who sought to change society during the 1960s
rebelled against the social norms of their parents and grandparents
by placing a premium on individuality and expressiveness.
We could certainly use more of Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ much-mocked puritanism
60 years after the trial that transformed Britain forever, in a society
where the connections of community and civility have frayed nearly beyond repair.
Unfortunately, it’s possible that time travel is not an option.
In any case, it is never too late to gain insight from the past.
So, the book that was considered scandalous and obscene in the 60s,
today is considered a classic of English literature,
and the court case that put it on trial is a significant moment
in the history of censorship and freedom of speech.
It is a reminder of the power of literature to challenge societies
norms and push the boundaries of what is considered acceptable.
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