1960 The term ‘sea change’ is frequently used but seldom justified. A genuine change of the literary weather (to vary metaphors) occurred in Britain and America in November 1960.
D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the last of which was the freest with the awkwardly-termed ‘four-letter words’. The final draft could not, in 1928, be published in Britain (nor easily printed: printers are notoriously strait-laced and nervous, as the easiest targets for prosecution). Lady Chatterley’s Lover was printed – like other subversively obscene works of literature (notably Ulysses) – offshore, principally in France, where it sold massively over the years.
Various expurgated versions of the novel were published in the English-speaking world. Lawrence, who died in 1930, would have disapproved. His novels ‘bled’, he complained, if they were cut.
Times changed in the late 1950s in the US, with the liberating Roth changes to the law of obscenity and the decline of censorious lobbies such as The Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1959, after a series of trials, Lawrence’s novel was deemed mailable and publishable. It was not, at that point, covered in the US by copyright protection and there was a flood of pirated versions. At one point, in 1960, the novel was being sold, as a newspaper supplement, on street corners in Boston for 25¢.
In the UK, the home secretary, Roy Jenkins – who complacently declared that ‘the permissive society is the civilised society’ – got into UK law an amended obscenity statute that allowed publication of an ‘offensive’ work if it could be shown to be of literary or social ‘merit’. Bad books could, in the right circumstances, be good books.
Penguin, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Lawrence’s death, brought out a collective seven-volume set of his work – including Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They prudently kept the stock in a warehouse, sending a dozen copies to the director of public prosecutions, daring him to act: which he duly did.
In November 1960 the publishers were tried at the Old Bailey. They mustered an impressive corps of witnesses to testify to the novel’s merit (tactfully, they did not draw the prosecution’s attention to the act of anal rape, late in the narrative, nor had the prosecution read the novel carefully enough themselves to notice it). Among other fatuities on the witness stand, the Bishop of Woolwich averred that the adultery of the gamekeeper and the aristocrat was equivalent to an ‘act of communion’.
By general agreement, the case for censorship was lost by the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith Jones, instructing the jury, in his opening address
to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
He had forgotten it was the 1960s. Or perhaps he never knew. Lady Chat (as she was fondly named) was acquitted in court on 2 November. The novel went on sale on the 10th. By the 11th, as The Times reported, there was not a copy to be found in any bookshop in London.