LADY CHATTERLEY’S LIBERATION

2011 edition with an Introduction by Doris Lessing

On the banned list for 30 years, D.H. Lawrence’s classic ‘dirty book’ went legit 60 years ago this month during a watershed obscenity trial at London’s Old Bailey. The Not Guilty verdict dragged ‘sexplicit’ literature out of the Victorian closet into the Permissive Age and Lady Chatterley’s Lover became required reading for every 1960s teenager behind the school bike shed. Belinda Beckett has the unexpurgated highlights.

WORDS BELINDA BECKETT

LADY C FOR THE PRICE OF 10 CIGARETTES

The epic trial of Regina v Penguin Books was a test case for 1959’s change to Britain’s Obscene Publications Act. For the first time, four-letter words and sex scenes might be ‘acceptable’ IF the work as a whole was proved to have literary merit – in court.

Although Lady Chatterley’s Lover is riddled with sex and ‘colourful’ language, no one doubted the literary merit of D.H. Lawrence, author of 12 novels, 13 short story collections, 17 poetry anthologies and five plays. Written in 1928, two years before he died, the unabridged version had never been published in Britain, although Lawrence had a few thousand copies run off privately in Italy, where no one understood the language.

D.H. Lawrence

A Not Guilty verdict looked like an easy win for Penguin. The unexpurgated Lady C in paperback for three shillings and sixpence, the price of 10 Rothmans King Size, was sure to be a best seller. Adopting a publish-and-bedamned approach, Penguin printed 200,000 copies, sent a batch to the Director of Public Prosecutions and waited for the court summons.

THE BOOK, THE JUDGE, HIS WIFE AND HER COVER

For six days over the week of October 20 – November 2, 1960, Mr Justice Byrne brought the book to court in a modest damask cover (for decency’s sake), hand-sewn by his wife. Indeed, Lady Dorothy Byrne presided on the bench at her husband’s side throughout the entire trial, not unusual for judges’ wives at the time if they could make themselves useful to His Honour. It was Lady Byrne who marked up the trial copy, highlighting 13 explicit sex scenes, 30 F-words and 14 C-words.

This rare book, and its cover, still exists. Sold at auction for £56,250, it was acquired for posterity last year by Bristol University in a crowd-funding appeal headed by Stephen Fry.

2011 edition with an Introduction by Doris Lessing

A BOOK FOR MEN ONLY …

Despite the ban, unabridged copies could be bought under the counter if you knew where to look. For 30 years these ‘bootleg books’ circulated furtively among the ‘educated’ classes, many of them the very politicians, journalists and lawyers who had forced Lady C underground.

Worse than the earthy vocabulary, they believed it threatened the social order, involving an adulterous affair across the class divide between a minor aristocrat and a common gamekeeper. It would never do to make such a book freely available to ‘decent women’ and affordable to all.

In fact, ‘decent women’ read it too. Queen Mary of Lady Chatterley - 1993 BBC television serial starring Sean Bean and Joely Richardson England was in possession of a copy leant by a ladyfriend until it was confiscated by her husband, King George.

…TRIED BY WOMEN

There were three women on the jury, which was unusual. Even in the Swinging Sixties, females could be excused from jury service at obscenity trials to protect them from ‘depravity and corruption’. Penguin Books turned down the option, even exchanging one male juror for a female in the belief that women would be more open-minded.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1955

NOT FIT FOR WIVES AND SERVANTS

The Prosecution provoked laughter in court with its opening statement: “Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” Most people no longer had servants and, after all, the judge had already asked his own wife to read it.

Lawyers barely touched on the book’s veiled reference to the criminal act of anal sex, which Penguin saw as the biggest threat to publication, choosing to fixate on the adultery and fourletter-word count.

Neither side mentioned the racist quote about sex with ‘black women and, somehow, well, we’re white men: and they’re a bit like mud’, which might be considered the most offensive passage today…

Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1981

LEGITIMISING THE F-WORD

The Defence called 35 expert witnesses – journalists, critics, teachers, E.M. Forster, four Anglican churchmen – to back up their case.

The Bishop of Woolwich provoked muffled sniggers when he likened the sex to ‘an act of holy communion’. But sociologist Richard Hoggart impressed with his brief dissertation on the F-Word. “We have no word in English for this act which is not either a long abstraction or an evasive euphemism, and we are constantly running away from it, or dissolving into dots,” he said. “Lawrence wanted to say, ‘This is what one does. In a simple, ordinary way, one f*cks,’ with no sniggering or dirt.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1995

Interestingly, most family publications essential (included) still use asterisks today!

A RESULT FOR LIBERALISM

After the Not Guilty verdict, Penguin’s paperbacks flew off the shelves, notching up two million sales that year. It was a win for artistic freedom and vindication for D.H. Lawrence. In his mission to bring sex out into the open in literature, he had refused to cut a single four-letter word, stating, “I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors”.

The 2015 BBC TV film was panned by critics for omitting four-letter words entirely

More seismically, the verdict untied the last stays on the corset of Victorian morality and ushered in the uncensored freedoms of the Permissive Society. The Pill came along in 1961, abortion in 1967, divorce reform in 1969… and theatre critic Kenneth Tynan uttered the first F-word on British TV in 1965.

Or, as the poet Philip Larkin delightfully put it in Annus Mirabilis (1967):

‘Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first LP.’