R V PENGUIN BOOKS LTD, THE LADY CHATTERLEY TRIAL

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Penguin Books, that was found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, in London, on a day like today in 1960.

R v Penguin Books Ltd, also known as The Lady Chatterley Trial, was the public prosecution in the United Kingdom of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for the publication of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The trial took place over six days, in No 1 court of the Old Bailey, between 20 October and 2 November 1960 with Mervyn Griffith-Jones prosecuting, Gerald Gardiner counsel for the defence and Laurence Byrne presiding. The trial was a test case of the defence of public good provision under section 4 of the Act which was defined as a work in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.

The jury found for the defendant in a result that ushered in the liberalisation of publishing, and which some saw as the beginning of the permissive society in Britain.

The Obscene Publications Bill was first put before the UK Parliament in 1955 as a private member's bill on the recommendation of the Herbert Committee in response to what was seen as the failure of the existing common law offence of obscene libel.

More information: The New Yorker

The Bill's sponsor Roy Jenkins cited five prosecutions in 1954 which highlighted the uncertainty of the law on obscenity and that the basis of the existing law, R v Hicklin, had the effect of a stringent literary censorship. Consequently, the resultant Act made specific provision for a defence of public good, broadly defined as a work of artistic or scientific merit, intended to exclude literature from the scope of the law while still permitting the prosecution of pornography or such works that would under section 2 of the Act tend to deprave and corrupt persons likely to read it.

The Act also required the court to consider the work as a whole, put a time limit on prosecutions, provided booksellers with a defence of innocent dissemination, gave publishers a right of defence against a destruction order, provided the right of appeal, and limited the penalty of conviction. The Act came into force on 30 August 1959.

The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Sir Theobald Mathew, made submission to the Bill's Commons Select Committee on 27 May 1957 that his office would take into account the existing reputation of the author, the publisher, the printer before deciding on prosecution. Roy Jenkins wrote to The Spectator on 26 August 1960 that the DPP's decision to indict Penguin was a misapplication of the law.

 More information: History Extra

Lawrence's novel had been the subject of three drafts before the final unexpurgated typewritten transcript was submitted to the Florentine printers on 9 March 1928 with the intention of publishing a private limited edition of 1000 copies. Martin Secker refused to publish the work in this form, forcing Lawrence to publish the first edition of the final version himself without copyright protection in July 1928. That August, U.S. customs confiscated imported copies of this edition, as indeed did Scotland Yard. Although The First Lady Chatterley published by the Dial Press in 1944 was declared obscene by a U.S. court (overruled several months later), it took until 21 July 1959 for a U.S. court to rule that the first authorised unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (published by Grove) was not obscene.

On 16 August 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated English edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

On 18 March 1960 the Chief Constable of Peterborough wrote to the DPP seeking advice regarding the imminent publication of the book, though there was no evidence of publication at this time.

More information: The Guardian

On 16 August, Penguin presented 15 copies to D.I. Monahan; legal proceedings were instituted, and a summons was issued on 25 August at Bow Street Magistrates' Court.

Lord Teviot moved for the Second Macmillan ministry to ban all such publications on 14 December 1960; peers exchanged 18,770 words but voted down his motion in a spoken vote. Had the vote succeeded, it still would have needed backing from the House of Commons to create any legal changes.

Richard Hoggart in his autobiography wrote of the trial: It has been entered on the agreed if conventional list of literary judgements as the moment at which the confused mesh of British attitudes to class, to literature, to the intellectual life, and to censorship, publicly clashed as rarely before  -to the confusion of more conservative attitudes. On the far side of that watershed and largely as a consequence, the favoured story continues, we had the Permissive Society. All of which is excessive and over-simple, but has some truth.

More information: The Collector

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.

Philip Larkin