Passport photograph of D. H. Lawrence
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
(Yale University)

“Sexual intercourse began in 1963,” wrote Philip Larkin in his poem “Annus Mirabilis.” “Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” What Larkin meant was that for the first time, sex had become something visible in culture, something that could be acknowledged as existing in a public arena. There was a distinct lifting of censorship on sexual matters around this time in America, France and Britain due to a number of important test cases on novels with graphic content. Western culture was finally opening up, and becoming more broad-minded.

In the United Kingdom, 1960 saw the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Penguin Books courted the injunction by publishing an unexpurgated version at a relatively cheap price, in a move motivated by a recent change in the law. It was no longer permissible to prosecute novels on the basis of obscene passages taken in isolation. Now the book as a whole had to be considered, and equally significant, the content could be assessed and “justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.” This was a sea change in attitude towards literature itself; it had been considered in the past that a well-written book stood to be even more dangerous than self-evident dross.

The trial was over quickly. The jury at the Old Bailey heard testimony for the defence from thirty-five different literary experts, including Rebecca West and E. M. Forster, and were told there were another thirty-five waiting in the wings. The prosecution, due in part to complacency and in part to an unsuccessful search for anyone who would condemn the novel, produced only one witness: the police office who had collected copies of the book from the publishers. The jury reached a verdict in less than three hours.

“I feel as if a window has been opened and fresh air has blown right through England,” said Barbara Barr, Lawrence’s stepdaughter. It was a symbolic victory for the force of liberal humanitarianism in Britain, and a severe blow to the authoritative “old guard,” described in George Orwell’s words as “the striped-trousered ones who rule.” The establishment was duly horrified by the outcome, and raised questions in the press for weeks afterwards as to why the prosecution had been unable to match the defence “bishop for bishop, don for don.”

Reading the notes of the trial today, the dead hand of the prosecution can be felt in both the patronising assumptions made, and the atrocious act of literary criticism committed. Senior Treasury counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones declared to the jury, “Ask yourselves the question: 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 the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” His approach was to put Lady Chatterley figuratively in the dock and to try her, not for obscenity, but for adultery.

At the end of the fifties, it was still difficult for conventional wisdom to accept that women were also sexual beings, and that the desires of the body were natural. This was precisely what D. H. Lawrence wanted to eradicate: the idea that the body was animalistic and should be loathed and feared. He wanted to show a couple, a man and a woman together, both of them disappointed in their lives, but healing and growing together through an intimate relation that put them back in their bodies in a healthy, meaningful way. His idea was unacceptably radical in 1928 when the book was first published and had not changed so very much by 1960. Charles Rembar who successfully defended the book in America wrote in his account of the trial that “freedom of expression is experienced as a need mainly by two classes of people — writers and lawyers.” If the case had been put to a popular vote, he maintained it would have lost. In other words, obscenity trials at this time were working against public opinion.