If you go into an high street bookshop you’re likely to discover, nestled in between sections like ‘Tragic Real Lives,’ and ‘Cosy Crime,’ the ‘Erotic Fiction’ section. It will largely consist of implausibly bad prose and dubiously accurate depictions of kinky (but not too kinky) sexual practices. Basically every edition will be a blatant attempt to repackage 50 Shades of Grey whilst changing just enough plot points and names that the audience hopefully won’t notice. What might not cross your mind is how the availability of all literary depictions of explicit sexual activity, from high to low culture is a relatively recent development, and we largely owe it to the outcome of a 1960 legal case concerning the obscenity or otherwise of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence.
In the early Twentieth Century, if you wanted to publish something with swearing, sex, or some doubly scandalous combination of the two, you would have to print it abroad. This was the case with James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in France in 1922, and not infrequently seized by Customs when people tried to bring it back to the UK. All this in spite of the fact that if whilst ploughing through seven hundred pages of formal experimentation and obscure allusions you’re still somehow able to get off to it then frankly, you’ve earned that perverse sexual gratification.
Following a change in the law, Penguin Books decided to go ahead with the publication of their unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel, but nonetheless found themselves having to defend their decision in front of judge and jury. The book was only the second to be tried under the new law, the first being a directory of prostitutes, with services they’d provide and how to contact them sold by a bookseller in (unsurprisingly) Soho.
Lady Chatterley was clearly a different beast. For a start, though you know what a certain gamekeeper does to Connie, you aren’t told how to find one for yourself. Furthermore, apart from, or even including, all the al fresco fornication, it was clearly a work with literary intent. Did its literary nature excuse the sexual content? Of particular concern was the use of a “four letter Anglo-Saxon word”, the apparently unmentionable ‘cunt’. The witnesses called to defend the novel included the Bishop of Woolwich and a professor of English Literature, who argued that the sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was in fact deeply moralising.
The prosecution’s opening address asked if Lady Chatterley was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Although, at least according to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse wasn’t to be invented for three or so more years, even in 1960 this sounded hopelessly out of touch — the times were changing. Though Lady Chatterley was the book that first triumphed in the face of censorship, it’s safe to say if Lawrence’s novel hadn’t ushered in the sea-change, something else would have done.
So, what is the Chatterley trial’s legacy? Well, apart from some excellent news reel footage in which the British public mumble that they are buying the book “for a friend” (maybe clichés weren’t invented until 1963 either) it’s been traditionally thought that the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover ushered in a new wave of societal permissiveness and sexual liberation.
Whilst that might be a romanticised or exaggerated view of events, this triumph of art over censorship was a landmark event in literary history, and shaped what we can buy and read in bookshops today.
