It was on this day in 1960 that Penguin Books was acquitted in an obscenity case. D.H. Lawrence's (books by this author) novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was the book in question, and Penguin had attempted to publish a paperback edition of the novel, which had been published in 1928 and banned in England ever since. Obscenity laws had been in place in England since 1868. The definition of obscene was anything that might "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." Lawrence knew he didn't stand a chance with Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was the story of a Constance Chatterley, the wife of a paralyzed, impotent lord; she has an affair with the gamekeeper on her estate. So he self-published the novel in Florence, and died in France in self-imposed exile two years later, in 1930. At the time of his death, few people took him seriously as a literary figure. One exception was the novelist E.M. Forster, who called him "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."
In 1959, England's obscenity law was redefined, with more leeway for material that could be proven to have artistic merit. Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, saw his chance to include Lady Chatterley's Lover in a D.H. Lawrence series. Penguin announced its intention to publish the book, and the government announced its intention to take them to court.
The press lined up at 7:45 a.m. on the morning of October 27th to get into the first day of the trial, and Penguin's lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, handed out illegal copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover with the covers of a different Lawrence novel, so that they could follow the proceedings better.
Dozens of writers had volunteered to defend Lawrence's novel, among them Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Doris Lessing, Irish Murdoch, and Laurence Durrell. But in general, the defense chose safer, more mainstream witnesses — priests, professors, schoolteachers, journalists. Some of them had been asked to testify for the prosecution but instead had volunteered their services for the defense. The most famous novelist was mild-mannered E.M. Forster, who once again publicly stood up for Lawrence.
The defense called 35 witnesses, all of whom strongly defended the novel. Despite the prosecution's aggressive questioning and reading of particularly lurid passages, the defendants all strictly maintained that it was a good, moral novel. One young graduate repeatedly insisted that the novel was "puritanical" at heart. A bishop claimed that Lawrence was portraying sex as sacred, and when he was asked if he thought it was a book that Christians should read, he said yes, it was. One of the headlines that evening was A BOOK ALL CHRISTIANS SHOULD READ.
In the end, it didn't matter how many obscene passages the prosecution read aloud, or that the judge suggested to the jury that they deliver a guilty verdict. The trial wasn't even about Lady Chatterley's Lover as much as it was about a new era, a move away from old Victorian values and toward a society in which sexual matters could be discussed freely.
It took the jury less than three hours to reach their verdict, acquitting Penguin Books. People lined up outside bookstores before they opened, and the first edition of 200,000 copies sold out in the first few minutes. Many booksellers said they could have sold thousands more that day. Within a year, Lady Chatterley's Lover sold 1 million copies.
