How Lady Chatterley broke support for Obscenity Act

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How Lady Chatterley broke support for Obscenity Act
By Kelly Macnamara
Published: 29 June 2007
Independent UK

The government's embarrassing defeat in the 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover trial caused a marked loss of enthusiasm for the recently introduced Obscenity Act, documents released yesterday by the National Archives reveal.

A little over a year after the 1959 Obscenity Act came into force a Home Office report, compiled after the trial, appears to cast doubt on the decision to use the Act to prosecute Penguin Books for publishing an unabridged version of the D H Lawrence novel.

The document, produced a month after a jury had unanimously found the publishers not guilty after just three hours' deliberation, was an assessment of the case as a first test of the Act.

It found the outcome of the trial, which had caused unease in Parliament, was in line with the principles of the Act. "Parliament decided that the application of the test of what can properly be published, laid down only last year after the most exhaustive discussion, should be left to a jury; it is not for Parliament now to complain of their judgment," it said.

Several hand-written annotations on the document seem to suggest there was some disagreement as to the outcome of the case.

Next to a line saying "it would not be proper to discuss the reasons for the [Director of Public Prosecutions'] decision to prosecute" is a note which reads: "This is balls".

Later the line "the director's action has enabled an authoritative ruling to be obtained" is annotated with the words: "This is balls too."

It is unclear who made the notes, however.

The document goes on to outline the response that the government and public bodies had received after the trial. The Home Office received about 30 letters ("not a large number having regard to the publicity that attended the case") and the Attorney General, Sir Richard Manningham-Buller, received a meagre two letters, one asking whether an appeal was possible and the other wondering whether the book's obscene words could now be used with impunity.

The trial appears to have revealed a gap between the government's attitudes towards public morality and the attitudes of the public itself.

A day after the jury delivered its verdict, bookshops were besieged by people wanting to buy the novel. Penguin sold 200,000 copies, its entire first run, in the first day and sold 2 million copies in six weeks.

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My parents bought a copy of the unexpurgated version soon after publication. I was, at the age of 8, a precocious reader, and I discovered it in a drawer underneath some table napkins.

I read it from cover to cover. I knew already how babies were made. (My friends at school saw to that!). It was the source, while I was reading it, of a certain odd feeling that I could not identify at the time. Much later, after reading, for admittedly prurient reasons (!) "Sons and Lovers", "The Rainbow", and "Women In Love", I realized that the feeling was caused by D H Lawrence's dreadful writing style, which I still find annoying.

I subsequently discovered that my grandparents, a very prim and proper churchgoing couple, it seemed to me, had a similarly hidden copy of a previous, expurgated edition!

I can only imagine the disappointment of those people who eagerly bought the book expecting an erotic dirty read, having to plough through acres and acres of Lawrence's turgid prose. "The strange beauty of the phallos" etc etc.

I recently read Sybille Bedford's account of the trial, included in her collection of journalism "As It Was", and I was intrigued to note that the headmaster of Alleyn's School, my old school, gave evidence for the defence. He was a dry old stick when I went there 3 years later, and I never would have guessed.

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Contrex
Contrex, there are too many "dry old sticks" and religious fanatic activists making public policy based on fear of their own sexuality and interest in other people's sexuality.

BBB

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BBB, I watched an old movie on TCM a couple of night ago (Madame Bovary) and was surprised to find this info about the book.

Madame Bovary is a novel by Gustave Flaubert that was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialised in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made it notorious. After the acquittal on 7 February, it became a bestseller in book form in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.

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MORE THAN SEX GOING ON HERE
The following prose-poem, which begins with some lines from Philip Larkin, is a personal reflection on those days of the Chatterly ban, the Beatles and my own emerging religious beliefs.-Ron Price, Tasmania

____________________________________
Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
-Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis, quoted in Margaret Drabble: A Reader's Guide.

Sexual activity began
In 1962
Between the beginning of my pioneering
And the complete institutionalization
Of charisma in the conveyance
Of authority in an emerging world religion.
-Ron Price, Untitled Poem, written only here to convey a perspective.

The year I became a Baha'i
Lady Chatterly's Lover1 went
on trial, four-letter words
became okay, sex was opened
to public discussion endlessly,
the unsayable became sayable
and pornography began to
travel in rivers to the sea of
our lives. The permissive
society was well on its way,
Betty Friedan published her
Feminine Mystique and the
tenth stage of history made
its entrance2 in the greatest
drama in the world's spiritual
history---as I tasted my first
experience of depression,3
hungered for sex and was
initiated into the mysteries
and secrets of pioneering.4

Ron Price
1 August 1998

1 The first year of my experience as a Baha'i was October 1959 to October 1960.
2 The tenth stage of history is part of a Baha'i paradigm of history. It began in 1963.
3 This outline of the early 1960s is found in many places. I drew on Margaret Drabble: A Reader's Guide, Valerie Myer, Vision Press, NY, 1991, pp.13-14.
4 this poem is another example of the vahid(Farsi word for unity), a poem of 19 lines.

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Lawrence did not consider "Chatterly" to be obscene. He did feel that Ulysses was obscene, however. Conversely, Joyce did not consider Ulysses obscene. He did feel that "Chatterly" was obscene.

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How Lady Chatterley broke support for Obscenity Act

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