Trial and Eros

The American Scholar has an interesting essay about when Lady Chatterley’s Lover ran afoul of Britain’s 1959 obscenity law.

From the piece...

And pretty further he went. In charting the love affair between Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her (wheelchair-bound) husband’s estate, the book describes their 13 sexual encounters in meticulous and unflinching detail. Arguably even more transgressive was the language that Lawrence, in his quest for realism, allowed his characters to employ. As the prosecutor in the 1960 trial, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, was to note in court: “The word ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ occurs no less than 30 times. . . . ‘Cunt’ 14 times; ‘balls’ 13 times; ‘shit’ and ‘arse’ six times apiece; ‘cock’ four times; ‘piss’ three times, and so on.”

Lawrence, who spent the last years of his life in Italy and died in France in 1930, was aware that the book could not be published in England, at least not in the form he intended. Since 1868, obscenity had been a common-law offense, (unhelpfully) defined as any material whose tendency “is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” No one seemed to have any doubt that Chatterley would fall in the dead center of that definition. Lawrence acted as his own publisher and had the book composed, printed, and bound in Florence. Britain’s intrepid John Bull magazine, a venerable repository of conventional wisdom, got hold of a copy and characterized it as “the most evil outpouring that has ever be­smirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness.” Britons smuggled the book past customs inspectors for decades, and from time to time copies were seized and burned.

Remarkably, this was the way matters stood until 1959, when liberal members of Parliament, under the leadership of Roy Jenkins, passed a new Obscene Publications Act. It kept the “deprave and corrupt” language for defining obscenity, but characterized the potential objects of corruption more generally, as “persons who are likely . . . to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.” Crucially, the act provided that the work in question be “taken as a whole”—that is, merely reading out the naughty bits would not suffice—and held that a defendant “shall not be convicted . . . if it is proved that publication of the article in question is 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.” Moreover: “the opinion of experts as to the literary, artistic, scientific or other merits of an article may be admitted . . . either to establish or to negative [sic] the said ground.”