In 1959, persuaded by the Society of Authors, parliament passed a new Obscene Publications Act with a preamble that promised “to provide for the protection of literature and to strengthen the law concerning pornography”. The distinction was to prove elusive, certainly to the attorney general, Reginald Manningham-Buller. In August 1960 he read the first four chapters of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the boat train to Southampton and wrote to the director of public prosecutions approving the prosecution of Penguin Books (“I hope you get a conviction”). The key factor in the decision to prosecute was that Penguin proposed to sell the book for 3/6; in other words, to put it within easy reach of women and the working classes. This, the DPP’s files reveal, was what the upper-middle-class male lawyers and politicians of the time refused to tolerate.
The choice of Lady Chatterley as a test-case was inept, but it suited the anti-intellectual temper of the legal establishment and it would mean the defeat of an impeccably liberal cause. Besides, DH Lawrence had form. Back in 1915 all copies of The Rainbow had been seized by police and burned (as much for its anti-war message as for its openness about sex). In 1928, police threatened the publisher Martin Secker with prosecution unless it removed 13 pages from Pansies, a book of Lawrence’s poems. The publisher complied, but sent all its unexpurgated copies abroad. The following year police raided an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings and seized every canvas on which they could descry any wisp of pubic hair. For the next 30 years British customs erected a cordon sanitaire to keep out smuggled copies of Lady Chatterley, which by this time was being published in France and Italy. So Lawrence was entrenched in prudish English minds as the filthy fifth columnist, an enemy much more dangerous than predictably dirty foreigners such as De Sade or Nabokov (whose banned Lolita would have been a more sensible target). With parochial arrogance, the prosecuting authorities ignored the New York court of appeal, which in 1959 had overturned a ban on Lady Chatterley because it was written with “a power and tenderness which was compelling” and which justified its use of four-letter Anglo-Saxon words.
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