Is this a book you wish your wife or your servants to read?” asked prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC in 1960. Penguin Books were being tried under the Obscenity Act, for publishing an uncensored version of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Griffith-Jones’s words quickly backfired, prompting laughter from the jury and an acquittal for Penguin, who sold over three million copies of the book in the following months.
Penguin’s uncensored Lady Chatterley’s Lover was rife with sex scenes, contained explicit language that had not before appeared in a mainstream British novel, and – crucially – was inexpensive and therefore widely accessible (unlike Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which became considerably much more expensive after its unbanning in 1959). According to Sotheby’s, the landmark verdict in favour of Penguin “helped bring to birth a more liberal and permissive Britain”. This spirit seemed to endure over the subsequent decades, but is it under threat today?
