Lady Chatterley’s Obscenity Trial

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh So, Tracy, yes,
you probably know. I mean we all know about Lady

(00:21):
Chatterly's Lover. Today, we kind of think of it as
like sort of a steamy classic book. Uh sure, that
was not the case when it came out then it
was just considered obscene. Uh and it stayed uh categorized
as obscene for a long time. We just passed the
anniversary of a trial in Great Britain in which it
was debated whether the book was obscenity or whether it

(00:44):
had literary merit. And that trial story is a story
I really love. H It didn't actually happen until thirty
years after D. H. Lawrence, the author, had died, and
it really marks a moment in history where there was
a lot of discussion about the legalities of determining the
value of a work of art or literature. That's something
that people still grapple with today as humans with different

(01:06):
values and ideologies. And we're all trying to survive together
on this rock hurdling through space, not everybody agrees on
what is art and what has merit versus what might
be considered inappropriate or obscene. So today we're going to
first talk about author D. H. Lawrence, whose life was
in many ways as dramatic as any book he wrote.
He also borrowed a lot from his life for his writing.

(01:29):
And then we're going to talk about obscenity laws in
Great Britain. Specifically, this book has a whole life in
terms of it being considered obscene and litigated in many countries,
but we're primarily focusing on Great Britain, and we will
talk a little bit about things going on in the
US because they dove tail on one another. And then
we're going to talk about the trial that made Lady

(01:51):
Chatterley really world famous in the mid twentieth century. Heads up,
As you may have guessed from this introduction, Uh, we're
talking about a book it involves a lot of sex. However,
I will say we're being pretty careful about that, Like
we're not really going into detail about any of the
descriptions in the book. We're not reading any of the

(02:11):
passages in the book that you would consider selecious if
that's your thing. Um, But just know that, like, we
are going to mention some of it and how it
was perceived both legally and by readers, as well as
some of Lawrence's other work. So. David Herbert Lawrence was
born on September in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England.

(02:37):
His early life was really not easy at all. His father,
Arthur John Lawrence, worked in the minds and his mother, Lydia,
was a lacemaker. It's believed that Arthur wasn't able to read,
but Lydia was actually well educated. She had grown up
in a middle class family before that family lost everything
they had, and she had educational opportunities that her husban

(03:00):
been did not. Lydia's love of literature is usually cited
as having a strong influence on David, who was the
couple's fourth child. Yeah. I read varying accounts about whether
he went by David or Burt more around the house.
We know his mother called him Burt, but just af
hy I you'll hear him called sometimes David, sometimes dh

(03:21):
sometimes Bert in this podcast. Uh. Lawrence was not a
child of robust health, and his frailty was only accentuated
by being in a coal town where the air was
not exactly ideal to be breathing. That also meant that
he was often kind of left behind socially, as he
often convalesced at home. He did excel academically, and at
the age of twelve, he received a scholarship to Nottingham

(03:44):
High School. That was something that no child from Eastwood
had ever received before. His time at Nottingham was not
as impressive in terms of academic achievement as his earlier
schooling had been, and he still struggled to make friends,
and he was often sick. At the age of sixteen,
Lawrence started a job as a clerk in a factory

(04:04):
that made surgical supplies, but he was only there a
few months before he got sick. He got pneumonia and
had to leave his job to recover. This was after
the death of his brother William, and it's possible that
the stress of grief contributed to his health issues during
this time. After he more or less got better, he

(04:24):
started teaching school that was back in Eastwood, and he
also met a longtime friend, Jesse Chambers. Jesse seems to
have sort of picked up the same flag that Lawrence's
mother had carried in terms of encouraging David to look
for a better life than Eastwood could offer. Jesse. Like
Lydia urged Lawrence to write, which he did, and at

(04:47):
this point Lawrence was simultaneously pursuing a writing career and
a teaching career, and this was in the early nineteen hundreds.
In nineteen o six, he published his first short story
that was called an Enjoyable cre Smith's a Prelude. He
was also at this point studying to get his teaching
certificate in Nottingham. He was also working on his novel

(05:08):
The White Peacock, which was published in nineteen eleven. That
novel was followed in nineteen twelve by The Trespasser. These
successes were almost undoubtedly shadowed by the fact that Lydia
Lawrence his mother had died in nineteen ten, and her son,
who she called Bert, grieved the loss very deeply, writing
at one point that he and his mother had an

(05:30):
almost marriage like love. In nineteen twelve, while visiting a
former professor named Ernest Weekly, Lawrence fell really deeply in love,
but that was with Ernest Weekly's wife. She was German
novelist Frida von rick to Offen. Lawrence was engaged at
the time, but he broke off this engagement immediately and

(05:52):
persuaded Frieda to leave earnest. He also quit his job
to become a full time novelist. Lawrence and Frieda traveled
to Germany and then to Italy. David wrote at a
rapid pace throughout all of these travels. Yeah, this was
a very dramatic time. There is a story that he
actually was suspected of being a spy when they were

(06:12):
in Germany, and that was why they had to leave
pretty quickly and go to Italy. And of course all
of this may have been catalyzed by just him having
been in an emotionally fraught state, still dealing with the
loss of his mother. In the first year of his
relationship with Frieda, Lawrence published his first play titled The
Daughter in Law, his first book of poetry titled Love

(06:34):
Poems and Others, and his third novel, the acclaimed Sons
and Lovers. Sons and Lovers is generally considered D. H.
Lawrence's first truly great work, and it draws a lot
from Lawrence's own life. It tells the story of a boy,
Paul Moral, from a mining town who yearns for more
and tries to make a better life for himself as

(06:55):
he navigates his relationship with his mother and two women
with whom he has romantic relation and ships. Doesn't sound
familiar at all. After this whirlwind that he went through
of travel and writing and putting out sons and lovers,
David and Frieda returned to England and they got married
on July thirteenth, nineteen fourteen. That was basically right after

(07:16):
her divorce was legally finalized. His first short story collection,
The Prussian Officer, was published soon after the wedding. Lawrence's
next published work marked the start of his problems with
being accused of obscenity. The Rainbow was released in nineteen fifteen,
and it follows three generations of one family in a

(07:37):
world that's rapidly changing from an agricultural society to an
industrialized one. The reason critics called this obscene was that
it had a number of instances where passion and sexual
desire were discussed really plainly and very frank and open terms.
In one instance, a couple of sex life is reinvigorated

(07:58):
after the husband has a brief sexual encounter with another
woman while traveling. The couple's relationship becomes focused almost entirely
on their sexual connection to the exclusion of everything else,
even their family. This was, of course, not just a
scenario where readers of nineteen fifteen would find the sexual
writing shocking, although they did, the characters were also very

(08:21):
clearly breaking social morains. In addition to that shift in
that couple's relationship, there is later on in the book
a sexual encounter between two women. This entire book ended
up being banned on the grounds that it was obscene.
Half of the print run was destroyed, and when Lawrence's
publishers at Mathulan appeared before a magistrate, they really threw d. H.

(08:43):
Lawrence under the bus, saying that they kept telling him
to change things, but that he stopped making edits for
them and then they just had to go to print.
This was all happening too at a time when d. H.
Lawrence and his wife Frieda would have loved to have
left England, but they could not because of World War One.
They were living in a small cottage in Cornwall, and

(09:05):
because of the controversy surrounding Lawrence's writing, as well as
the fact that his wife was German. They were having
just a really isolated life. They had nobody from the
community who wanted to befriend them. Yeah, they definitely had
friends in like intellectual circles, but in terms of their
day to day lives, they were sort of community. Pariah's

(09:26):
Lawrence was working on his sequel to The Rainbow, which
was Women in Love. Those two books had initially been
planned as one larger book, but then his publisher had
asked him to split it into two, and while he
was writing Women in Love, he and Frieda were in
a state of constant conflict as they worked through some
issues that had come up in their rather hasty marriage.

(09:47):
For one thing, DH was grappling with his own sexual identity,
as he recognized that he had been attracted to other men,
and while his own writings suggests that he came to
terms with an identity of bisexuality, this subject has continued
to be discussed and debated by literary critics and biographers
for decades. Additionally, Frieda had entered the marriage believing that

(10:09):
this was going to be an open one and that
she would be free to have lovers other than her husband.
That was something that d. H. Lawrence was not comfortable with,
although eventually they worked this out and she did have
some freedom in that regard. So not only were the
newlyweds alone and under constant suspicion from their neighbors, they
were also in a constant state of stress between the
two of them. Women in Love reflects this conflict. The

(10:33):
story picks up with Ursula, who was the character in
focus at the end of The Rainbow, as well as
her sister and the two marriages that each of them
enter into. These two marriages are deeply intertwined, and the
story is very much about people trying to find relationships
in which they feel fulfilled as individuals and as sexual beings.

(10:56):
Because of the issues and controversy surrounding The Rainbow, public
location of Women in Love took a while. Publisher Thomas
Seltzer to get through three years of revisions before it
went to print in New York in nineteen twenty, and
even then the first edition was only released two subscribers.
It was published in London the following year, where it

(11:18):
was not banned, although it was still considered controversial. When
World War One ended, d h and freed to Lawrence
left England and moved to Italy. It was there that
he finished his editing on Women in Love and he
also completed a set of short stories titled My England
and Other Stories, which came out in ninety two. He

(11:38):
also worked on several other novels, including The Lost Girl
and Aaron's Rod. After two years in Italy, the Lawrences
headed to the US. They opted not to go across
the Atlantic to make this journey, but instead they went
to Seulon now Sri Lanka, and then Australia and then
across the Pacific to reach the US. While he is

(12:00):
in Australia, he wrote the book Kangaroo over the course
of about a month and a half. This novel, even
more than most of his other work, is pretty obviously autobiographical.
The main character, Richard Lovett, is an English writer married
to a German woman, and after living in England through
the World War, they moved to Australia. Once there, this

(12:23):
character love It finds himself in the push and pull
of conflicting political movements in the country. The ultimately finds
that he does not feel a connection to the parties
who were vying for his alliance. There continues to be
debate over whether D. H. Lawrence was drawing from real
events and people in his descriptions of the political leaders

(12:44):
and parties of Australia at the time. Yeah, they're definitely
people who are like he's describing people that were real
and obviously that's what this is, and other people are
like Yeah, But in his time in Australia, he wasn't
there long enough to have met all of these people
in these very high profile and controversial positions. Uh, and
it for it to not have been particularly well documented

(13:05):
if that had been the case. But after leaving Australia,
the Lawrence has made their way to North America and
they headed to Taos, New Mexico, where they lived for
a little while. Lawrence had been working for several years
before this on a non fiction project titled Studies in
Classic American Literature, and he finished that while living in Taos.
This book includes literary criticism of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne

(13:28):
and Herman Melville, among others. And he also wrote three
other nonfiction works in the early nineteen twenties before they
even reached the us SO Movements of European History and
Psychoanalysis and The Unconscious We're both published in nineteen twenty one,
and then Fantasia of the Unconscious was published in nineteen two.
His American literature criticism work was the last of his

(13:51):
nonfiction books to be published, and that came out in
ninety three. He continued to write fiction as well, and
his next book was Boy in the Bush, which came
out in nineteen four. The Plumed Serpent, which was released
in ninety six, is an interesting approach to the function
of religion in a post war world and the end

(14:13):
of Christianity and a return to indigenous religious traditions. This book,
which featured a revival of Aztec religious rights, was no
doubt informed by the trips the writer made some Mexico
while living in the American Southwest. Yeah, definitely a tourist's
version of such things. UM. Not not something you would

(14:34):
go to for any kind of accurate representation of such things.
In n. D. H. Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis after
he had had a bronchial hemorrhage and seen a doctor.
He left New Mexico and returned to Italy after his diagnosis,
and there he started working on Lady Chatterley's Lover, but
it was not his only project. He also penned a

(14:55):
travel fiction called Sketches of Etruscan Places UM. I saw
that described once as like kind of his his dream
version of his life of travel, where it like there's
a self insert character in every situation of like it
sounds like this would be my cool life if I
lived abroad. Um, he did live a cool life abroad,
so it's kind of interesting. Sketches was published in ninety six,

(15:19):
and then he went back to work on Lady Chatterly,
or Lady C, as he called it in correspondence with friends.
When that book was published in it was published privately,
once again to subscribers, and not available to the general public.
We will talk a lot more about this than just
a moment. But though he believed in his book, D. H.

(15:39):
Lawrence also knew that it had its detractors even before
it had left the printer. He wrote of the book
to his agent, quote, I am determined to stand by
Lady C and to send her out into the world
as far as possible. I perfectly understand that C. B
and Rich are against her, thinking she will do me harm,
and probably disliking her anyhow. But I stand by her

(16:03):
and am perfectly content she should do me harm. With
such people as take offense at her, I am out
against such people fly a little boat. I sort of
love that the writing. It's just got like a great
attitude to it, in my opinion. As his health declined,
d H. Lawrence moved once more, this time to the

(16:25):
south of France, and there he worked on a number
of poems and a critique of religion, and specifically the
book of revelations titled Apocalypse that was published posthumously. D H.
Lawrence died in Vals, France, on March seco n thirty.
He was only forty four at the time. Lawrence was
buried initially in Vaunts. According to Frieda, this was such

(16:47):
a small, simple ceremony. She wrote of it, quote, we
buried him very simply, like a bird. We put him
away a few of us who loved him. Frieda moved
back to Taos to live with Angelo Vaguely, who had
been Lawrence's friend and Frieda's lover for several years before
d H. Died. She eventually married him quite late in

(17:08):
her life. Five years after d H. Lawrence died, Revigedly
returned to France to have the author's body exhumed and
cremated so that he could be brought back to Taos.
That's something that Frieda had requested. There's a whole other
story here. We'll talk about it a little more on Friday.
In a moment, we're going to dig a little deeper

(17:29):
into the story of Lady Chatterly and the laws that
governed this book's availability for a long time. But first
we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.
The controversy of D. H. Lawrence's work outlived him by

(17:51):
quite a stretch. When his book came out in British
authorities declared that it was permanently banned in Great Britain,
not published a version in the US that same year,
but that was a very heavily edited edition. The plot
of the book is about the marriage and affairs of
the titular character, Constance Chatterly. Her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterly,

(18:15):
is paralyzed from the waist down, and their life is
both physically and emotionally void. They really do not connect
on any level. Connie has a brief affair with the
playwright that also leaves her unfulfilled, but then she starts
a relationship with the estate gamekeeper, Oliver Milords, who is
also married. Their affair is really intense and sensual, in

(18:39):
a way that Connie has never experienced before, and ultimately
it unravels their lives as both Malords and Connie try
to escape their marriages. The book doesn't end with them together,
but there's a sense of hope that they might eventually
be together. And while the book has in more recent
decades come under criticism for or featuring a woman in

(19:01):
a role of socio economic power becoming obsessed with a
man who is not exactly kind to her, Malour's is
pretty distant and even derisive. Lady Chatterley's Lover was for
its time, incredibly progressive for continuing to put forth the
idea of a woman even having sexual appetites. It's also
pretty straightforward about the many sex acts it describes. It's

(19:24):
not demeaning for either partner, and it offers up the
idea that real love and passion and sexuality are things
that people have lost touch with as society has become
more industrialized. I have not read this book. Um does
it fall into the trope of disabled people as like sexless?

(19:46):
Not really? Okay? Um? So her husband comes back from
the war with with that paralysis, and he seems to
over the course of the book become possibly there's like
hints that he's he's having some sort of relationship with
his nurse. It doesn't really go into much sexuality there, um,

(20:09):
But I was just curious because that is a very
common trip. It is, for sure. Um. I think you
could argue either side of it. Honestly, because he's very
he seems very permissive and even suggestive that she should
go elsewhere to have her sexual needs. Meant, but because
they're which could fall into that trope, but because their

(20:30):
relationship is just off anyway, you could argue the opposite
that he just doesn't want anything to do with her. Um.
It has also been a long time since I've done
a thorough read of it, so don't take any of
that as any kind of expertise or thorough gospel on
the matter. To get to the legal part of all
of this, Lord Campbell's Act, also known as the Obscene

(20:53):
Publications Act of eighteen fifty seven, established laws against obscene
literature written, and it was problematic in a lot of
the same ways of other obscenity laws we've talked about
on the show recently. It did not define what qualified
as obscene literature. That was questioned as possibly being obscene

(21:15):
was determined on a case by case basis in court, So,
of course, that led to some situations where the application
of the law was inconsistent, or even where literature that
described fairly commonplace happenings that people might see every day
was determined to be obscene just because the judge involved

(21:36):
applied his own sense of morality to the line of
the law. Additionally, that act provided a great deal of
power to authorities. Under the Act, police were empowered to
search any establishment they believed might have obscene literature for
sale or distribution. It also enabled postal workers to confiscate
any parcels that were suspected of containing obscene materials, and

(21:59):
for the destruction and of any such materials. Section three
of the eighteen fifty seven Act also stated that quote
no action, suit, or information, or any proceeding of what
nature soever shall be brought against any person for anything
done or omitted to be done in pursuance of this
Act or in the execution of authorities under this Act.

(22:22):
There was a provision here that a person could take
legal action against someone if certain requirements related to a
fairly narrow window. There's like there's a three month window,
but there's also a one month window. It's worded very
very um specifically, but also in the way it is
quite confusing. Uh. And it also stated that the party

(22:44):
intending to prosecute had to notify the defendant in writing
about it first. So basically, if someone took your things
and destroyed them and they weren't in any way obscene
at all, even though even though they could say I
thought it was obscene, you had no recourse to like,
get any kind of recompense from it. And because of
the rather nebulous nature of this law and all of

(23:04):
these problems with it, as well as some others, it
was criticized literally from the beginning. Even so, it took
more than a hundred years for the Act to be updated.
The big changes that took place in the Obscene Publications
Act of ninety nine were first a provision for a
defense of innocent dissemination, meaning the person who distributed the

(23:27):
obscene item didn't mean to do so, and second for
a defense based on the social or artistic value of
the item being distributed. This is outlined in section four
of the law, titled Defense of Public Good, and it
reads quote one, A person shall not be convicted of
an offense against Section two of this Act, and an

(23:50):
order for forfeiture shall not be made under the foregoing
section 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. Two.

(24:11):
It is hereby declared that the opinion of experts as
to the literary, artistic, scientific, or other merits of an
article may be admitted in any proceedings under this Act,
either to establish or too negative the said ground. That
defense of public good phrase made a lot of publishers

(24:32):
start to reevaluate literature that they had not been able
to bring to press before the law was updated, and
one of those titles was, of course, Lady Chatterly's Lover.
There was a similar trajectory for the book's status in
the United States. In Utah, Senator Reid Smoot seemed kind
of obsessed with Lawrence's last novel and led a charge

(24:54):
to have it banned as a small section of a
larger tariff act that he was coast sponsoring. Smoot stated
in a debate on the Senate floor quote. I could
tell from the very beginning that it is written by
a man with a diseased mind and a soul so
black that he would obscure the darkness of hell. Nobody

(25:15):
would write a book like that unless his heart was
as rotten and as black as it could possibly be.
Although it seemed that most of his colleagues thought this
fixation on Lawrence's book was a little over zealous, his
Tariff Act passed and Lady Chatterley could only be published
in the United States in a heavily abridged form that

(25:37):
removed all of the explicit sex scenes. Yeah, there's a
if you ever just want to have a fun time
look at old newspapers with read Smoot and some of
his colleagues arguing about this because they really kind of
get his goat a lot of the time, where they're like, really,
you think it's gross, but you seem to have read

(25:59):
it completely, and he's very adamant that he only spent
ten minutes looking at it like it's all weird thing um.
In the cases of both the US and Great Britain
obscenity laws, because Lawrence's book had been published initially in
Italy and had to be shipped to people in those
countries who wanted it. That meant that customs offices and

(26:22):
post offices were supposed to be the mainline of defense
against this questionable material getting into those countries. But after
the initial release official statements about it from government officials,
in this kind of furor that people like Smoot had
experienced kind of died down. Interest in the band in

(26:42):
the US was reignited when a French adaptation of the
novel for film challenged its censorship in the US. Kingsley Pictures,
the film's distributor, went all the way to the U. S.
Supreme Court after the State of New York denied a
distribution license because quote it's object matter is adultery presented

(27:02):
as being right and desirable for certain people under certain circumstances,
and it said that it quote alluringly portrays adultery as
proper behavior. When Kingsley Pictures Court Versus Regents went before
the U. S. Supreme Court, though the court's judgment read
in part quote what New York has done therefore is

(27:23):
to prevent the exhibition of a motion picture because that
picture advocates an idea that adultery under certain circumstances, maybe
proper behavior, Yet the First Amendment's basic guarantee is of
freedom to advocate ideas. The state quite simply has thus
struck at the very heart of constitutionally protected liberty. Yeah,

(27:45):
that film was made in ninety five, but it was
a couple of years later that they tried to distribute
it in the US. Uh, And all of this started
to bubble over. On May eleven, ninety nine, the Johnson
City Press of Tennessee reported quote, last week, the Grove
City Press released an addition of Lady Chatterley's Lover exactly

(28:05):
as D. H. Lawrence wrote it, not omitting one four
letter word or tender descriptive passage. This article then mentions
that while thirty thousand copies of the book had made
their way out into the world, I question that number. Uh.
The New York Post Office had seized a hundred and
sixty four copies of it. Publisher Barney Rossett, who founded

(28:28):
Grove Press, fought to have bands on a number of books.
I returned that among those titles was Lady Chatterley's Lover,
and he filed suit against Robert K. Kristen Mary individually
and as postmaster of the City of New York that
was a United States District Court SD New York. In
a filing which read quote, plaintiffs seek to restrain the

(28:50):
Postmaster from enforcing a decision of the Post Office Department
that the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and circulars announcing its
availability are nonmail herble under the Statute barring obscene Matter
from the Males. Ross It won the case, and this
established the idea of redeeming value for controversial works that

(29:11):
excluded them from obscenity laws. So, after the update to
the British Obscenity Act and the success of US publishers
in court, Penguin Books took a bold step and published
an unexplagated edition of Lady c in London nine days
after its publication. Legal proceedings were initiated. In the case

(29:32):
of r v. Penguin Books Limited was filed that our
stands for Regina, which means Queen. It's like saying the
Crown is filing this suit against you. Okay, we're going
up for the trial, but first we will take a
quick sponsor break. During the time before Great Britain's Obscenity

(30:00):
Act had its ninette update, Lady Chatterly's Lover had circulated
for decades. There were versions of the book printed in
various countries almost from the moment the book was first released,
and we used the word printed there rather than published,
pretty deliberately because a lot of them were basically black
market reproductions made by copying that initial run. I read

(30:21):
one cute account. It read cutely to me about like,
what will high school teenagers do now to be rebellious
if this book is very illegal? And as it once
again became a hot topic, the revisit to Lawrence's tail
and to a new generation considering its value and whether
it was worth getting spun up over. In nineteen fifty nine,

(30:46):
Time magazine ran a fresh review of the book, which stated, quote,
but is it pornography? The answer of literary people is no. Lawrence,
a fretful neurotic, always at war with himself, was a
serious writer. But there is another question. Is Lady Chatterley
dull and tiresome? This time? The answer must be yes.

(31:07):
People were starting to see this book's banning is kind
of pointless. By this time, The lines regarding what people
thought of as obscene and what was merely provocative. Those
lines had shifted a lot since the late nineteen twenties.
The Asheville Citizen Times of Asheville, North Carolina ran an
article about the Grove Press edition which included the comment quote.

(31:29):
It may seem ungallant to point this out, but after
thirty years Lady Chatterley that much talked about English gentlewoman
who had an affair with her husband's gamekeeper may strike
the present day observer is rather tame. Penguin's publication of
the book was not an attempt to just slide it
through print and hope nobody noticed. The book had been

(31:50):
a subject of renewed debate in both countries for several years,
and Penguin made an announcement that they would be publishing
it months before they did so. They even livered fifteen
copies directly to police officials. They knew that this inexpensive
paperback edition it costs just three shillings and sixpence. I

(32:10):
thought that would likely become a test case for these
updated nineteen fifty nine obscenity laws, and they were right.
In August nineteen sixty, Penguin was called to the bench,
and on October twentie of that year, the trial of
Lady Chatterly was underway at the Old Bailey, known more
formally as the Central Criminal Court of London. All of

(32:31):
the jurors had been given copies of the new Penguin
edition of the book and had been instructed by the
judge to read them. They had like a weekend and
a couple of days to get it read. During the
London trial, Prosecutor Mervin Griffith Jones addressed the jury opening
with quote, let me emphasize it on behalf of the prosecution,
do not approach this manner in any priggish, high minded,

(32:53):
super correct mid Victorian manner. Look at it as we
all of us, I hope look at thes today. And then,
to go back and re quote the words of Mr
Justice Devlin, you will have to say, is this book
to be tolerated or not? Would you approve of your
young son's young daughters, because girls can read as well

(33:15):
as boys reading this book. Is it a book that
you would have lying around your in your own house?
Is it a book that you would even wish your
wife or your servants to read. That's sort of sexist
and classist series of questions there at the end of
the quote really ended up hurting the prosecution because to
the jury it made it seem very out of touch

(33:38):
with modern sensibilities. Griffith Jones had also counted all of
the obscene acts and words in the book, and he
gave the assembled jurors those statistics. The F word was
in the book more than thirty times, the C word
fourteen times. There were thirteen quote episodes of sexual intercourse,

(33:59):
and twelve of them were very detailed. But here's the thing.
He even like offered up the word womb as something
offensive in his argument, and again that probably didn't help
his case. The defense was led by Gerald Gardner, and
opening remarks reminded the jury of the reputation of Penguin

(34:19):
Books and it's well established mission too put great works
of literature in the hands of working people. Gardner asked
the jury to consider whether such a reputable publisher would
want something as reprehensible as what Mr Griffith Jones had
described in the hands of so many. He also made
the case that even though he had been controversial in

(34:41):
his lifetime, since his death, D. H. Lawrence had come
to be recognized as one of the great English writers
and among the five or six greatest yes. The defense
conceded there were things in the book that we're shocking,
but the jury had to decide whether it was like
to corrupt people or lead to depravity. The defense called

(35:03):
thirty five witnesses, among them people like Rebecca West and
I M. Forster. There were journalists, There were editors and
literature professors. There were critics. There were even ministers and
experts in child development and education, and they all testified
that Lawrence was actually making a fairly moral case with
Lady Chatterly. When one witness stated that Lawrence used sex

(35:26):
as a quote holy basis for a good life, the
prosecution started reading the most salacious passages he could find
in the book to show just how unholy they were.
According to Molly Panter Downs, who was a journalist who
attended the trial and wrote about it for The New Yorker, quote,
practically every description of love making in the book must
have been read out by Mr Griffith Jones with awful

(35:49):
emphasis and the air of imparting some reprehensible right that
would be news to all his listeners. And it was
interesting how well the writing stood up to that treatment.
Defense witness Helen Gardner, who was a reader of Renaissance
English literature at the University of Oxford, stated that Lawrence's
use of four letter words was not shameful, as they

(36:11):
were describing an act that itself was not shameful. When
Griffin Jones asked her if she would object to teaching
the book to a mixed class, she replied, oh, no,
seeming perplexed that he would even ask such a question.
Was days and days of literary discussion in court, and
though the defense had they claimed another thirty six witnesses

(36:33):
in reserve, when they stopped at the thirty five initially listed,
the entire courtroom seemed relieved. Panther Downs wrote a lengthy
stream of defense witnesses quote. By the end of the case,
every juror should have been qualified to write an honors
thesis on it. Finally, Justice Byrne, who presided over the case,

(36:53):
reminded the jurors that they really had two things to deliberate,
first whether the book was obscene, and second, whether it's
literary merit outweighed any obscenity that they had determined it
to possess. The defense seemed pretty worried despite all of
their witnesses testifying to the book's value. The liberation took
three hours. When the jury returned, they announced the verdict

(37:18):
of not guilty. Penguin Books had not run a foul
of the obscenity law and publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover. Just
days later, the publisher released all the copies that had
and the two hundred thousand copy print runs sold out.
Bookshops all over Britain reported that they had run out
of stock and had started taking back orders. Penguin added

(37:41):
a publisher's dedication to their next edition that read quote
for having published this book. Penguin Books was prosecuted under
the Obscene Publications Act nineteen fifty nine at the Old
Bailey in London from twenty October to two November nineteen sixty.
This edition is therefore dedicated into the twelve jurors, three

(38:01):
women and nine men, who returned a verdict of not
guilty and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available
for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom.
Two million copies of the thirty two year old book
were sold in less than a year. Today, the Chatterly
obscenity case is considered a landmark when it comes to

(38:22):
obscenity law in Britain, so much so that the copy
that was used by Judge Sir Lawrence Burn was sold
at auction by Sotheby's in for fifty six thousand, two
hundred fifty pounds, but British Arts Minister Michael Ellis issued
a ban on its export to the anonymous buyer because
there was concern about letting an important artifact of British

(38:45):
legal and literary history leave the country. So a funding
effort was launched to match the auction price and keep
that annotated copy in Britain. Penguin Books donated ten thousand
pounds to this effort, but Alto at Lee, the University
of Bristol purchased the book to keep in the Penguin archive,
ensuring that it would indeed stay in Britain. And that

(39:09):
is the Lady Chatterley's Lover Trial, which I sort of love.
As I said, it's just such an interesting thing. I
remember having discussions about books that were considered obscene um
in high school. This is when I realized I couldn't
debate because I got I completely lost my cool during
a debate where someone was being very prudish by my estimation,

(39:33):
and I was like, I don't think you've read the material,
and I really it's not on the debate team didn't
make it. Um. What I do have is a listener
mail though, and we'll talk more about Lady Cee on Friday.
But I have a listener mail which is a correction, um,

(39:55):
because I left a single word out and ruined the
meaning of a thing out. This is from our listener, Barbara.
Barbara writes, I am binge listening to the two season
and just finished the Mabel Pengually episode from two. I
noticed in the story it was stated that in nineteen seventeen,
New York was the first state to give women the vote.
That is not correct. It was Wyoming. Wyoming gave women

(40:18):
the right to vote when it was a territory in
eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen eighty nine, it was made
part of the original constitution while they were becoming a state,
which occurred in eighteen nineties. So it was Wyoming in
eighteen ninety is the first state to have in their
constitution women's suffrage. Maybe there was some way that that
sentence was worded in the podcast, like first state that
had denied women the vote to give women the vote

(40:38):
as Wyoming had it from the very beginning of the state. Barbara,
of course, you're right. Um, I actually looked at one
of my earlier notes and Tracy knows. I mean, I
think we've both done this, but I'm probably the worst
of the worst of us. Um. You'll make a note
and then you'll copy a thing, you'll copy pasted into
a document and words will vanish and it will Yeah.
I had literally written it as in my side notes,

(41:01):
because I keep a second document that's like me writing
key points to hit and it was like first Eastern
state and Eastern So somehow, I I thought we had
already uh like done a correction about this shortly after
the episode came out. But it may just be that
somebody mentioned it and I looked it up. I think so,

(41:23):
because I don't remember talking about it. But I could
be wrong, because I also forget things. Yeah, I also
also forget things. But the New York law did become
like a big rallying cry for women's voting rights in
the East, and so I think that like that's why
it gets noted in that context of like the first
state in the Eastern us, although really neither of these

(41:47):
things are correct, because the first state that let women
vote was actually New Jersey. Yeah, the New Jersey Assembly
passed a law in that gave women the right to
vote across the state, but then they took it back
in so for ten years women could vote in New Jersey,

(42:08):
and then that was not the case anymore. By total coincidence,
we are recording this listener mail on election day here
and there are I'm gonna be going to the polls
after we finished recording where I early voted because I
have meetings this after. So at the last minute on Friday,
I was like, oh, Brian, we got early votes, so
I don't forget. Yeah, I did not, because the the

(42:33):
the the election day polling place is a lot closer
to me than the early voting location. Oh, ours are
pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah, I'm not too bad. But in
any case, Barbara, thank you for your email and pointing
that out. And then I had not known that thing
about New Jersey until I went to verify stuff and
I discovered it. So now we all learned. Today you

(42:54):
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You
can also find us on social media. Is Missed in
History and if you have not subscribed yet and you
would like to, you can do so on the I
heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(43:15):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Lady Chatterley’s Obscenity Trial