BOOKS

THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLEY Edited by C. H. Rolph (The Case of Regina v. Penguin Books, Ltd.); see Bibliography, page 18.

For thirty years after the death of D. H. Lawrence, no publisher dared (except privately) to publish his novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover," in an unexpurgated English version. When the English firm of Penguin Books, Ltd. (a publisher of paperbacks covering all the branches of the world's literature) decided in 1960 to do so, the results were thoroughly anticipated; so much so, in fact, that before any distributions of this title were made to book-dealers or to the public at large, copies were furnished to the appropriate Police Officials, so that Penguin Books, itself, could stand trial if charges were to be brought.

Penguin Books had already published a number of the other and less controversial works of D. H. Lawrence, and the only apparent reason why it had delayed the publication of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was because of the extreme strictures of English law on the subject of obscene publications. Until 1959, a mere word or phrase taken out of context was sufficient to convict a publisher under obscenity statutes. However, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 accomplished some drastic revisions of the law, by introducing the principle of "the book taken as a whole. Under this more liberal principle, a book could no longer be condemned

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as obscene from a few isolated words or passages; it must as a whole, and in its general tone, tend to "deprave or corrupt." Under these new circumstances, Penguin Books felt justified in taking the calculated risk of publishing "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in popular, paperback form, realizing that the literary merits of the book as a whole could now be argued in court, and perhaps be made to outweigh the charges of obscenity brought by the Queen's Prosecutor. When Penguin Books first furnished advance copies of this title to Scotland Yard, it was by no means certain that a prosecution would result; and when the Crown did decide to prosecute, it may have been more for the reasons of wanting to test the new law on material of literary importance than from any desire to attack this particular book or its author. Be this as it may, in about two months' time, and as it had had half-expected, Penguin Books, Ltd., was made to stand trial under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959 for publishing "Lady Chatterley's Lover," even though no one outside of English officialdom had yet seen any of their 200,000-copy edition. The trial has been described as "probably the most thorough and expensive seminar on Lawrence's work ever given," expensive, at any rate, costing the publishers some £13,000, for the final, NOT GUILTY, verdict.

The Queen's Prosecutor was deadly serious—even to the point of comedy, as it must have seemed to the jurors

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