This week sees Penguin publish a 50th anniversary edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Trussed up in striped orange livery, with a central image that’s a somewhat raunchy pun on the original, this classic is being re-released with new bonus material from Geoffrey Robertson QC and Steve Hare. The Lady Chatterley Trial is one of the most infamous trials in literary history and perhaps it is apt to mark its 50-year anniversary with a new edition of the novel, complete with added bumpf about the court case.
When, in 1960, the Crown levelled the charge of obscenity against Penguin for wanting to publish an unedited version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (as was already available in France and Italy), the publishing house made use of a loophole in Roy Jenkins’s Obscene Publications Act of 1959. This Act stated that a work could be of sufficient literary merit to counterbalance its obscenity – books must be ‘taken as a whole’ rather than judged on individual passages.
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