The Lady Chatterley Trial

Artwork by Hunt Emerson for Dawn of the Unread

Lawrence was a classic Notts outlaw, a Midland nonconformist who hated, and was in turn hated by, the Establishment. It was after he had quit England to undertake his ‘savage pilgrimage’ that he wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sitting under a pine tree in the Tuscan hills. Interestingly another great Nottingham writer, Alan Sillitoe, penned Saturday Night and Sunday Morning while sat under an orange tree in Majorca.

Lady Chatterely’s Lover first appeared in an edition privately printed in Florence in 1928, when a London newspaper steamed: ‘Famous Writer’s Shameful Novel: A Landmark in Evil!’ The book was banned. But Lawrence was used to controversy by then. In 1915 all copies of The Rainbow were seized by the police and burned, though this was more to do with its anti-war message than sexual shenanigans.

Artwork by Hunt Emerson for Dawn of the Unread

Lawrence died in 1930, from tuberculosis, but posthumously won a significant victory for free speech after Penguin decided to publish it in Britain to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its author’s death. As a result Lady Chatterley’s Lover became the first novel to be prosecuted under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act and dozens of young legal eagles were delegated to underline all the naughty words in preparation for the case coming to court. The prosecution made a bit of a hash of their case, causing the jury to snigger by asking them questions of the following kind: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ It was an objection from another age – on the whole, the members of the jury weren’t of the kind to employ servants. No sooner had the jury found in the book’s favour than the Swinging Sixties began. That great Midland poet Philip Larkin famously observed as much when he wrote that it was in 1963 that ‘Sexual intercourse began’, right after ‘the end of the Chatterley ban’. You could say (it’s a bit of an exaggeration but there’s a flavoursome kernel of truth in it nonetheless) that, with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence tore down class distinctions in England, invented modern sex and – most significantly – made it possible for us all to swear more freely. Not bad for a miner’s son from unfashionable Eastwood.

This article was originally published in D.H Lawrence Zombie Hunter, part of a comic serial exploring Nottingham's literary history by Dawn of the Unread. 

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