The Question That Ended Censorship: How a Snobbish Remark Freed 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'

A Changing Britain and a Forbidden Book

Imagine Britain in 1960. A nation caught between post-war austerity and the coming cultural explosion of the Swinging Sixties. It was in this climate that Penguin Books made a bold decision: to publish the full, unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The novel, written three decades earlier, was infamous for its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable four-letter words. More scandalously, it depicted an affair between an aristocratic woman and her working-class gamekeeper, challenging the very foundations of the British class system. Penguin's decision was a direct challenge to the establishment, deliberately setting the stage for a landmark legal battle under the newly passed Obscene Publications Act of 1959. For the first time, a book could be saved from censorship if it was proven to have literary merit—a defense for the 'public good'.

The Crown Versus a 'Depraved' Novel

The trial, officially R v Penguin Books Ltd, began at the Old Bailey in London and quickly became a national spectacle. Leading the prosecution was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a senior Treasury counsel with a reputation for being a pillar of the old guard. His strategy was straightforward: to shock the jury with the novel's 'filth'. He painstakingly listed the number of times swear words appeared and read the most sexually explicit passages aloud, hoping to prove the book's tendency to 'deprave and corrupt' its readers.

The Question That Backfired Spectacularly

The trial's most defining moment, however, had nothing to do with four-letter words. It came during Griffith-Jones' opening statement. In a moment of what would prove to be catastrophic misjudgment, he turned to the jury of nine men and three women and asked a question that perfectly encapsulated the chasm between the establishment and the changing world:

Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?

A ripple of noise went through the courtroom. The jury had burst into laughter. With that one sentence, Griffith-Jones had revealed his entire worldview—patronizing, misogynistic, and hopelessly classist. He assumed a jury in 1960 would share his view of women as delicate creatures to be shielded and servants as a commonplace feature of life, incapable of judging literature for themselves. But he had fundamentally misread the room. The laughter wasn't just amusement; it was ridicule. It signaled that the prosecution's argument, rooted in a bygone era of social hierarchy, was already obsolete. The question backfired, making the prosecution seem absurd and disconnected from modern life.

A Victory for Literature and Free Speech

The defense, led by Gerald Gardiner QC, seized the opportunity. They presented an army of 35 expert witnesses—from literary critics and academics to a bishop—to testify to the novel's artistic merit and serious moral purpose. The trial transformed from a case about obscenity into a profound public debate about art, class, and social morality. After a six-day trial, the jury took just three hours to return a verdict: not guilty. The victory was monumental. Penguin sold 200,000 copies on the first day of its release. The trial didn't just vindicate Lady Chatterley's Lover; it shattered the existing system of literary censorship in Britain. The prosecutor's condescending question, intended to seal the book's fate, had instead helped secure its freedom and, in doing so, became an immortal punchline in the story of modern Britain.

Sources

• JSTOR Daily
• The British Library
• The Guardian