October 20: On This Day in World History … briefly
When the full edition was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law.
1960: Lawrence’s ‘Lover’ gets Britain buzzing
Writer DH Lawrence’s last novel ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, the unexpurgated version of which had been banned in England for the previous 30 years, was the subject of a court case in London. Penguin Books were prosecuted for publishing Lawrence’s original full text, deemed by the Crown to be obscene. To equip them for the case, the jury were told to read the book.
The book
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford’s physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her emotional frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance’s realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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