Fifty years ago this last week, Penguin Books were acquitted of publishing an obscene book- namely, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a verdict which became one of the cornerstones of modern British attitudes to literary censorship and helped to usher in the first stirrings of the social and sexual upheaval of the 1960s. The book itself has subsequently become second to its reputation- though not Lawrence’s best work, any new adaptation is bound to arouse a certain amount of sensationalistic coverage. As a student at Bristol reading the novel in my third year for some context on Lawrence, I read the Penguin edition of the time, which had a cover illustration showing a black-and-white photograph of a headless, naked female figure- which I took great pleasure in leaving upturned on the table whenever I broke off from reading on the southward train journey. And as a postgraduate tasked with preparing a seminar paper on the subject of whether the novel was "a dirty book", I argued that it wasn’t, on the grounds that it is above all a novel about sexuality and the class system, and even a novelist of Lawrence’s talents would find it difficult to discuss such issues without recourse to sexual encounters described in sexual langauge.

The particular controversy attached to Lady Chatterley’s Lover arose precisely because the novel uses sex between an aristocratic woman and her gamekeeper to question and challenge ideas about the relationship between the classes in the aftermath of the First World War. In the novel, the war leaves Clifford Chatterley partially paralysed and sexually impotent- a nice example of sex being used as a metaphor rather than the subject of one, as Chatterley’ s impotence stands for the dead hand of the landed classes on post-war Britain- whereas the gamekeeper Mellors, with his vigour and frank language, represents both the potential and the dangers of the labouring classes. The novel clearly meant a great deal to Lawrence as he rewrote it twice- the first two versions have been published as The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane- and the final version was initially published in Paris, remaining available there for many years while the novel remained unpublished in Britain. Lawrence died in 1930 after many years of exile and illness, and it was Penguin’s intention to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover in paperback and in Britain which provoked the obscenity trial. At stake was the right of a British publisher to bring to the nation’s bookshelves a novel which challenged accepted standards for sexual content and language, and the right of the British people to read it.

In today’s climate of appeals and cases dismissed on legal technicalities, what stands out most is the clear-cut nature of the verdict. The jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty- there could be no clearer sign that in the Britain of 1960, sexual content and language were not in themselves considered obscene. The thirty years since his death had consolidated Lawrence’s reputation as a novelist- as a chronicler of the lives, aspirations and frustrations of working people in the English Midlands of the early twentieth century, he has no serious rival- and there was no shortage of witnesses from the literary world prepared to testify to the novel’s literary merit. There had, of course, also in the meantime been the Second World War, and it may well have been in the minds of many people that twenty years previously the British people had been engaged in six years of war in order to save Western civilisation from the book-burners par excellence- that being the case, it would have been little short of a slap in the face of the generation which fought the Nazis for the law of England to condone the banning of works of fiction. Or it may simply be that Britain had moved on. If the class system of Lady Chatterley was slipping away after the First World War, it was well on the way to being dismantled after the Second, and the Chatterley verdict helped to undermine the last relics of the idea that there was an Establishment at the top of society which knew what was best for everybody and could decide what people were allowed to read.

In the subsequent fifty years, of course, vast numbers of books have been published next to which Lady Chatterley looks tame. Words which caused so much concern in 1960 are the stuff of mainstream films and television- and indeed the arrival of the broadcast media in every home has only confirmed the good sense of the jury, because very few people in search of sexual stimulation these days would resort to printed prose. The kind of smut which the establishment feared in 1960 didn’t pervade the streets- it went to the video shop, DVD and eventually online. If anything, the Chatterley verdict made it practically impossible to obtain a prosecution for obscenity for printed fiction- written prose requires the reader to become an active participant in the story, while the material we need to control is being streamed into this country from a thousand Russian servers. We’re not that far away in time from the Satanic Verses furore, and yet the thought of banning Salman Rushdie’s novel in the interests of public order was about as far away from Government policy as it’s possible to be. But the important thing to remember is that a large part of what has become the prevailing attitude to literary censorship in this country is down to a single jury of twelve people, who had to decide whether Britain had grown up. It’s right that we should have censorship of sorts- caring parents will always want the right to control the time and the way in which their children learn about sexuality and reproduction (I was pretty much let loose to run around the Human Biology section of the Natural History Museum), and as Mark Kermode has pointed out, an appropriate level of censorship also protects the actors and participants in film and television from being forced or manipulated into doing things they don’t want to do. But in spite of its reputation, Lady Chatterley’s Lover contains less sexual content or foul language than most books published today- the down side of the freedom writers and publishers earned has been the increase in the amount of bonking and swearing in, well, practically every book for adults published these days, and it’s difficult not to wonder whether we aren’t in some ways cheapened and lessened as a consequence. Nevertheless, fifty years ago it fell to twelve ordinary people to decide whether we as a nation were ready to read the words "shit" and "piss", and on baance they decided that we were. We owe them a great deal, even if in our own generation we sometimes struggle to deal with the outworking of their courageous verdict.