Lady Chatterley’s Obscenity Trial

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh So, Tracy, yes, you probably know. I mean we all know about Lady Chatterly's Lover. Today, we kind of think of it as like sort of a steamy classic book. Uh sure, that was not the case when it came out then it was just considered obscene. Uh and it stayed uh categorized as obscene for a long time. We just passed the anniversary of a trial in Great Britain in which it was debated whether the book was obscenity or whether it had literary merit. And that trial story is a story I really love. H It didn't actually happen until thirty years after D. H. Lawrence, the author, had died, and it really marks a moment in history where there was a lot of discussion about the legalities of determining the value of a work of art or literature. That's something that people still grapple with today as humans with different values and ideologies. And we're all trying to survive together on this rock hurdling through space, not everybody agrees on what is art and what has merit versus what might be considered inappropriate or obscene. So today we're going to first talk about author D. H. Lawrence, whose life was in many ways as dramatic as any book he wrote. He also borrowed a lot from his life for his writing. And then we're going to talk about obscenity laws in Great Britain. Specifically, this book has a whole life in terms of it being considered obscene and litigated in many countries, but we're primarily focusing on Great Britain, and we will talk a little bit about things going on in the US because they dove tail on one another. And then we're going to talk about the trial that made Lady Chatterley really world famous in the mid twentieth century. Heads up, As you may have guessed from this introduction, Uh, we're talking about a book it involves a lot of sex. However, I will say we're being pretty careful about that, Like we're not really going into detail about any of the descriptions in the book. We're not reading any of the passages in the book that you would consider selecious if that's your thing. Um, But just know that, like, we are going to mention some of it and how it was perceived both legally and by readers, as well as some of Lawrence's other work. So. David Herbert Lawrence was born on September in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His early life was really not easy at all. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, worked in the minds and his mother, Lydia, was a lacemaker. It's believed that Arthur wasn't able to read, but Lydia was actually well educated. She had grown up in a middle class family before that family lost everything they had, and she had educational opportunities that her husban been did not. Lydia's love of literature is usually cited as having a strong influence on David, who was the couple's fourth child. Yeah. I read varying accounts about whether he went by David or Burt more around the house. We know his mother called him Burt, but just af hy I you'll hear him called sometimes David, sometimes dh sometimes Bert in this podcast. Uh. Lawrence was not a child of robust health, and his frailty was only accentuated by being in a coal town where the air was not exactly ideal to be breathing. That also meant that he was often kind of left behind socially, as he often convalesced at home. He did excel academically, and at the age of twelve, he received a scholarship to Nottingham High School. That was something that no child from Eastwood had ever received before. His time at Nottingham was not as impressive in terms of academic achievement as his earlier schooling had been, and he still struggled to make friends, and he was often sick. At the age of sixteen, Lawrence started a job as a clerk in a factory that made surgical supplies, but he was only there a few months before he got sick. He got pneumonia and had to leave his job to recover. This was after the death of his brother William, and it's possible that the stress of grief contributed to his health issues during this time. After he more or less got better, he started teaching school that was back in Eastwood, and he also met a longtime friend, Jesse Chambers. Jesse seems to have sort of picked up the same flag that Lawrence's mother had carried in terms of encouraging David to look for a better life than Eastwood could offer. Jesse. Like Lydia urged Lawrence to write, which he did, and at this point Lawrence was simultaneously pursuing a writing career and a teaching career, and this was in the early nineteen hundreds. In nineteen o six, he published his first short story that was called an Enjoyable cre Smith's a Prelude. He was also at this point studying to get his teaching certificate in Nottingham. He was also working on his novel The White Peacock, which was published in nineteen eleven. That novel was followed in nineteen twelve by The Trespasser. These successes were almost undoubtedly shadowed by the fact that Lydia Lawrence his mother had died in nineteen ten, and her son, who she called Bert, grieved the loss very deeply, writing at one point that he and his mother had an almost marriage like love. In nineteen twelve, while visiting a former professor named Ernest Weekly, Lawrence fell really deeply in love, but that was with Ernest Weekly's wife. She was German novelist Frida von rick to Offen. Lawrence was engaged at the time, but he broke off this engagement immediately and persuaded Frieda to leave earnest. He also quit his job to become a full time novelist. Lawrence and Frieda traveled to Germany and then to Italy. David wrote at a rapid pace throughout all of these travels. Yeah, this was a very dramatic time. There is a story that he actually was suspected of being a spy when they were in Germany, and that was why they had to leave pretty quickly and go to Italy. And of course all of this may have been catalyzed by just him having been in an emotionally fraught state, still dealing with the loss of his mother. In the first year of his relationship with Frieda, Lawrence published his first play titled The Daughter in Law, his first book of poetry titled Love Poems and Others, and his third novel, the acclaimed Sons and Lovers. Sons and Lovers is generally considered D. H. Lawrence's first truly great work, and it draws a lot from Lawrence's own life. It tells the story of a boy, Paul Moral, from a mining town who yearns for more and tries to make a better life for himself as he navigates his relationship with his mother and two women with whom he has romantic relation and ships. Doesn't sound familiar at all. After this whirlwind that he went through of travel and writing and putting out sons and lovers, David and Frieda returned to England and they got married on July thirteenth, nineteen fourteen. That was basically right after her divorce was legally finalized. His first short story collection, The Prussian Officer, was published soon after the wedding. Lawrence's next published work marked the start of his problems with being accused of obscenity. The Rainbow was released in nineteen fifteen, and it follows three generations of one family in a world that's rapidly changing from an agricultural society to an industrialized one. The reason critics called this obscene was that it had a number of instances where passion and sexual desire were discussed really plainly and very frank and open terms. In one instance, a couple of sex life is reinvigorated after the husband has a brief sexual encounter with another woman while traveling. The couple's relationship becomes focused almost entirely on their sexual connection to the exclusion of everything else, even their family. This was, of course, not just a scenario where readers of nineteen fifteen would find the sexual writing shocking, although they did, the characters were also very clearly breaking social morains. In addition to that shift in that couple's relationship, there is later on in the book a sexual encounter between two women. This entire book ended up being banned on the grounds that it was obscene. Half of the print run was destroyed, and when Lawrence's publishers at Mathulan appeared before a magistrate, they really threw d. H. Lawrence under the bus, saying that they kept telling him to change things, but that he stopped making edits for them and then they just had to go to print. This was all happening too at a time when d. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda would have loved to have left England, but they could not because of World War One. They were living in a small cottage in Cornwall, and because of the controversy surrounding Lawrence's writing, as well as the fact that his wife was German. They were having just a really isolated life. They had nobody from the community who wanted to befriend them. Yeah, they definitely had friends in like intellectual circles, but in terms of their day to day lives, they were sort of community. Pariah's Lawrence was working on his sequel to The Rainbow, which was Women in Love. Those two books had initially been planned as one larger book, but then his publisher had asked him to split it into two, and while he was writing Women in Love, he and Frieda were in a state of constant conflict as they worked through some issues that had come up in their rather hasty marriage. For one thing, DH was grappling with his own sexual identity, as he recognized that he had been attracted to other men, and while his own writings suggests that he came to terms with an identity of bisexuality, this subject has continued to be discussed and debated by literary critics and biographers for decades. Additionally, Frieda had entered the marriage believing that this was going to be an open one and that she would be free to have lovers other than her husband. That was something that d. H. Lawrence was not comfortable with, although eventually they worked this out and she did have some freedom in that regard. So not only were the newlyweds alone and under constant suspicion from their neighbors, they were also in a constant state of stress between the two of them. Women in Love reflects this conflict. The story picks up with Ursula, who was the character in focus at the end of The Rainbow, as well as her sister and the two marriages that each of them enter into. These two marriages are deeply intertwined, and the story is very much about people trying to find relationships in which they feel fulfilled as individuals and as sexual beings. Because of the issues and controversy surrounding The Rainbow, public location of Women in Love took a while. Publisher Thomas Seltzer to get through three years of revisions before it went to print in New York in nineteen twenty, and even then the first edition was only released two subscribers. It was published in London the following year, where it was not banned, although it was still considered controversial. When World War One ended, d h and freed to Lawrence left England and moved to Italy. It was there that he finished his editing on Women in Love and he also completed a set of short stories titled My England and Other Stories, which came out in ninety two. He also worked on several other novels, including The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod. After two years in Italy, the Lawrences headed to the US. They opted not to go across the Atlantic to make this journey, but instead they went to Seulon now Sri Lanka, and then Australia and then across the Pacific to reach the US. While he is in Australia, he wrote the book Kangaroo over the course of about a month and a half. This novel, even more than most of his other work, is pretty obviously autobiographical. The main character, Richard Lovett, is an English writer married to a German woman, and after living in England through the World War, they moved to Australia. Once there, this character love It finds himself in the push and pull of conflicting political movements in the country. The ultimately finds that he does not feel a connection to the parties who were vying for his alliance. There continues to be debate over whether D. H. Lawrence was drawing from real events and people in his descriptions of the political leaders and parties of Australia at the time. Yeah, they're definitely people who are like he's describing people that were real and obviously that's what this is, and other people are like Yeah, But in his time in Australia, he wasn't there long enough to have met all of these people in these very high profile and controversial positions. Uh, and it for it to not have been particularly well documented if that had been the case. But after leaving Australia, the Lawrence has made their way to North America and they headed to Taos, New Mexico, where they lived for a little while. Lawrence had been working for several years before this on a non fiction project titled Studies in Classic American Literature, and he finished that while living in Taos. This book includes literary criticism of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, among others. And he also wrote three other nonfiction works in the early nineteen twenties before they even reached the us SO Movements of European History and Psychoanalysis and The Unconscious We're both published in nineteen twenty one, and then Fantasia of the Unconscious was published in nineteen two. His American literature criticism work was the last of his nonfiction books to be published, and that came out in ninety three. He continued to write fiction as well, and his next book was Boy in the Bush, which came out in nineteen four. The Plumed Serpent, which was released in ninety six, is an interesting approach to the function of religion in a post war world and the end of Christianity and a return to indigenous religious traditions. This book, which featured a revival of Aztec religious rights, was no doubt informed by the trips the writer made some Mexico while living in the American Southwest. Yeah, definitely a tourist's version of such things. UM. Not not something you would go to for any kind of accurate representation of such things. In n. D. H. Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis after he had had a bronchial hemorrhage and seen a doctor. He left New Mexico and returned to Italy after his diagnosis, and there he started working on Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it was not his only project. He also penned a travel fiction called Sketches of Etruscan Places UM. I saw that described once as like kind of his his dream version of his life of travel, where it like there's a self insert character in every situation of like it sounds like this would be my cool life if I lived abroad. Um, he did live a cool life abroad, so it's kind of interesting. Sketches was published in ninety six, and then he went back to work on Lady Chatterly, or Lady C, as he called it in correspondence with friends. When that book was published in it was published privately, once again to subscribers, and not available to the general public. We will talk a lot more about this than just a moment. But though he believed in his book, D. H. Lawrence also knew that it had its detractors even before it had left the printer. He wrote of the book to his agent, quote, I am determined to stand by Lady C and to send her out into the world as far as possible. I perfectly understand that C. B and Rich are against her, thinking she will do me harm, and probably disliking her anyhow. But I stand by her and am perfectly content she should do me harm. With such people as take offense at her, I am out against such people fly a little boat. I sort of love that the writing. It's just got like a great attitude to it, in my opinion. As his health declined, d H. Lawrence moved once more, this time to the south of France, and there he worked on a number of poems and a critique of religion, and specifically the book of revelations titled Apocalypse that was published posthumously. D H. Lawrence died in Vals, France, on March seco n thirty. He was only forty four at the time. Lawrence was buried initially in Vaunts. According to Frieda, this was such a small, simple ceremony. She wrote of it, quote, we buried him very simply, like a bird. We put him away a few of us who loved him. Frieda moved back to Taos to live with Angelo Vaguely, who had been Lawrence's friend and Frieda's lover for several years before d H. Died. She eventually married him quite late in her life. Five years after d H. Lawrence died, Revigedly returned to France to have the author's body exhumed and cremated so that he could be brought back to Taos. That's something that Frieda had requested. There's a whole other story here. We'll talk about it a little more on Friday. In a moment, we're going to dig a little deeper into the story of Lady Chatterly and the laws that governed this book's availability for a long time. But first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. The controversy of D. H. Lawrence's work outlived him by quite a stretch. When his book came out in British authorities declared that it was permanently banned in Great Britain, not published a version in the US that same year, but that was a very heavily edited edition. The plot of the book is about the marriage and affairs of the titular character, Constance Chatterly. Her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterly, is paralyzed from the waist down, and their life is both physically and emotionally void. They really do not connect on any level. Connie has a brief affair with the playwright that also leaves her unfulfilled, but then she starts a relationship with the estate gamekeeper, Oliver Milords, who is also married. Their affair is really intense and sensual, in a way that Connie has never experienced before, and ultimately it unravels their lives as both Malords and Connie try to escape their marriages. The book doesn't end with them together, but there's a sense of hope that they might eventually be together. And while the book has in more recent decades come under criticism for or featuring a woman in a role of socio economic power becoming obsessed with a man who is not exactly kind to her, Malour's is pretty distant and even derisive. Lady Chatterley's Lover was for its time, incredibly progressive for continuing to put forth the idea of a woman even having sexual appetites. It's also pretty straightforward about the many sex acts it describes. It's not demeaning for either partner, and it offers up the idea that real love and passion and sexuality are things that people have lost touch with as society has become more industrialized. I have not read this book. Um does it fall into the trope of disabled people as like sexless? Not really? Okay? Um? So her husband comes back from the war with with that paralysis, and he seems to over the course of the book become possibly there's like hints that he's he's having some sort of relationship with his nurse. It doesn't really go into much sexuality there, um, But I was just curious because that is a very common trip. It is, for sure. Um. I think you could argue either side of it. Honestly, because he's very he seems very permissive and even suggestive that she should go elsewhere to have her sexual needs. Meant, but because they're which could fall into that trope, but because their relationship is just off anyway, you could argue the opposite that he just doesn't want anything to do with her. Um. It has also been a long time since I've done a thorough read of it, so don't take any of that as any kind of expertise or thorough gospel on the matter. To get to the legal part of all of this, Lord Campbell's Act, also known as the Obscene Publications Act of eighteen fifty seven, established laws against obscene literature written, and it was problematic in a lot of the same ways of other obscenity laws we've talked about on the show recently. It did not define what qualified as obscene literature. That was questioned as possibly being obscene was determined on a case by case basis in court, So, of course, that led to some situations where the application of the law was inconsistent, or even where literature that described fairly commonplace happenings that people might see every day was determined to be obscene just because the judge involved applied his own sense of morality to the line of the law. Additionally, that act provided a great deal of power to authorities. Under the Act, police were empowered to search any establishment they believed might have obscene literature for sale or distribution. It also enabled postal workers to confiscate any parcels that were suspected of containing obscene materials, and for the destruction and of any such materials. Section three of the eighteen fifty seven Act also stated that quote no action, suit, or information, or any proceeding of what nature soever shall be brought against any person for anything done or omitted to be done in pursuance of this Act or in the execution of authorities under this Act. There was a provision here that a person could take legal action against someone if certain requirements related to a fairly narrow window. There's like there's a three month window, but there's also a one month window. It's worded very very um specifically, but also in the way it is quite confusing. Uh. And it also stated that the party intending to prosecute had to notify the defendant in writing about it first. So basically, if someone took your things and destroyed them and they weren't in any way obscene at all, even though even though they could say I thought it was obscene, you had no recourse to like, get any kind of recompense from it. And because of the rather nebulous nature of this law and all of these problems with it, as well as some others, it was criticized literally from the beginning. Even so, it took more than a hundred years for the Act to be updated. The big changes that took place in the Obscene Publications Act of ninety nine were first a provision for a defense of innocent dissemination, meaning the person who distributed the obscene item didn't mean to do so, and second for a defense based on the social or artistic value of the item being distributed. This is outlined in section four of the law, titled Defense of Public Good, and it reads quote one, A person shall not be convicted of an offense against Section two of this Act, and an order for forfeiture shall not be made under the foregoing section if it is proved that publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art, or learning, or of other objects of general concern. Two. It is hereby declared that the opinion of experts as to the literary, artistic, scientific, or other merits of an article may be admitted in any proceedings under this Act, either to establish or too negative the said ground. That defense of public good phrase made a lot of publishers start to reevaluate literature that they had not been able to bring to press before the law was updated, and one of those titles was, of course, Lady Chatterly's Lover. There was a similar trajectory for the book's status in the United States. In Utah, Senator Reid Smoot seemed kind of obsessed with Lawrence's last novel and led a charge to have it banned as a small section of a larger tariff act that he was coast sponsoring. Smoot stated in a debate on the Senate floor quote. I could tell from the very beginning that it is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure the darkness of hell. Nobody would write a book like that unless his heart was as rotten and as black as it could possibly be. Although it seemed that most of his colleagues thought this fixation on Lawrence's book was a little over zealous, his Tariff Act passed and Lady Chatterley could only be published in the United States in a heavily abridged form that removed all of the explicit sex scenes. Yeah, there's a if you ever just want to have a fun time look at old newspapers with read Smoot and some of his colleagues arguing about this because they really kind of get his goat a lot of the time, where they're like, really, you think it's gross, but you seem to have read it completely, and he's very adamant that he only spent ten minutes looking at it like it's all weird thing um. In the cases of both the US and Great Britain obscenity laws, because Lawrence's book had been published initially in Italy and had to be shipped to people in those countries who wanted it. That meant that customs offices and post offices were supposed to be the mainline of defense against this questionable material getting into those countries. But after the initial release official statements about it from government officials, in this kind of furor that people like Smoot had experienced kind of died down. Interest in the band in the US was reignited when a French adaptation of the novel for film challenged its censorship in the US. Kingsley Pictures, the film's distributor, went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court after the State of New York denied a distribution license because quote it's object matter is adultery presented as being right and desirable for certain people under certain circumstances, and it said that it quote alluringly portrays adultery as proper behavior. When Kingsley Pictures Court Versus Regents went before the U. S. Supreme Court, though the court's judgment read in part quote what New York has done therefore is to prevent the exhibition of a motion picture because that picture advocates an idea that adultery under certain circumstances, maybe proper behavior, Yet the First Amendment's basic guarantee is of freedom to advocate ideas. The state quite simply has thus struck at the very heart of constitutionally protected liberty. Yeah, that film was made in ninety five, but it was a couple of years later that they tried to distribute it in the US. Uh, And all of this started to bubble over. On May eleven, ninety nine, the Johnson City Press of Tennessee reported quote, last week, the Grove City Press released an addition of Lady Chatterley's Lover exactly as D. H. Lawrence wrote it, not omitting one four letter word or tender descriptive passage. This article then mentions that while thirty thousand copies of the book had made their way out into the world, I question that number. Uh. The New York Post Office had seized a hundred and sixty four copies of it. Publisher Barney Rossett, who founded Grove Press, fought to have bands on a number of books. I returned that among those titles was Lady Chatterley's Lover, and he filed suit against Robert K. Kristen Mary individually and as postmaster of the City of New York that was a United States District Court SD New York. In a filing which read quote, plaintiffs seek to restrain the Postmaster from enforcing a decision of the Post Office Department that the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and circulars announcing its availability are nonmail herble under the Statute barring obscene Matter from the Males. Ross It won the case, and this established the idea of redeeming value for controversial works that excluded them from obscenity laws. So, after the update to the British Obscenity Act and the success of US publishers in court, Penguin Books took a bold step and published an unexplagated edition of Lady c in London nine days after its publication. Legal proceedings were initiated. In the case of r v. Penguin Books Limited was filed that our stands for Regina, which means Queen. It's like saying the Crown is filing this suit against you. Okay, we're going up for the trial, but first we will take a quick sponsor break. During the time before Great Britain's Obscenity Act had its ninette update, Lady Chatterly's Lover had circulated for decades. There were versions of the book printed in various countries almost from the moment the book was first released, and we used the word printed there rather than published, pretty deliberately because a lot of them were basically black market reproductions made by copying that initial run. I read one cute account. It read cutely to me about like, what will high school teenagers do now to be rebellious if this book is very illegal? And as it once again became a hot topic, the revisit to Lawrence's tail and to a new generation considering its value and whether it was worth getting spun up over. In nineteen fifty nine, Time magazine ran a fresh review of the book, which stated, quote, but is it pornography? The answer of literary people is no. Lawrence, a fretful neurotic, always at war with himself, was a serious writer. But there is another question. Is Lady Chatterley dull and tiresome? This time? The answer must be yes. People were starting to see this book's banning is kind of pointless. By this time, The lines regarding what people thought of as obscene and what was merely provocative. Those lines had shifted a lot since the late nineteen twenties. The Asheville Citizen Times of Asheville, North Carolina ran an article about the Grove Press edition which included the comment quote. It may seem ungallant to point this out, but after thirty years Lady Chatterley that much talked about English gentlewoman who had an affair with her husband's gamekeeper may strike the present day observer is rather tame. Penguin's publication of the book was not an attempt to just slide it through print and hope nobody noticed. The book had been a subject of renewed debate in both countries for several years, and Penguin made an announcement that they would be publishing it months before they did so. They even livered fifteen copies directly to police officials. They knew that this inexpensive paperback edition it costs just three shillings and sixpence. I thought that would likely become a test case for these updated nineteen fifty nine obscenity laws, and they were right. In August nineteen sixty, Penguin was called to the bench, and on October twentie of that year, the trial of Lady Chatterly was underway at the Old Bailey, known more formally as the Central Criminal Court of London. All of the jurors had been given copies of the new Penguin edition of the book and had been instructed by the judge to read them. They had like a weekend and a couple of days to get it read. During the London trial, Prosecutor Mervin Griffith Jones addressed the jury opening with quote, let me emphasize it on behalf of the prosecution, do not approach this manner in any priggish, high minded, super correct mid Victorian manner. Look at it as we all of us, I hope look at thes today. And then, to go back and re quote the words of Mr Justice Devlin, you will have to say, is this book to be tolerated or not? Would you approve of your young son's young daughters, because girls can read as well as boys reading this book. Is it a book that you would have lying around your in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read. That's sort of sexist and classist series of questions there at the end of the quote really ended up hurting the prosecution because to the jury it made it seem very out of touch with modern sensibilities. Griffith Jones had also counted all of the obscene acts and words in the book, and he gave the assembled jurors those statistics. The F word was in the book more than thirty times, the C word fourteen times. There were thirteen quote episodes of sexual intercourse, and twelve of them were very detailed. But here's the thing. He even like offered up the word womb as something offensive in his argument, and again that probably didn't help his case. The defense was led by Gerald Gardner, and opening remarks reminded the jury of the reputation of Penguin Books and it's well established mission too put great works of literature in the hands of working people. Gardner asked the jury to consider whether such a reputable publisher would want something as reprehensible as what Mr Griffith Jones had described in the hands of so many. He also made the case that even though he had been controversial in his lifetime, since his death, D. H. Lawrence had come to be recognized as one of the great English writers and among the five or six greatest yes. The defense conceded there were things in the book that we're shocking, but the jury had to decide whether it was like to corrupt people or lead to depravity. The defense called thirty five witnesses, among them people like Rebecca West and I M. Forster. There were journalists, There were editors and literature professors. There were critics. There were even ministers and experts in child development and education, and they all testified that Lawrence was actually making a fairly moral case with Lady Chatterly. When one witness stated that Lawrence used sex as a quote holy basis for a good life, the prosecution started reading the most salacious passages he could find in the book to show just how unholy they were. According to Molly Panter Downs, who was a journalist who attended the trial and wrote about it for The New Yorker, quote, practically every description of love making in the book must have been read out by Mr Griffith Jones with awful emphasis and the air of imparting some reprehensible right that would be news to all his listeners. And it was interesting how well the writing stood up to that treatment. Defense witness Helen Gardner, who was a reader of Renaissance English literature at the University of Oxford, stated that Lawrence's use of four letter words was not shameful, as they were describing an act that itself was not shameful. When Griffin Jones asked her if she would object to teaching the book to a mixed class, she replied, oh, no, seeming perplexed that he would even ask such a question. Was days and days of literary discussion in court, and though the defense had they claimed another thirty six witnesses in reserve, when they stopped at the thirty five initially listed, the entire courtroom seemed relieved. Panther Downs wrote a lengthy stream of defense witnesses quote. By the end of the case, every juror should have been qualified to write an honors thesis on it. Finally, Justice Byrne, who presided over the case, reminded the jurors that they really had two things to deliberate, first whether the book was obscene, and second, whether it's literary merit outweighed any obscenity that they had determined it to possess. The defense seemed pretty worried despite all of their witnesses testifying to the book's value. The liberation took three hours. When the jury returned, they announced the verdict of not guilty. Penguin Books had not run a foul of the obscenity law and publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover. Just days later, the publisher released all the copies that had and the two hundred thousand copy print runs sold out. Bookshops all over Britain reported that they had run out of stock and had started taking back orders. Penguin added a publisher's dedication to their next edition that read quote for having published this book. Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act nineteen fifty nine at the Old Bailey in London from twenty October to two November nineteen sixty. This edition is therefore dedicated into the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of not guilty and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom. Two million copies of the thirty two year old book were sold in less than a year. Today, the Chatterly obscenity case is considered a landmark when it comes to obscenity law in Britain, so much so that the copy that was used by Judge Sir Lawrence Burn was sold at auction by Sotheby's in for fifty six thousand, two hundred fifty pounds, but British Arts Minister Michael Ellis issued a ban on its export to the anonymous buyer because there was concern about letting an important artifact of British legal and literary history leave the country. So a funding effort was launched to match the auction price and keep that annotated copy in Britain. Penguin Books donated ten thousand pounds to this effort, but Alto at Lee, the University of Bristol purchased the book to keep in the Penguin archive, ensuring that it would indeed stay in Britain. And that is the Lady Chatterley's Lover Trial, which I sort of love. As I said, it's just such an interesting thing. I remember having discussions about books that were considered obscene um in high school. This is when I realized I couldn't debate because I got I completely lost my cool during a debate where someone was being very prudish by my estimation, and I was like, I don't think you've read the material, and I really it's not on the debate team didn't make it. Um. What I do have is a listener mail though, and we'll talk more about Lady Cee on Friday. But I have a listener mail which is a correction, um, because I left a single word out and ruined the meaning of a thing out. This is from our listener, Barbara. Barbara writes, I am binge listening to the two season and just finished the Mabel Pengually episode from two. I noticed in the story it was stated that in nineteen seventeen, New York was the first state to give women the vote. That is not correct. It was Wyoming. Wyoming gave women the right to vote when it was a territory in eighteen sixty nine. In eighteen eighty nine, it was made part of the original constitution while they were becoming a state, which occurred in eighteen nineties. So it was Wyoming in eighteen ninety is the first state to have in their constitution women's suffrage. Maybe there was some way that that sentence was worded in the podcast, like first state that had denied women the vote to give women the vote as Wyoming had it from the very beginning of the state. Barbara, of course, you're right. Um, I actually looked at one of my earlier notes and Tracy knows. I mean, I think we've both done this, but I'm probably the worst of the worst of us. Um. You'll make a note and then you'll copy a thing, you'll copy pasted into a document and words will vanish and it will Yeah. I had literally written it as in my side notes, because I keep a second document that's like me writing key points to hit and it was like first Eastern state and Eastern So somehow, I I thought we had already uh like done a correction about this shortly after the episode came out. But it may just be that somebody mentioned it and I looked it up. I think so, because I don't remember talking about it. But I could be wrong, because I also forget things. Yeah, I also also forget things. But the New York law did become like a big rallying cry for women's voting rights in the East, and so I think that like that's why it gets noted in that context of like the first state in the Eastern us, although really neither of these things are correct, because the first state that let women vote was actually New Jersey. Yeah, the New Jersey Assembly passed a law in that gave women the right to vote across the state, but then they took it back in so for ten years women could vote in New Jersey, and then that was not the case anymore. By total coincidence, we are recording this listener mail on election day here and there are I'm gonna be going to the polls after we finished recording where I early voted because I have meetings this after. So at the last minute on Friday, I was like, oh, Brian, we got early votes, so I don't forget. Yeah, I did not, because the the the the election day polling place is a lot closer to me than the early voting location. Oh, ours are pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah, I'm not too bad. But in any case, Barbara, thank you for your email and pointing that out. And then I had not known that thing about New Jersey until I went to verify stuff and I discovered it. So now we all learned. Today you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media. Is Missed in History and if you have not subscribed yet and you would like to, you can do so on the I heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.