From JSTOR Daily, November 15:
How the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover was reversed.
In 1960, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was charged with being obscene under British law. The book had originally been published privately in 1928 and then in France in 1929. There had been no legal publication in the UK until the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which made literary merit a defense against charges of obscenity, emboldened Penguin to issue an inexpensive, unexpurgated paperback.
Literature scholar Christopher Hilliard notes that the new law’s backers were surprised by the action the Crown took in challenging Penguin. The Crown fell back on the century-long informal precedent of “variable obscenity,” which held that obscene books should be kept out of the hands of children, women, and the working classes, who were all susceptible to works likely to “deprave or corrupt.” Upper-middle-class male readers, on the other hand, could generally be trusted with suspect books. It was precisely Penguin’s paperback—cheap and mass-produced—that was the trouble.
“Material the authorities would ban if it was produced for a mass audience did not necessarily warrant prohibition if it was directed toward a privileged readership in whose judgement the courts could have more faith,” Hilliard writes.
But it was now 1960. The prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who had represented the British at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asked the jury, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?” In response, members of the jury broke out in laughter. Three of the jurors were women. The jury pool also included a cross-section of workers, including teachers, dockworkers, drivers, and salesmen. It was unlikely that any of them employed live-in domestic servants.....
....MUCH MORE
Know your audience is at least as important as Know Your Customer.
