A publisher's note in the 2001 Random House Inc. edition of the novel states that Lawrence "was unable to secure a commercial publication [of] the novel in its unexpurgated form".[17] The author privately published the novel in 2000 copies to his subscribers in England, the United States and France in 1928. Later that same year, the second edition was privately published in 200 copies.[17] Then, pirated copies of the novel were made.
An edition of the novel was published in Britain in 1932 by Martin Secker, two years after Lawrence's death. Reviewing it in The Observer, the journalist Gerald Gould noted that "passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance—importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them".[18] An authorised and heavily censored abridgment was published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. also in 1932.[19] That edition was subsequently reissued in paperback in the United States by Signet Books in 1946.
British obscenity trial
In November 1960, the full unexpurgated edition, the last of three versions written by Lawrence,[20] was published by Penguin Books in Britain, selling its first print run of 200,000 copies on the first day of publication.[21][22]
The trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 Act, introduced by Roy Jenkins, had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Another objection related to the use of the word "cunt".
Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses. The verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty" and resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it was the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".
The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to 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".
In 2006, the trial was dramatized by BBC Wales as The Chatterley Affair.
Australia
The book was banned in Australia,[23][24] and a book describing the British trial, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, was also banned.[25] In 1965 a copy of the British edition was smuggled into the country by Alexander William Sheppard, Leon Fink, and Ken Buckley, and then a run of 10,000 copies was printed and sold nationwide.[26][27] The fallout from that event eventually led to the easing of censorship of books in the country. The ban by the Department of Customs and Excise on Lady Chatterley's Lover, along with three other books—Borstal Boy, Confessions of a Spent Youth, and Lolita—was lifted in July 1965.[28] The Australian Classification Board, established in 1970, remains.
Canada
In 1962, McGill University Professor of Law and Canadian modernist poet F. R. Scott appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada to defend Lady Chatterley's Lover from censorship. Scott represented the appellants, who were booksellers who had been offering the book for sale.
The case arose when the police had seized their copies of the book and deposited them with a judge of the Court of Sessions of the Peace, who issued a notice to the booksellers to show cause why the books should not be confiscated as obscene, contrary to s 150A of the Criminal Code.[29] The trial judge eventually ruled that the book was obscene and ordered that the copies be confiscated. That decision was upheld by the Quebec Court of Queen's Bench, Appeal Side (now the Quebec Court of Appeal).[30]
Scott then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which allowed the appeal on a 5–4 split and held that the book was not an obscene publication.[31]
On 15 November 1960, an Ontario panel of experts, appointed by Attorney General Kelso Roberts, found that novel was not obscene according to the Canadian Criminal Code.[32]
United States
One of the US "unexpurgated" editions (1959)Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned for obscenity in the United States in 1929. In 1930, Senator Bronson Cutting proposed an amendment to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which was being debated, to end the practice of having U.S. Customs censor allegedly obscene imported books. Senator Reed Smoot vigorously opposed such an amendment and threatened to read indecent passages of imported books publicly in front of the Senate. Although he never followed through, he included Lady Chatterley's Lover as an example of an obscene book that must not reach domestic audiences and declared, "I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"[33]
A 1955 French film version, based on the novel and released by Kingsley Pictures, was the subject of attempted censorship in New York in 1959 on the grounds that it promoted adultery.[34] The US Supreme Court held on 29 June 1959 that the law prohibiting its showing was a violation of the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[35]
The ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill was fought and overturned in court with assistance by publisher Barney Rosset and lawyer Charles Rembar in 1959.[36] It was then published by Rosset's Grove Press, with the complete opinion by United States Court of Appeals Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan, which first established the standard of "redeeming social or literary value" as a defence against obscenity charges. Fred Kaplan of The New York Times stated the overturning of the obscenity laws "set off an explosion of free speech".[37]
Susan Sontag, in a 1961 essay in The Supplement to the Columbia Spectator that was republished in Against Interpretation (1966), dismissed Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "sexually reactionary" book and suggested that the importance given to vindicating it showed that the US was "plainly at a very elementary stage of sexual maturity".[38]
Japan
Translator Sei Itō (left) and his publisher Hisajirō Oyama (right) at the first Chatterley trial in Japan.The publication of a full translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover by Sei Itō in 1950 led to a famous obscenity trial in Japan that extended from 8 May 1951 to 18 January 1952, with appeals lasting to 13 March 1957. Several notable literary figures testified for the defence. The trial ultimately ended in a guilty verdict with a ¥100,000 fine for Ito and a ¥250,000 fine for his publisher.
India
In 1964, the bookseller Ranjit Udeshi in Bombay was prosecuted under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (sale of obscene books)[39] for selling an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (AIR 1965 SC 881) was eventually laid before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India. Chief Justice Hidayatullah declared the law on the subject of when a book can be regarded as obscene and established important tests of obscenity such as the Hicklin test.[40]
The court upheld the conviction:
When everything said in its favour we find that in treating with sex the impugned portions viewed separately and also in the setting of the whole book pass the permissible limits judged of from our community standards and as there is no social gain to us which can be said to preponderate, we must hold the book to satisfy the test we have indicated above.
