Editing D. H. Lawrence (section)

==''Lady Chatterley'' trial==
{{Main|R v Penguin Books Ltd.}}
A heavily censored abridgement of ''[[Lady Chatterley's Lover]]'' was published in the United States by [[Alfred A. Knopf]] in 1928. This edition was posthumously reissued in paperback in the United States by both Signet Books and [[Penguin Books]] in 1946.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://flashbak.com/twenty-five-lady-chatterleys-lover-covers-369030/|title=1946 Penguin and Signet book covers|date=3 December 2016}}</ref> The first unexpurgated edition of ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was printed in July 1928 in Florence by a small publisher, [[Giuseppe Orioli]]: 1000 copies in a very good print, according D. H. Lawrence, who wrote a thank-you poem to Orioli. When the unexpurgated edition of ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the [[Obscene Publications Act 1959|Obscene Publications Act of 1959]] became 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 and the word "[[cunt]]".

Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including [[E. M. Forster]], [[Helen Gardner (critic)|Helen Gardner]], [[Richard Hoggart]], [[Raymond Williams]] and [[Norman St John-Stevas]], were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, [[Mervyn Griffith-Jones]], asked if it were 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 were 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."