… Exactly 50 years ago, for six days in late October and early November of 1960, Penguin Books was tried in the Old Bailey for having attempted to bring out a paperback edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned since its 1928 publication [uncut, in Florence]. … Since 1868, obscenity had been a common-law offense, (unhelpfully) defined as any material whose tendency “is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” No one seemed to have any doubt that Chatterley would fall in the dead center of that definition. … Remarkably, this was the way matters stood until 1959, when liberal members of Parliament, under the leadership of Roy Jenkins, passed a new Obscene Publications Act. …

But the government, as it turned out, was not greatly impressed with the new law and was not inclined to give Penguin a free pass. … Penguin didn’t expect such an aggressive response. … [But t]he Crown was meanwhile finding out that prosecution would not be easy. …

The [judge's] summing up … “cast gloom on everyone from Penguin.” In the lobby as well, “the general opinion . . . seemed to be that the jurors would not take long to come up with a verdict against Penguin.” However, after just under three hours, the dock worker, the installation inspector, and the others [in the jury] filed back in and the foreman announced a unanimous verdict of not guilty. “There was an outburst of clapping,” noted The Times, “instantly silenced by the usher.” Penguin was off to the races. It printed 50,000 additional copies of the novel in seven days, then two million over the next six months. By the following year, Chatterley had brought it a profit of 112,000 pounds, the equivalent at that time of $310,000.

The end of the Chatterley ban did not mark an immediate end of literary censorship in Britain. Within a few years of the trial there were successful obscenity prosecutions of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (also known as Fanny Hill), banned since John Cleland wrote it in 1748 and brought to market by a publisher emboldened by the Chatterley ruling. But both rulings were overturned on appeal, and in fairly short order the practice, in both Britain and the United States, became the present one, where the publication of more or less everything (child pornography excepted) is more or less permitted. …