Lady Chatterley's Lover is a thoroughly nasty book. Penguin could have tested the egregiousness of the 1959 act with any one of many better novels. By the time Lawrence began planning a tale of rude goings-on between a lady and a servant, a new mass readership was ripe for introduction to the joys of literary sex. In the 19th century the two realms were converging the great unwashed were increasingly able to read, and the educated classes were increasingly unable to read any language but English. The stories of the common folk were equally obscene, but they seldom reached the ears of educated folk. Gentlemen read their obscene poems in Latin, less often Greek, because that was the best way of keeping sexual excitement out of the reach of women and servants.

They relieved themselves with women of the streets, who would do the deed for a mutton chop or a dish of coals. Unfortunately the English seem to have been left short of both. In 17th- and 18th-century Europe art encouraged lust. If they hadn't been so accomplished, they would have been less seductive. The fact that they were cultivated and eloquent didn't make their virtue any less easy. Courtesans were the only presentable females young English gentlemen met on the Grand Tour they reigned over the salons, they played the songs of the day and showed off the best and most precious works of the most distinguished artisans. The women who posed for Titian with armfuls of flowers and a nipple exposed were courtesans. Prostitution and art have always lived together. Pornography is the literature of prostitution. Poor old Rochester! Poor old Swift! To think that literary merit had rendered their works innocuous. According to the wording of the act, the brainchild of Roy Jenkins, literary merit neutralises any tendency to deprave, corrupt, shock or disgust. The jury found the publisher not guilty because the book in question, Lady Chatterley's Lover, had literary merit. A ll those people who have their hearts in the right place have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the not guilty verdict in the trial of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.

Ledi Čaterli meilužis by D.H. Lawrence