Judge Summing Up In “Lady Chatterley” Case

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29352, 3 November 1960, Page 6

Judge Summing Up In “Lady Chatterley” Case

(N.Z. Press Association— Copyright)

LONDON, November 1. The Judge in the “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” case today told the jury of nine men and three women that they must not select passages from the book and judge them obscene.

"You must take the book as a whole,” said Mr Justice Byrne in his summing up at the fifth day of the trial. Penguin Books are charged under the obscenity laws with publishing an unexpurgated edition of the novel, by D. H. Lawrence, which deals with a woman's love affair with her husband's game-keeper. Mr Justice Byrne told the jury they were not being asked to decide a question of taste. “There is a considerable difference between being shocked and disgusted and you must ask yourselves, as men and women of the world, not with a prudish mind, but with a liberal mind, the question: Is the tendency of that book to deprave and corrupt those who are likely to read it?” In his final speech to the jury, Mr Gerald Gardiner, Q.C., for the defence, said: “There is, is there not, a high breathlessness about beauty which cancels out lust? This is a moral book because the message, meaning and outcome Is that two people find an aspect of truth.” Of the suggestion that the book was about adultery, he said: “I suppose there must be a mind which would describe ‘Antony and Cleopatra* as a play about adultery. “Antony had a wife and I suppose there might be a mind which would describe this play by Shakespeare as the story of a sex-starved soldier copulating with an Egyptian queen.” Mr Mervyn Griffith Jones, leading for the Crown, conceded that the book “was a book of some merit.” But he said: “There is adultery the whole way through. There is no basis for any real love or talk of lasting communion between these two

people (Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper).” He asked if it was a book which "suggests a permanent and satisfactory union of love between man and woman.” The trial was adjourned until tomorrow when Mr Justice Byrne will conclude his summing up.