As Netflix's adaptation debuts, an expert walks us through the watershed obscenity trial that forever changed British social norms.
It was massive. It was very widely followed—the media couldn't resist it. Part of that was because of the Obscene Publications Act passing in 1959; the law’s main change was to make literary merit a defence, but it also enabled the defence council to call expert witnesses to say why this is good literature. Previously, any obscenity case was the prosecutor saying,"This is really bad” and the defence saying,"It's not.
John Arthur Thomas Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich , with Stephen Hopkinson, General Director of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, during theCentral PressThe Obscene Publications Act kept the legacy definition of obscenity from the Victorian period, which was: “Is this material going to deprave and corrupt those who read it?” If a bishop says it's not going to deprave and corrupt you, that’s hard to argue with. Penguin made a very democratic argument that you should have the right to read.
I would say no, in a way, because of the road not taken. Penguin tried to defend this on the grounds of equality, saying that poor people should be able to read the same things as rich people do. They didn’t try to defend it on the grounds of the freedom to read—that’s a very American line of defence.
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