Penguin Books – derrickjknight

A Knight’s Tale (38.1 Wives And Servants

‘The Obscene Publications Act 1959 (c. 66) is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament that significantly reformed the law related to obscenity in England and Wales. Prior to the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions for artistic merit or the public good. During the 1950s, the Society of Authors formed a committee to recommend reform of the existing law, submitting a draft bill to the Home Office in February 1955. After several failed attempts to push a bill through Parliament, a committee finally succeeded in creating a viable bill, which was introduced to Parliament by Roy Jenkins and given the Royal Assent on 29 July 1959, coming into force on 29 August 1959 as the Obscene Publications Act 1959. With the committee consisting of both censors and reformers, the actual reform of the law was limited, with several extensions to police powers included in the final version.

The Act created a new offence for publishing obscene material, repealing the common law offence of obscene libel which was previously used, and also allows Justices of the Peace to issue warrants allowing the police to seize such materials. At the same time it creates two defences; firstly, the defence of innocent dissemination, and secondly the defence of public good.’ (Wikipedia)

My schooldays ended in July 1960, but even then, like every other schoolboy in the country I had keenly awaited the outcome of a trial due to take place later in the year of Penguin Books as the publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which publication in August had been prevented under the auspices of the above quoted legislation, thus ruining our summer holiday reading. All copies distributed before 16th were immediately withdrawn, pending the trial opening in November.

An entertaining and informative article from the New Yorker by Mollie Panter-Downes (surely an apt name) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1960/11/19/the-lady-at-the-old-bailey, gives an excellent eye-witness account of the proceedings which demonstrated how far certain sections of the judiciary had become distanced from the national mood.

In his summing up, the question put to the jurors by Counsel for the Prosecution, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who was later to become a judge, as to whether they would wish their wives or their servants to read such a book, said it all.

Lawrence’s really rather mediocre novel was first published privately in Venice in 1928, but not until November 1960 could it be published in UK. Naturally the trial’s publicity boosted Penguin’s sales enormously.

The Reader

After a little clearance work in the garden I spent much of the day finishing reading

This is Penguin Books 1948 edition of Huxley’s novel first published in 1923. Today’s seven and a half pence is the current coin equivalent of the purchase price of one shilling and sixpence. We could, in 1948 have bought six of De Marco’s 3d ice creams mentioned in https://derrickjknight.com/2012/05/29/the-bees/ for that money.

At that time Penguin books were bound with stitching which must be one reason why this copy remains intact.

Huxley’s novel, allegedly comic, is to my mind a tragic farce focussing on London’s post WW1 promiscuous Bohemian intellectuals. His second work of fiction contains his usual exploration of ideas and includes a number of devices such as the dialogue of a musical play within the story. The writing is as fluid as ever although terms like ‘blackamoors’ and ‘nigger mask’ for a band of musicians and a piece of carving, albeit not meant in a derogatory sense, grate on modern ears.

Regular readers will know of my penchant for leaving bookmarks in my own copies for posterity to find within the pages. Sometime before the mid 1960s someone has beaten me to it

with this compliments slip, from perhaps Joan, who might have been trying to get her pen to work by scribbling as I sometimes do in order to make the ink flow. The telephone number is the key. Before the 1950s very few people had telephones and the early exchanges were operated manually by banks of usually female staff who connected callers to the required recipient. As in the number on this slip the areas were identified by the first letters of the location followed by four digits. All-digit numbers were introduced in the early 1960s, when the TEM of Temple Bar became 836. Later still London numbers were, in two stages, further divided to begin 0207 (inner) or 0208 (outer).

Watching me reading, and correctly assuming that this would all appear on today’s blog post, Jackie decided to make her own contribution in the forms of

her photograph of me and this Father’s Day card Becky sent me some years ago.

Shortly before sunset we drove to Barton on Sea to have a look at it. These are my photographs;

and here are Jackie’s,

with a couple of me.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s spicy paprika pork, tender runner beans, and boiled new potatoes, with which she drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Médoc.

An Evocation

After yesterday’s long trip we took it easy today.

I finished reading

The front and back of the jacket are from a painting by the author’s father, Ulric van den Bogaerde created in 1934.

In this book Dirk Bogarde returns to the years from 1927 to 1934 visited fleetingly in the first part of his autobiography ‘A Postillion Struck by Lightning’. The work really does evoke that period of a largely idyllic childhood. In his author’s note, the author, no doubt very fairly, credits Fanny Blake as ‘the most valiant of editors’ with having ‘wrestled hard and long with [his] deliberately limited vocabulary.’ It is this naive vocabulary and verbal style that is the greatest charm of this volume, conveying the very sense of the young boy who published, courtesy of the Viking branch of Penguin Books, this evocation in 1992 – so many years after the depicted events. Bogarde’s fluency and facility with description nevertheless shines through, as he expands on his early childhood.

The monochrome full page pictures among the text