The Jolly Roger Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its Pirated Editions
richard owen
O Pino What a bean-o! When we printed Lady C!
(D.H. Lawrence, ‘To Pino’, 1928).
‘I have had in my hand a very funereal volume, bound in black and elongated to look like a bible or long hymn-book, gloomy’. So wrote D.H. Lawrence in 1930 in an essay entitled ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. It was the year of his death, at the age of only forty-four. But what made Lawrence think funereal thoughts was not so much his impending demise but the fact that in his hand was a pirated edition of his most famous (or infamous) novel. Whatever else one may think about Lawrence’s novels and short stories, for bibliophiles at least one of them is an absolute treasure trove. I speak of course of Lady C. In Britain there’s a tendency to think that the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial raised the curtain for the very first time on a novel that Lawrence himself described as ‘very improper’. In fact by that time there were already numerous pirated editions in circulation, both expurgated and unexpurgated. However, these were modest a V airs commercially. What distin- guished the 1960 trial (apart from the hilarity it occasioned) was the fact that Penguin had gambled on a favourable verdict and printed 200,000 copies in advance. Lady Chatterley was about to be promoted from the collector’s bedside table to worldwide distribution. The change of status was dramatic. Lawrence’s estate was to receive sums of money that would have been unimaginable to the author. Most of Lawrence’s essay ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ amounts to a defence of his use of ‘obscene language’ to describe what Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors get up to in a novel
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