the jolly roger
If the prosecution had understood what was meant, 14 and had spelt it out, Sparrow suggested, ‘the verdict might have been a di V erent one’. Instead Mervyn Gri Y th-Jones, the prosecuting counsel, prob- ably helped to secure a not guilty verdict by loftily asking members of the jury if Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they wished their wives or servants to read. The 200,000 copies sold out on the first day of publication, at 3s 6d a copy, and two million copies were sold within a year. 15 The trial was the subject of a drily humorous piece in this journal in the summer of 1960 ( The Book Collector , Volume 9 No. 2) which noted that ‘As Mr F. Warren Roberts’s forthcoming bibliography of D.H Lawrence will show, American collectors and readers have always been able to obtain the unexpurgated text of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a variety of editions, in hard covers or paper-backed, autho- rised, unauthorised or impudently pirated.’ Their British cousins, on the other hand, ‘after long years of deprivation, are only now about to be supplied with a Penguin edition’. The article then reprinted a review from Field and Stream 16 of the American edition of the book which stated that ‘this fictional account of the day by day life of an English gamekeeper’ con- tained interesting passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and ‘other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper’, though unfortunately one was obliged to ‘wade through many pages of extraneous material’ to profit from these ‘sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate’. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the reviewer added, could therefore never replace J.R Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping (the joke – or rather the additional joke – being that ‘J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping’ was an invention). 14 . The illustrations in this piece were by Carlo Lapido for a Paris edition of 1932. The first shows Lady C. in her wedding dress with Sir Cli V ord. The last four show Lady C. without her wedding dress and without Sir Cli V ord. Had the jury been shown these, Penguin would surely have been sunk. 15 . The judge at the trial, Sir Lawrence Byrne, had his wife read and mark up a copy to indicate the naughty bits. On 30 October 2018, this copy came up at Sotheby’s in London together with the hand-stitched damask bag, in which Sir Lawrence carried it into court. It was sold for £ 48,000 (hammer price). 16 . November 1959, p.142
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