Lady Chatterley Trial

The Obscene Publications Act 1959 defined obscenity as material that would "tend to deprave and corrupt" the reader. There was, however, a clause allowing for publication of material that would otherwise be deemed obscene, "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern".

The first test case of the Act came when a charge of obscenity was brought against Penguin Books for publication in 1960 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel by D. H. Lawrence published first in Florence, in 1928, and later in Paris. The trial, officially known as "Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd.", is often referred to as "the Lady Chatterley Trial". A number of eminent witnesses took the stand to testify to the artistic merit of the novel, including the aged novelist E. M. Forster, and two of the academics behind the development of "Cultural Studies" as a discipline combining sociology and literature, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.

The acquittal of Penguin Books in November 1960 is often taken as symbolic of changing attitudes towards sexual morality and literary decency, one of the beginnings of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. Social changes were also explicitly referenced at the trial. The barrister for the prosecution, Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, at one point addressed the jury with the words "Ask yourselves, is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" The idea that men could happily read things unsuitable for women, or upper-class men read things unsuitable to the lower classes, went so much against the "classless" optimism of the time as to be laughable. The defending barrister made hay with it in his final statement:

I do not want to upset the Prosecution by suggesting that there are a certain number of people nowadays who as a matter of fact don’t have servants. But of course that whole attitude is one which Penguin Books was formed to fight against . . . the attitude that it is all right to publish a special edition at five or ten guineas so that people who are less well off cannot read what other people read. Isn’t everybody, whether earning £10 a week or £20 a week, equally interested in the society in which we live, in the problems of human relationships including sexual relationships? In view of the reference made to wives, aren’t women equally interested in human relations, including sexual relationships?

From Empire to Commonwealth

In the immediate postwar period Britain still thought of itself as an imperial nation. At its height the British Empire was the largest empire the world has ever known, comprising territories in North America, the Carribean, the South Atlantic, West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, parts of China, and most of Oceania. After 1919, parts of the Middle-East were also ruled by Britain under mandate from the League of Nations.

Each of these territories had its own status and method of government, varying according to how it had become part of the British Empire, pre-existing customs (as the British understood them), the strength and cohesion of native elites, and other local or regional conditions. The five most important parts of the Empire were Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (sometimes called the "four pillars" of the Empire) and India. Queen Victoria’s two most important titles were Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India. Victoria’s successors also bore the title Emperor of India until renouncing it in 1948, the year after India became independent. The only 20th century British monarch never to have been emperor or empress of India was Elizabeth II.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were settler colonies: large numbers of British and Irish (and other European) settlers emigrated to these territories. These were the first colonies to attain significant measures of self-government: Canada from 1867, Australia from 1901, New Zealand from 1907, and the Union of South Africa from 1910. They remained tied to Britain in various ways, for instance supplying troops during the two world wars, recognising the British monarch as Head of State, and (until 1967) often holding their currency reserves in Sterling.

As more and more imperial territories became self-governing, the Empire was transformed into a free international association, the Commonwealth of Nations. This is an international organisation, currently of 53 states (listed here), all of which (with the exception of Mozambique) were once part of the British Empire.

Elizabeth II is not only the head of the Commonwealth, she is also head of state in 16 of the states that are members of the Commonwealth: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Saint Kitts and Nevis (listed in order of independence). She is also Lord of Man, and titular Queen of Fiji.

Commonwealth countries are often proud to have legal systems, armies, educational institutions, and structures of government and administration modeled on British examples, although they are equally proud of the fact that the British are no longer running them.

The Commonwealth also provides sporting exchanges in the Commonwealth Games (a sort of mini-Olympics), and part of the legacy of Empire is the way that the games cricket and rugby are played across the globe, primarily in Commonwealth countries (unlike Association Football, which has been adopted by many countries that were never part of the British Empire).

One of the legacies of the Empire is the existence of a collection of nations around the world in which the English language is widely spoken in everyday life and is used as a literary language, not simply a lingua franca for negotiation and exchange. Even the U.S.A., the main English-speaking country outside the Commonwealth, was originally a collection of British colonies in North America. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka (1986), the West-Indian poet Derek Walcott (1992), the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1995), the Indo-Trinidadian travel writer V.S. Naipaul (2001), and the Southern African novelists Nadine Gordimer (1991), J.M. Coetzee (2003), and Doris Lessing (2007). All these, and many others who have not received the same accolade, write in English for a world-wide readership, and contribute to an international literary culture that cannot be described by any model that simply puts Britain at its "centre".

Imperial and Commonwealth history is also important in determining post-war patterns of mass migration into the British Isles, creating a much more multiracial and multicultural society there, as well as earlier patterns of migration in other parts of the world (such as from India to the West Indies and to East Africa).