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?
