A Spectator's Notebook
`THINGS HAVE moved on.' 1 read with some complacency in last Thursday's New York Herald Tribune, 'since D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover and the censors of Great Britain and the United States found it unfit for public sale.' But not very far and not very fast, for in the Evening Standard of the next day I read of a bookseller in London being jailed for two months at Bow Street 'after pleading guilty to publishing the obscene book Lady Chatterley's Lover.' Having disposed of the next case Sir Laurence Dunne, the chief metropolitan magistrate, remarked that 'these books cause infinite harm when they get into the hands of immature people.' I fully agree —especially into the hands of customs officials, busybodies, officious policemen, and moralising magistrates. But I don't suppose Sir Laurence Dunne meant it so. In which case I should like to remind him of Mr. Justice Stable's famous summing-up in the Philanderer case when he asked whether our contemporary literature is to be measured by what 'is suit- able for the decently brought up young female aged fourteen?'
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