Although it is now over a year since the Lady Chatterley trial took place, the issues it raised continue to be absorbing for anyone interested in the relation between literature and morality. And only now, perhaps, when the angry dismay of those who disapproved of the verdict and the somewhat shrill jubilation of those who welcomed it have both subsided, can one look at those issues in a dispassionate spirit. So I make no apology for opening this paper with a consideration of some key aspects of the trial, before I pass on to other and more general questions. Reading through the Penguin volume, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, which contains a transcript of most of the proceedings, one is struck by the frequency with which the defence witnesses came into collision with the judge or prosecuting counsel over the fundamental meanings of words. Mr Richard Hoggart, for instance, puzzled and irritated the prosecuting counsel by insisting on giving to the word ‘puritanical’ its full historical significance; while Mrs Joan Bennett and the learned judge found themselves quite comically at cross-purposes about what they meant by ‘marriage’. Another witness, Mr Raymond Williams, has since suggested that these clashes were inevitable when literary and legal minds had to meet on ground chosen by the latter; and no doubt he is right in finding them unedifying. Nevertheless, certain of these disagreements are, I think, fruitful if properly considered, and this is particularly true of the profound and sustained disagreement about the significance of the word ‘moral’, which formed a continuous undercurrent to the trial, intermittently manifesting itself in the witnesses’ evidence, and the speeches by counsel and the judge. This disagreement became more overt in the public controversy that followed the trial, notably in the correspondence columns of The Times.