Abstract
What were the social origins of D. H. Lawrence? Was he from a proletarian background? Or was this a myth which at times he found convenient to cultivate? Have we believed too much of what he said about these matters? And has the time come to demolish the views which are held regarding his social background?1
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Notes
V. de S. Pinto, Reginald Mainwaring Hewitt (1887–1948): A Selection, from his Literary Remains (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955) p. 18.
V. de S. Pinto, D. H. Lawrence after Thirty Years (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1960).
For an earlier appreciation by Pinto of Lawrence see V. de Sola Pinto, Prophet of the Midlands (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1951).
C. H. Rolph, The Trial of Lady Chatterlev (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) pp. 73–83.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1961) p. 201.
Such scenes are captured in the works set in the area, in particular The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).See also his essay ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, New Adelphi June-Aug 1930, pp. 255–63. For later academic comment, see A. R. and C. P. Griffin, ‘A Social and Economic History of Eastwood and the Nottinghamshire Mining Country’, in A D. H. Lawrence Handbook ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) pp. 127–63
See also G. Holderness, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982) ch. 2, pp. 48–94.
Although the standard-of-living debate generated considerable interest in the late 1950s, there was very little discussion of literary evidence. For some later critical comment on literary sources as aids in understanding the industrialisation process in Britain, see J. M. Jefferson, ‘Industrialisation and Poverty in Fact and Fiction’, in The Long Debate on Poverty (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1972) pp. 189–238.
See the Introduction by J. D. Chambers toET2nd edn (London: Cass, 1965);
J. D. Chambers, ‘Memories of D. H. Lawrence’ Renaissance and Modern Studies xvi (1972) 5–17.
A selection of his work is collected in Watson, Politics and Literature in Modern Britain. For his early attempt to blend history and literature, see George Watson, The English Ideology ( London: Allen Lane, 1973 ).
This remark appeared in Lawrence’s autobiographical sketch and can be found in D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism ed. A. Beal (London: Heinemann, 1963).
C. Caudwell, ‘D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Bourgeois Artist’, repr. in S. E. Hyman, The Critical Performance ( New York: Random House, 1956 ) pp. 153–73.
D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage ed. R. Draper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,1970) pp. 332ff.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Keynes, Lawrence and Cambridge’, Scrutinyxvi (1949)242–6; repr. in Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952) pp. 254–60 (p. 258 ).
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959 ) p. 33.
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology ( London: New Left Books, 1976 ) p. 157.
R. Goffee, ‘The Butty System in the Kent Coalfield’, Bulletin of the Socio (y for the Study of Labour History, no. 34 (Spring 1977) p. 42, notes the need for further research into the butty system. Jessie Chambers (ET, p. 16) mentions that a contribution to the Congregational chapel in Eastwood could secure a better type of stall.
Hence the chapel’s nickname. the ‘Butty’s Lump’. For a discussion of the butty system at Brinsley, see C. P. Griffin, ’The Social Origins of D. H. Lawrence: Some Further Evidence’, Literature and History, VII (1981) 223–7.
Nehls, 1, 16–17. For one particularly poor week, see G. Neville, A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence, ed. C. Baron ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ) p. 49.
See Griffin, ‘The Social Origins of D. H. Lawrence’. For a recent loose acceptance of the Lawrences’ evidence see Philip Callow, Son and Lover ( London: Bodley Head, 1975 ) pp. 26–7.
Ibid., p. 9. See G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement, 1789–1937 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960) pp. 152ff. for the ambience of self-improvement after the mid nineteenth century.
Harry Moore, The Intelligent Heart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960) pp. 43 and 46; and Nehls, 10, 605. See ET p. 75, for evidence of Lawrence saving up to pay for himself at University College, Nottingham. Ada Lawrence (ET pp. 16–17), comments upon her mother’s careful management.
Pinto, Prophet, pp. 7–8 refers to cultural differences. For a recent discussion, see R. Spencer, Lawrence Country ( London: Cecil Woolf, 1979 ) pp. 56–83.
A point emphasised by a former Nottingham student, G. E. Mingay, in ‘The Contribution of a Regional Historian: J. D. Chambers 1898–1970’, Studies in Burke and his Time, XIII (1971) 2007.
The same point is made but from a differing ideological viewpoint by F. K. Donnelly in ‘Ideology and Early English Working-Class History: Edward Thompson and his Critics’, Social History, no. 2 (May 1976) pp. 219–38.
J. R. Harrison, The Reactionaries (London: Gollancz, 1966), needs careful watching in this connection. See the wise and cautionary general remarks in Hough, The Dark Sun p. 239.
For an affirmative general comment on the intercommunion of the disciplines and the need to perceive society as an interconnecting totality, see R. H. Tawney, ‘Social History and Literature’, in Tawney, The Radical Tradition ed. Rita Hinden (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964) pp. 183–4. Watson, in Politics and literature in Modern Britain p. 9, acknowledges the risks of any enterprise which defies conventional boundaries.
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Holmes, C. (1987). Lawrence’s Social Origins. In: Heywood, C. (eds) D. H. Lawrence: New Studies. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18695-2_1
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