Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [4]
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, near Nottingham, England, in the small mining town of Eastwood. His father, Arthur, was a coal miner, the kind of man, typical of workers the world over, who found himself in a dangerous, dead-end job, and even as a miner’s butty, a foreman of sorts, he could barely make a living. He drank to mask his frustration, his pain, and his fears, and he transferred his aggressions to his family in the form of a violence that, while mostly verbal, made their lives at times a living hell. Lawrence thought his mother, Lydia, a saint. However, she was no more a saint than the father was a devil. Like Arthur Lawrence, she, too, was frustrated by poverty and the ugliness of her surroundings. Like him, she transferred her blind hostility against her marginalization to her spouse, falling out of love with him and using his drinking as an excuse to hold him directly responsible for her unhappiness and the lack of opportunity for her children. The fact that her husband was risking his life in the mines every day to provide for her and the children meant nothing to her, and she inoculated her children with her contempt for her husband. No one loved Arthur. No one ever talked to him. No one cared if he lived or died, except as it affected their welfare, and this in turn hardened his attitude toward his family and made him an even more frequent visitor of the pubs. Lawrence duly documents all this in Sons and Lovers, and it is difficult not to feel a measured contempt for the mother and the children who hated their father, while at the same time driving him harder to provide more for them. Lawrence apparently never matured enough to gain perspective on how unfairly his father was treated, flawed though he certainly was.
Lawrence’s biographer, Harry T. Moore, writes about Mrs. Lawrence:
She was proud of these children, and fought fiercely to give them good lives: her sons would not go into the mines, her daughters would not become servants. And through the galling poverty of those years she made intense sacrifices for them, particularly in furthering the education of David Herbert—or Bert, as the family called him.
Unfortunately, this is only part of the story. The intensity of love that was in this woman’s being drove itself outwardly in two directions: she hated her husband and, just as extravagantly, she loved her children. These children became a battleground in the parents’ war (Moore, The Priest of Love, p. 11).
Lawrence began his primary education at the Beauvale Board School, as did all the other children in his family. Frail, sickly, sensitive, uninspired by his environment, picked on by the other boys because he could not play games, but encouraged by his clinging mother, whose aspirations for him set him apart, Lawrence does not appear to have been an especially brilliant student, but one who worked hard. In his teacher W. W. Whitehead, Lawrence would eventually find a supporter. Whitehead tutored him for the County Council Scholarship, which Lawrence won at the age of twelve. This scholarship allowed him to attend the Nottingham High School and receive an excellent secondary education. It literally changed the course of his life.
After high school, Lawrence worked as a clerk in Haywood’s, a manufacturer of surgical and orthopedic implements in Nottingham, selling elastic stockings and support bandages. It was during this relatively happy period that a tragic event shattered the Lawrence household and left his mother in a state of chronic depression, alienated even from her beloved children, with little will to live. William Ernest, Lydia Lawrence’s favorite child, died of pneumonia in London, apparently from overwork. During the mother