Fight the Good Fight. D.H. Lawrence as Culture Warrior. Talk to the D.H. Lawrence Society. 8 January 2025 Chris Nottingham

Talk to the D.H. Lawrence Society 8 January 2025 

Chris Nottingham 

I’d like to start by thanking Brenda for the invitation to present this paper. It’s now more than 10 years since Steve and I published ‘Heartlands’ and discussed our ideas at meetings of the Society. I note with great sadness the cultural vandalism that has in the interim greatly hampered the efforts of those of you who work to keep the memory of Eastwood’s greatest son alive, and I welcome the opportunity to make my small contribution to the cause.
Recently I have found myself thinking particularly of the hostility which Lawrence and his work have faced over the years. I was provoked to write what follows by one book in particular: Hugh Kingsmill’s 1938 biography of Lawrence. While the book is itself almost entirely without merit, it does offer an illustration of the vitriol that Lawrence could inspire.
Recently ‘culture war’ has become associated a with right wing populist moral panic with such agents of enlightenment as Fox News in the US the Daily Mail in the UK seeking to enrol their devotees as foot soldiers in a ‘war on woke’. The panic may seem overblown if not downright ridiculous and might well persuade temperate souls to abandon the notion of culture war altogether. This, I shall argue, might be a mistake. Specifically, I suggest the notion of a battle over cultural issues, encompassing but going beyond what we normally mean by politics, passionately fought, with both sides unwilling to see any merit in their opponents, offers a useful way of discussing what was at issue between Lawrence and his critics. Lawrence himself became the issue, a figure around which fundamental differences were fought out.
I’ll begin by selecting elements of Lawrence’s cultural background; the circumstances from which D.H. Lawrence, author, emerged. In placing him in a social context and pointing out that many of the ideas he worked with were drawn from the progressive intellectual climate of the day, I am not disputing his originality nor diminishing his immense creative energy, but even genius must have its raw materials and its canvas.
Religion
What then, were the sources of conflict and tension that energised the young Lawrence, moulded his intellect and created him as a figure who would provoke hostility? In Lawrence’s early years religion was a live cultural issue, and I’ll begin there. For many the loss of religious faith was the key moment; the onset of ‘doubts’, the point at which a new mental life began.
T.S. Eliot believed:
‘…individual writers can be understood and classified according to the type of Protestantism which surrounded their infancy and the precise stage of decay it had reached.’
He thought Lawrence’s Congregational background was a severe limitation of his capacities as thinker and writer.
(working from: TS Eliot After Strange Gods NY Harcourt Brace 1934. P.41)
Congregationalism, for Eliot, was no more than: ‘vague hymn-singing pietism’. It was ‘a deplorable religious upbringing that gave Lawrence a lust for intellectual independence’ but ‘no principle on which to scrutinise behaviour’. (p.63) Lawrence, however, was happy to have been brought up this way and believed its tradition of intellectual independence was an admirable feature of Congregationalism. Lawrence and Jessie Chambers together sampled and rejected the High Anglican orthodoxy that Eliot espoused. Jessie spoke for both when she dismissed a C of E service they attended for ‘spiritual coldness’: ‘The place was not even dead for it had never been alive.’ It was rendered no more attractive by one of the local gentry ‘lisping’ his way through the Bible reading. Lawrence claimed that he had cast off conventional religious belief by the age of sixteen and gave no sign that the loss of faith brought grief or confusion. For Lawrence, the passage out of belief was a seamless process. Even after his loss of faith he still found it worthwhile to attend services, With Jessie, he engaged with the Minister ‘on questions raised by T.H. Huxley and Haeckel’, and the Minister, to his credit, was prepared to respond. Even when teaching in Croydon Lawrence still attended Unitarian services.
Eliot was right to identify Congregationalism as a pillar of Lawrence’s mental make-up. Its tradition was democratic, egalitarian and deeply earnest with a disdain for ritual and mystery, preferring honest argument. For Eliot it was the root of what he disliked in Lawrence; his lack ‘of the critical faculties which education should give’; his ‘incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking’; his ‘distinct sexual morbidity’. For Eliot, Lawrence was always going to be a difficult case. He could not, as an honest critic, dismiss Lawrence entirely, but for Eliot, cultured individuals from this social stratum were not really supposed to exist. Culture, as Eliot later made specific (Notes Towards the Definition of Culture), was a zone that only a few might enter. Eliot, though clearly irritated by Lawrence was not entirely negative. For Lawrence spoke out ‘again and again’ against ‘the living death of modern material civilisation’ and he identified Fantasia of the Unconscious as ‘a book to keep at hand and re read’.
While Eliot disliked Congregationalism as much as he disliked Lawrence he was right at least, in identifying spiritual experience as a vital component of his mental constitution. All of Lawrence’s subsequent criticisms of society pointed to the spiritual desolation at its core, the catastrophic separation of man from nature. Largely contemptuous of political processes, Lawrence’s quest was always for unifying and universal principles, and he possessed an unwavering, evangelical commitment to sharing his insights with others. While Lawrence’s writing could be entertaining its intent was invariably serious. The background also shone through in his love of hymns. He often forced guests into renditions of his favourites, Lawrence dropped God but continued to fight the good fight. It is by no means fanciful to see in his character something of Bunyan’s pilgrim on his troubled progress to the celestial city.
Eliot might see Congregationalism as common and deplore the theological confusion, but Lawrence’s outlook was not out of step with the Christian and post Christian ethical socialism of the day. When W.T. Stead questioned the 1906 intake of Labour MPs about their intellectual influences, almost all referenced their Christian upbringing, with the majority citing membership of non-conformist churches. The ethical approach lay at the core of the New Age, the journal Lawrence and the Chambers family devoured. A.R. Orage, its editor wrote:
Socialism being in its largest sense no less than the will of society to perfect itself, even as in the personal sense Religion is the will of the individual towards self-perfection, it follows that all social institutions, together with the great forces of literature, art and philosophy, are to be tested by their services to this end,’ Education
Lawrence’s progress through schools and into teaching placed him on the front line of the culture war of the day. Eliot, in describing him as ‘uneducated’, was displaying an ignorance, or maybe disdain, of the scholarship route by which Lawrence and many other boys and girls were rising. Lawrence passed the entrance examination to the High School and became a ‘train boy’, as scholarship pupils were often called. Peter Quennell attending Berkhamsted School, reported that he and his fee-paying fellow pupils shunned the ‘train boys’, even pretending to detect an unpleasant smell in rooms which they had recently vacated. Lawrence didn’t write much about his experience at the High School. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment he noted he was ‘quite happy there, but the scholarship boys were a class apart,’ adding that he ‘made a couple of bourgeois friendships, but they were odd fish.’ Frieda later wrote: ‘Bitter it was to him, when a friend at the high school who took him home to tea, refused to continue the friendship as soon as he heard that Lawrence was a miner’s son.’ Lawrence though, does not seem to have suffered greatly. He certainly relished his first exposure to foreign languages, an enthusiasm that was sustained through his life. Perhaps Ursula’s thoughts in The Rainbow offer a clue to Lawrence’s feelings: ‘One went away to the Grammar School, and left the little school’ (The Rainbow, 245) She delights in the opportunity to study new subjects:
‘In all these things there was the sound of a bugle to her heart, exhilarating, summoning her to perfect places. She never forgot her brown “Longman’s First French Grammar,” nor her “Via Latina” with its red edges, nor her little grey algebra book. There was always a magic in them.’
Lawrence and Jessie Chambers were soon communicating with one another in French. Lawrence’s academic performance at the High School, however, was no more than competent, certainly below the brilliant levels of attainment he displayed in earlier and later academic tests. Writing many years later, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy 1957) still identified the tensions between a working-class home background and a middle-class school as a source of alienation in the individual pupil. Perhaps, any reservations Lawrence might have felt were swept aside or muted by his mother’s hyper enthusiasm. She proudly paraded him through the streets of Eastwood resplendent in his school uniform. Moreover, Lawrence himself was so bent on self-improvement that any slight suffered could be easily borne. However, for Lawrence it was his progress in teaching that pitched him into more serious conflicts. The pupil teacher system was one of the few ways young men and women from humble backgrounds could rise in the world. In return for taking lessons in the classroom the pupil teacher was paid a small amount; in Lawrence’s case five pounds in the first year, ten in the second and fifteen in the last; but also received tuition, from the School’s Head, and worked towards examinations that would secure entry into a University College or Teacher Training College. This would lead to a Teaching Certificate and, for the most able, a bachelor’s degree. It was the route taken by many of those who became stars in progressive literary circles, such as H.G. Wells and A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age.
Lawrence entered teaching at a time of rapid expansion. The number of teachers in England and Wales rose, from a base of 14,400 in 1870, before the implementation of compulsory school attendance, to 44,600 in 1880, 119,000 in 1900 and 164,000 in 1910. The Liberal commentator C.F.G. Masterman argued that the expansion of elementary education was precipitating social changes:
Here is, for example, the new type of elementary teacher- a figure practically unknown forty years ago- drawn in part from the tradesmen and ambitious artisan population … It is exhibiting a continuous rise of standard, keen ambitions, a respect for intellectual things which is often absent in the populations among which it resides.
C.F.G. Masterman The Condition of England, (Methuen, London, 1909) pp. 83-4. However, on the front line the life of a teacher was hard. Historians of a liberal disposition have often presented the expansion of compulsory education as a victory for the excluded. Yet many pupils and their parents saw the whole thing as a waste of time, an imposition of useless knowledge and alien values. In Sons and Lovers Paul is subject to the scepticism of his father’s workmates:
“Don’t they teach you to count at the Board-school?” he asked.
“Nowt but algibbra an’ French,” said a collier.
“An’ cheek an’ impidence,” said another
David Chambers, as quoted by Worthen, left an account of his sister Jessie’s struggles:
‘I saw her myself … call out a great hulking lad nearly as big as herself, and give him two strokes of the cane. His mother - a vast woman – waited for her as she came out and told her what would happen to her if she ever dared to lay her hands onto her Sam again. The children shouted after her as she went down the village street. She walked on with her head high as though she saw and heard nothing. She was about nineteen at the time, at the height of her glory’
Elementary teachers thus operated at a point where official requirements met popular resistance: their task was to carry what many of them regarded, at least initially, as a civilising mission to a suspicious, if not downright hostile audience, under the gaze of a suspicious task master.
Yet despite the daily encounter with the ‘rough collier lads’ Lawrence’s experiences as a pupil teacher were relatively happy. He and Jessie both attended the Ilkeston Pupil Teacher Centre to work towards their matriculation examinations. Jessie recalled, ‘I knew quite well that the manner of our education was a beggarly makeshift, but for me it was a wealth beyond price.’ The limitations of the pupil teacher system were remedied by intense informal reading. Lawrence and Jessie became part of a group of ambitious young teachers; the ‘Pagans’, who travelled to Ilkeston together. The group managed to generate spontaneous intellectual life which Lawrence used in The White Peacock.
Nonetheless, Lawrence and his colleagues were on the front line of a well-established cultural conflict. In the mid Nineteenth century, the new teachers had initially flourished with the support of liberal minded administrators such as Sir James Kay Shuttleworth who had encouraged them to think of themselves as an ‘army of light’. Others took a very different line. The Newcastle Commission of 1858, ignoring the favourable reports of its own investigators, condemned teachers as ‘over educated’ and warned that they were producing over educated pupils. Teachers, they claimed, were prone to ‘the use of ambitious language, vain display of knowledge’; and errors, ‘into which an uneducated person falls.’ They should consider themselves lucky: ‘Boys who would otherwise go out to work at mechanical trades at twelve or thirteen years of age, are carefully educated at the public expense’ and are able to earn ‘about £100 a year. The ‘Code’ of 1861 which followed, was designed to put upstart teachers in their place. The code restricted pay, imposed a system of payment according to pupil attendance and exam performance, narrowed the curriculum, and made it impossible for teachers to progress to the Inspectorate on the grounds that persons of their origins ‘could not hope to meet on terms of equality with school managers and the clergy’. When the local school boards took control after the 1870 Act the scope for professional autonomy was reduced further. Educational idealism wilted before the force of the ratepayer interest. It is of some significance that Birkin, in Women in Love, is a school’s inspector.
The class-based hostility to schoolteachers was deep and lasting. Teachers did make some professional progress but even as late as 1952 Lewis and Maude wrote “Girls who take the two-year training college are usually by no means the brightest of those who stay the extra year at school. Having secured a qualification at small expense, they find themselves at 20 with a permanent and pensionable job, three months holiday in the year, and a position which to many of them represents a clear advance in social status. Further, the job can be made an excellent training for marriage or a means of satisfying the maternal feelings of those who are less fortunate.’ The hostility was clearly exacerbated by the fact that teaching offered opportunities to ‘lower’ class individuals and particularly to ‘lower’ class women. One historian of the educational system suggests that some hostility arose from the fact that no politician or school manager would have children of their own in the Board schools. The cultural antipathy was deepened when it appeared that lowly teachers, in spite of the constraints, were producing more competent pupils than the private fee-paying schools.
Through the tribulations of Ursula in The Rainbow, Lawrence offered a vivid account of how this worked in practice. Initial ambitions met large unruly classes. The need to keep order was paramount and any failure was highly visible. Ursula teaches in a room with big glass windows and is constantly under scrutiny. She feels hostage for her pupils’ behaviour and performance:
The trouble went on day after day. She had always piles of books to mark, myriads of errors to correct, a heart-wearying task that she loathed. [….] Why should she say to herself, that it mattered, if she failed to teach a class to write perfectly neatly? Why should she take the blame unto herself?
Ursula makes her compromises and learns the black arts of discipline:
Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began to have a new life of her own again [ …]And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St. Philip’s School, which was always destroying her, but which she could now manage, without spoiling all her life.
Her reward comes at the end of the month:
Pay day came, and she received four pounds two shillings and one penny. She was very proud that day. She had never had so much money before. And she had earned it all herself. [….] She felt so established and strong, because of it.’
In spite of the drudgery the life of a teacher is still a step towards independence: ‘In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel move towards freeing herself.’
Lawrence began his teaching career idealistically but was soon forced to the same compromises as Ursula. In his poem Discipline, written while he was teaching at Davidson Road School in Croydon he wrote ‘over them the dark net of my discipline weaves’ as he struggles for ‘the brief material control of the hour.’ In practice the teacher was both disciplinarian and disciplined, with one eye on the class and the other on the corridor. In Last Lesson of the Afternoon Lawrence wrote what many teachers must have sometimes felt: ‘What is the point of this teaching of mine, and of this Learning of theirs? It all goes down the same abyss’. The sentiment was undoubtedly genuine, but not the whole story. In the memory of colleagues at Davidson Road School Lawrence was an effective teacher and popular with pupils and colleagues.
Masterman, quoted above, associated the new teachers with a ‘respect for intellectual things.’ Chesterton wrote, disparagingly of course, of a new middle class expressing its aspirations through ‘societies’: I mean, he added, ‘Vegetarian Societies and Socialist Colonies and things of that sort. In the face of cultural denigration by the established middle classes, difficult working lives, poor pay, and limited possibilities for career progression, it is easy to see why ambitious teachers were searching for consolation. A retiring president of the NUT searching for what was really lacking in the profession produced a plea for ‘culture’.
Lawrence and the Chambers family, as noted above, were avid readers of the New Age, edited by A.R. Orage, himself an escapee from elementary school teaching. Working mainly from an ABC tearoom in London, and only rarely paying his contributors, Orage managed to produce a magazine, half politics, half culture, that was a literary phenomenon of the age. The New Age covered all that was new, progressive and exciting. We can see in Lawrence’s correspondence how the stars of the progressive firmament; Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche entered his consciousness through the New Age. The progressive agenda appealed to many of the new teachers. Their status, like much else in their lives, was insecure and subject to challenge, resting on certificates of matriculation, records of training, testimonials to worthiness and the maintenance of respectability. Any material superiority rested less on disposable income than on security of employment and superannuation. The £100 a year that the Newcastle commission had bandied was well beyond average earnings. Women teachers, as was intended, usually earned less than male colleagues. Bear in mind Maude Pember Reeves study of 1913 of families in poverty was entitled Round About a Pound a Week. The progressive agenda offered an imagined world offering some escape from such working lives; a world where teachers could still dream of becoming educators. Lawrence, in escaping the daily drudgery of the classroom, in publishing work that commanded attention, in crossing swords on terms of equality with leading intellectuals, in escaping to Italy and beyond in company with a baroness, would himself serve as an inspiration for those still in harness.
Lawrence’s path into teaching though had provided a means of ascent. It had brought a period of relative independence, a means of leaving the family home. He found in the teachers’ centre a rudimentary forum of intellectual sociability. There was time for ferocious reading. Ford Maddox Ford, editor of the English Review, found Lawrence to be far better read than most of his contributors, certainly no ’rough diamond’. This was not an education that would impress the likes of Eliot, but in one aspect, at least, it was richer. Lawrence’s education took place alongside women. It would be many years before women were granted equal salaries and career opportunities in the teaching world, but they were ever present. It is difficult to see how Lawrence could have written as he did without this experience. (Hugh Kingsmill, D.H. Lawrence, Methuen, London, 193)8
I now turn to Hugh Kingsmill’s biography from 1938. Kingsmill (Harrow and Oxford) was the son of Arnold Lunn, the highly successful travel agent. He was a literary man of a conventional sort, publishing articles, a few self-published novels, several books and a good deal of journalism. From financial necessity he was sometimes driven to supplement his income by school mastering at Marlborough College, a world away from Davidson Road School. He formed a close friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge and Hesketh Pearson, which according to Richard Ingrams’ book on the three, he was at his best here. His speciality was acerbic one liners: ‘Homosexuality, which aims at duplicating the self rather than complementing it, is the natural outlet of exaggerated self-love’. By temperament he seems to have been the least suitable biographer of Lawrence that could be imagined. He had little interest in ‘the modern movement’ and a sharp antipathy towards his subject. His friend and mentee, Muggeridge recalled that after signing the contract he was ‘slightly mournful about the task before him’.
Although one must allow that there was far less material at his disposal than today Kingsmill’s Lawrence is a lazy book. He uses Lawrence’s early novels as if they were direct biography, switching between the life and the fiction with ease. He does occasionally come up with insights but the best are lifted from Jessie Chambers’ book. Yet while his grasp of the subject is less than secure, his opinions are contrastingly bold. Thus, Lawrence’s success was gained (p.41) ‘partly playing up to the romantic middle- and upper-class view of the working-classes to which he chiefly owed his quick reception as a writer.’ On The White Peacock: ‘Like all his novels, it meanders diffusely along, and stops not because it has reached any conclusion but because no conclusion shows any sign of coming into sight.’ He allows ‘it has a charm and freshness’ but immediately added that this ‘does not appear again in his writing.’ (All of his writing?) Similarly, Kingsmill’s steps confidently into Lawrence’s psyche: (p.68) ‘Conscious of his own incompleteness, and craving the satisfaction he was unable to obtain he made a deity of the physical desire which stronger men try to transmute.’ One can almost hear the house masterly injunction to ‘Pull yourself together old chap’. Lawrence was never a careful writer, always an intellectual risk taker, and Kingsmill took delight in turning a tin ear to his more complex ideas. Thus, on Lawrence’s view of the sexual impulse:
(p.62) ‘If contact with God could be established in this way (that is through sexual intercourse). Everyone would be saved except for a small number of celibates and a rather larger number of perverts and impotents.’
He quotes Lawrence directly: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect’, but then deals with this idea as if it was a personal idiosyncrasy. This belief was widely shared. Nietzsche was one obvious source, but in England, Havelock Ellis associated it with Dionysus and saw it as central to understanding the spirit of the age driving radicals of the Fin de Siècle. But to Kingsmill it was merely (p.64) ‘another example of the pretentious imbecility into which the pseudo-mystic slides so easily.’ Towards the end of the book K does seem to realise Nietzsche might be relevant (perhaps someone pointed it out) but turns it into another attack (p.165) … ‘Lawrence in his slight way often recalls Nietzsche,’ ‘Though without any of Nietzsche’s nobility of character and capacity to endure neglect and solitude […] Merely solacing his impotence with dreams of new forms of life in which he could be the master.’ Kingsmill made this point in connection with the poem Snake which in his view is self-evident nonsense. Many subsequent readers have found this poem a profound encounter the natural world, prescient of an outlook which was to gain wide acceptance after Lawrence’s time.
Kingsmill subjected Lawrence to the ‘chip on the shoulder’ criticism that has so often been deployed against aspirant working-class writers (p.226) ‘In spite of his fame as a writer, which was now widespread both in England and the States. He was still as touchy about his working-class origin as in his youth.’ Kingsmill gave full vent to his attack when he dealt with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he at least seems to have read:
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover is as much an attempt to obliterate his social as his sexual mortification.’
(p.230) ‘The obscenity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is of the painstaking unimaginative kind which was inseparable from the nature of the book… an attempt to assert his manhood, and to revenge himself on society by seducing a baronet’s wife in the person of a gamekeeper.’
(p.231)‘It appeased Lawrence’s resentment against the upper classes to make a baronet’s wife listen meekly to a gamekeeper talking in this way, and toying with her as he talked,’
Kingsmill’s distaste does not permit him to ask why Lawrence’s fascination with gamekeepers which runs throughout his work.
And the final depth:
On the confrontation with Sir Clifford ‘No doubt this disgusting scene owed some of its venom to the fact that Clifford had been wounded in the war, and that Lawrence, unlike Mellors, had not been in the army.’
Perhaps Kingsmill should have considered more closely Lawrence’s final letter to Middleton Murry, which he quotes:
(p.217) ‘The animal that I am you instinctively dislike – just as all the Lynds and Squires and Eliots and Goulds instinctively dislike it – and you all say there is no such animal, or if there is there ought not to be!’
His book tells us little about Lawrence but a great deal about Kingsmill’s hatreds and obsessions. Muggeridge initially had a highly positive view of Lawrence’s work but was persuaded out of it by Kingsmill and subsequently joined the chorus of hatred. Though both anathematised Lawrence and all his works neither was able to let it rest. Some of us will recall the much later television interview which Muggeridge undertook with Helen Corke, a colleague of Lawrence’s from Croydon days. Corke, to her credit, resisted Muggeridge’s obvious desire for something derogatory, and offered a very favourable account. What was it then that drove Lawrence’s enemies? Their distaste we know went well beyond normal critical disagreement. Hostility to Lawrence’s writings about sex seemed to be exacerbated by hostility to the author himself. Lawrence, as above, saw it as an instinctive animal like repulsion. I suggest that the notion of culture war is useful here: the sense that battle lines have been drawn, that disagreements are so visceral as to preclude discussion; that an opponent’s view is not merely misguided but indicative of a degenerate moral condition and, hence, it is not the alternative idea one is opposing but the person holding it, and his or her right to propagate it.
Why then did Lawrence come to feature so prominently in this war? Literary circles, then as now, are notorious for jealousies and feuds. It is difficult to avoid the impression that Lawrence’s success was, for many less successful writers, difficult to stomach, particularly for those inclined to view literature as cosy niche for gentlemen. A combination of legal persecution and public vilification meant Lawrence obtained little financial reward in his lifetime, but the quality and significance of his work was inescapable and attested to by such luminaries as Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. He could impress and challenge figures such as Bertrand Russell. He had been to Garsington and met with Bloomsbury. He was, in short, artistically successful, newsworthy and famous.
Lawrence also seemed to represent a challenge to the hegemony of the ‘educated’ middle class over the means of intelligent communication. Lawrence was the outsider and people in self-preserving coteries were forced to pay attention. Lawrence’s character came into this. His congregational background that demanded one ‘tell the truth and shame the devil’ meant that he did not shy away from confrontation. After all, even as an unpublished unknown he had walked into Ford Maddox Ford’s office and told him it was not how he thought an editor’s office should look.
But there was another aspect of Lawrence that established figures might find difficult, his grand ambition. Lawrence was never going to be satisfied with being a working-class writer much less a specialist in ‘kailyard’ tales of lower-class life. He wrote about his working-class home life simply because it was what he knew; not because he wanted to specialise in it. Woolf saw this in her reading of Sons and Lovers. Paul (Lawrence) she saw ‘is anxious to leave his own class and to enter another. He believes that the middle class possess what he does not possess.’ In a passage in The Rainbow Lawrence wrote that while the men were content with the life of the farm ‘The women were different’ and aspired to ‘another form of life than this’. While the men looked inwards Mrs Brangwen looked longingly out ‘towards the activity of men in the world at large’ and considered how she could help her children attain ‘equality with the living, vital people in the land, not be left behind obscure among the labourers.’ As with Mrs Brangwen so with Lawrence. He was determined to enter the Halls of Fame, and, like all outsiders, he was forced to use the door marked push. This inevitably did not endear him to many of those already inside. They attacked him for writing about women’s sexuality, they derided him for attempting the difficult business of writing about sexual intercourse, but it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that what was really at issue was the temerity of the son of a miner to aspire to the highest form of literature and to write of ordinary men and women as if their lives could carry great themes.
In the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial of 1960, Mervyn Griffiths Jones, prosecuting counsel, addressed the jury in terms which became the stuff of cultural legend.
“Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
Richard Hoggart, who testified in court to the book’s literary merit, wrote that the trial was ‘the moment at which the confused mesh of British attitudes to class, to literature, to the intellectual life, and to censorship, publicly clashed as rarely before – to the confusion of more conservative attitudes.’
And the work of Lawrence was at the heart of it.