![]() If Lawrence’s mother was around today, she might well have appeared on the TV series ‘Location, Location, Location’ as she was always determined to move on to a bigger, more prestigious home whenever money allowed. Next, we walk down towards the Breach, a handsome brick house, and Lawrence’s second home. Life here looked as if it would have been reasonably comfortable, if basic. We start at DH Lawrence’s birthplace at 8a Victoria St, which is now a museum and has been converted back to show how it would have looked when Lawrence was born. Lawrence concludes about his birthplace: ‘So life was a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot.’ When I was a boy, I always thought a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night was a pit.’ I like the rows of trucks, and the headstocks, and the steam in the daytime, and the lights at night. As the character Paul Morel (Lawrence) says in ‘Sons & Lovers’: ![]() ‘In the White Peacock some 145 different trees, shrubs and plants are introduced, 51 animals are brought in 40 different birds skim, hover, flit, fly and wheel through this novel’.īut what makes Lawrence unusual as a nature writer is that he was not merely a pastoral idealist he loved the mining landscape too (his father, of course, was a miner). Robert Gajdusek makes an interesting observation : He learnt sill more when he studied Botany at Nottingham University College. And these are skills he started to hone as a boy wandering around the landscapes we follow in today’s route. To me it seemed, and still seems, an extremely beautiful countryside, just between the red sandstone and the oak-trees of Nottingham, and the cold limestone, the ash-trees, the stone fences of Derbyshire.’ (Nottingham and the Mining Country, 1929).įierce debate has raged about Lawrence’s work ever since ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1960, but one thing all critics agree upon is that it is his powers of observation and description, especially of the natural world, that makes him a great writer. It is hilly country, looking west to Crich and towards Matlock, sixteen miles away, and east and north-east towards Mansfield and the Sherwood Forest district. ‘I was born nearly forty-four years ago, in Eastwood, a mining village of some three thousand souls, about eight miles from Nottingham, and one mile from the small stream, the Erewash, which divides Nottinghamshire from Derbyshire. Starting point: DH Lawrence Birthplace Museum, 8a Victoria St, Eastwood, NG16 3AW.These attractive 1960s paperback editions, embellished with the phoenix, an important Laurentian symbol of rebirth , can still be picked up for a few pounds (a bit more than five shillings, I grant you). He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.’ He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city’s gold phosphorescence. And the ending of the novel was probably the first time, read when I was a young teen, that I really felt a sense of place as well as fellow teenage angst: ‘But no, he would not give in. I still often read his poetry and travel writing today.įor me, Sons & Lovers was always his best novel by far, based as it is on real life (I never feel he was very good with plots). In fact it was all about his power of nature description and his willingness to explore (often very chaotically) a character’s inner feelings. And it really never was all about the sex. My English teacher told me that no-one remained a DH Lawrence fan beyond their twenties and, although in a sense he was right, he was somewhat dismissing our adulation of him in our late teens. The book that inspired this walk…Sons & Lovers (1913)
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