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Résumé

Like Paul in Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence was born into the “common people.” However, both artists’ work offered them the opportunity to climb the social ladder into the middle-classes. But Paul shocks his ambitious mother by declaring “I don’t want to belong to the well-to-do middle classes […] I belong to the common people.” In his essay “Which Class I Belong To” (1927), Lawrence summarised his own position as, by choice, of belonging to neither class.
Nevertheless, these texts demonstrate Lawrence’s sustained interest in class and how he saw language as fundamental to class distinction. In his work only the “common people” speak dialect, whereas the middle-classes speak “the King’s English” also known as “the Oxford Voice,” something Lawrence mocked in his poem of the same name.
This paper will look at these works, together with Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), to explore how Lawrence used language to not only differentiate between the classes but also to signify the characteristics that he associated with these two classes of people. In addition, it will consider Lawrence’s relationship with the “common people” and question whether his declaration of his classless state was realistic - or wishful thinking.

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Introduction

1In Sons and Lovers (1913) Mrs Morel’s fervent hope for her son, Paul, to rise from the working class into the middle classes seems to be coming to fruition. We are told Paul had “sent in a landscape to the winter exhibition at Nottingham Castle.” Then, after presumably reading Paul’s post (which together with her repeated comment “we should do it” indicates their overclose relationship), an animated Mrs Morel informally boasts to the young postman “His picture’s got first prize, Fred […] and is sold for twenty guineas.” Seeming to slightly compose herself, Mrs Morel then proudly continues in a more formal way, “And Major Moreton has bought it” (295). A little later, Paul’s request for a dinner suit sees Mrs Morel planning to alter the suit of her dead son, William, so that Paul may go “out to dinner several times in his evening suit that had been William’s […], [with] new friends who had dinner at 7.30 in the evening” (297).

2Within these short extracts we see Lawrence using a variety of subtle class markers to indicate that Paul is rising into the middle classes; we are told that he “sent in” a landscape rather than taking in a picture and that his success is at painting, which would be regarded as a middle-class occupation because, like writing, it is a financially precarious employment usually necessitating another source of income. Then we have the subtle interplay of the words “sold” and “bought.” In her initial excitement, Mrs Morel states, rather colloquially, that the picture “is sold.” Indeed, Mr Morel only refers to it being sold. But this could denote it was sold in a shop, or on a stall, like other common goods. Whereas her later statement that it has been bought is a more considered, formal phrase, and the information that it has been bought by someone from the upper classes, Major Moreton, then imposes a higher status on the purchase, which is reinforced by the revelation that the picture was priced in guineas, not pounds, and by the reader knowing that it was bought at an exhibition in the prestigious Nottingham Castle. The postman’s informal response to the news that Paul’s landscape has been bought by Major Morton, “It looks like meanin’ somethink, that does, Mrs Morel,” also acts to underline the status of the transaction and to highlight the difference in class between him and Mrs Morel (295).

3Turning to Paul dinner engagements, Lawrence explains in some detail the arrangements proposed to alter the dead son’s suit and Mrs Morel’s feelings about the procedure. However, it is Paul’s need to wear special clothes to eat a meal with “these new friends,” together with the clarification that the meal called dinner is eaten at 7.30 in the evening (the inference being that his old, working-class friends, ate dinner at a different time, possibly midday), that are clear signifiers that Paul is rising into the middle classes. But Paul swiftly thwarts his mother’s ardent ambitions by declaring: “I don’t want to belong to the well-to-do middle class. I like my common people best. I belong to the common people” (298).

4Which begs the question of who were the common people? This is a question Paul finds difficult to answer. Under his mother’s hostile interrogation, Paul claims, rather vaguely, that the differences between people are “in themselves” rather than “in their class”, which perhaps suggests he is not yet able to vocalise his intuitions. Paul then asserts that “Only from the middle classes, one gets ideas,” but he believes that you get something far more important from the common people, “life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves—.” To counter this, Mrs Morel claims that Paul would object to being regarded as one of the common people and draws from him the confession that he does not want to mix with the common people – his father’s pals – because he sees them as “rather different.” She also points out that Paul is only interested in “Those that exchange ideas, like the middle classes. The rest don’t interest you” (298).

5So perhaps here we also get an early glimpse of Lawrence’s confusion about his own class allegiances, a problem that reverberates throughout his work before being more fully examined in some of his late essays. In these passages from Sons and Lovers, primarily, Lawrence’s use of language subtly denotes different social classes. But, in the later exchanges about the common people, it seems that Paul is trying to grasp towards a distinction between people that, whilst related to class, would appear to transcend class; as yet, an unrealised idea. Nevertheless, this reveals Lawrence’s interest in the connections between language, class and consciousness. Furthermore, throughout much of his subsequent prose, and in many of his poems, we see evidence of Lawrence’s growing interest in the symbolic value of language; something he uses to make a distinction between the classes which rests on a difference in consciousness, and is linked to his over-arching ideas about the conflict between blood and mental consciousness. Therefore, it is these, intertwining, themes of language, class and consciousness that form the basis of this essay, which will also look at Lawrence’s thinking about his own class and his relationship to the common people.

Class-distinction and language

6Lawrence’s upbringing would have instilled in him the recognition that a speaker’s use of language instantly conveys a value judgement to their audience; that what you say and, more importantly, how you say it, signifies a presumed background, upbringing and class. And in this, dialect plays a pivotal role. Indeed, Michael Squires reminds us that Lady Chatterley’s Lover “draws on the old comedy of manners tradition in which dialect instantly pins a value judgement on a character” (76). In Lawrence’s work, dialect is firmly linked to the common people.

7Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been valiant efforts to elevate the status of regional accents, but such judgements are still made. For example, if on first meeting me I commented: “Yer uvver nite I’ve gawn up yer apples and pears n’I? an’ got me mitts on a dog ’n bone ’n ’ad a right rabbit wivvan auld geezer daan the street,” many English people would make certain assumptions about me. Whereas if I said: “Yesterday evening, I ascended the staircase in order to find a telephone, so that I might have a lengthy discourse with the elderly gentleman who lives along the avenue,” it is likely they would make rather different assumptions. I am talking the same language and conveying the same information, but how I speak still colours other peoples’ impressions of me and my class.

8The first is my interpretation of Cockney rhyming slang, the East London dialect where I was born and brought up; and we might remember that in a letter to Edward Garnett in January 1913, Lawrence claimed to be one fifth Cockney (1L 502). Whereas the latter is standard English, often referred to as good or proper English. In Sons and Lovers Lawrence calls it “the King’s English.” This all acts to elevate its perceived value, reinforcing a perception of its superior worth in comparison to dialect.

9In late nineteenth-century England, concerns about the use of language gave rise to the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary, which was published in 1884, with the intention of standardising English. Michael North explains that this was presented as an egalitarian project that aimed “to deny the possibility of tense and tangled relationships within the language by providing standard definitions of words” But, in order to achieve this, it was observed that “eliminating dialectical variations” was necessary (12).

10The thought of improved, clear communication might seem like a good idea. Indeed, those who struggle to understand dialect, such as in Robbie Burns’ poems (or even in my rendition of Cockney rhyming slang), might well be persuaded to think that the elimination of dialect would be beneficial. But the creators of the dictionary were duplicitous about their objectives. Their goal was not to achieve equality, but to create division; North identifying the clear political motivation behind this enterprise that undermines any suggestion of altruism. As North clarifies, it was a perceived instability in Victorian society that prompted this initiative to standardise English in order “to focus attention on the alien, both foreign and domestic, and to provide a means of discriminating where other methods were beginning to fail” (278). In other words, the standardisation of English was seen as a way, not to break down class divisions, but to reinforce them. It aimed to emphasise the difference between us – those who spoke standard English – and them, who spoke dialect. Standardising English was seen as a way to identify and help keep foreigners and common people in their place. And we may remember that in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Connie is surprised that Mellors could even have been an officer in the army if he spoke dialect. Yet this forced division can also act to unify dialect speakers; their use of language acting as a resistance to Establishment norms.

11In a book about dialect, Élise Brault-Dreux draws attention to how “Modernism was more concerned with a standardization of English, notably with the creation of the OED.” Recognising that standard English “was simultaneously cosmopolitan; its literary production was the expression of internationalization, cultural eclecticism and openness,” Brault-Dreux also importantly recognises how “the regionalism, primitivism and commonness frequently attached to dialect therefore appears contrapunctal to this cultural zeitgeist” (38). So again we see how the desire to homogenise English acts to create a palpable division between speakers of standard English and those who use dialect, enabling value judgements to be made about both.

12Lawrence’s upbringing ensnared him in the liminality between the common people and the middle classes. Recently, Ronald Granofsky has highlighted the significance of Lawrence’s “turbulent mixed class child-hood” in that “he was, in reality, not simply of the working classes. His nuclear family contained the values, norms, mores and even languages of two distinct English classes” (173). We can see this linguistic and cultural dichotomy in Lawrence’s descriptions of his parents, where he firmly identifies the use of dialect with the common people, noting that his father “spoke broad dialect, and was altogether one of the common colliers,” whereas his mother “of course, spoke good English and was not of the colliery class” (LEA 173). Here, Lawrence’s “of course” highlights the link between class and language. Brought up among the middle classes, it would be natural for Lawrence’s mother to speak “good” English; the implication being that his father’s working-class dialect was not “good.” Whilst this again emphasises the gulf between Lawrence’s parents, it perhaps also reflects Lawrence’s perception of a distance between himself, as a dialect speaker, and his reader. Nevertheless, it was this duality of upbringing that, in his poem “Red-herring,” led Lawrence to depict himself and his siblings as “in-betweeners,” indoors using “proper” English and calling each other “you” whereas outside they used “tha” and “thee” and dialect. This observation also hints at the influence of Lawrence’s mother in the home environment (where his father only spoke dialect) and reveals the children’s efforts to please her – not him – by constraining their natural instinct to speak dialect.

13Lydia Lawrence’s insistence that her children spoke “good” English recognises the value judgements placed on language and underlines her ambitions for them, because until World War Two standard English was firmly associated with wealth and power. Therefore, by imbuing standard English with a higher social value than dialect forms, the inference was that all other ways of speaking are deviations from the standard and hence inferior and, by implication, so were the common people who used dialect. Therefore, the use of standard English by the Lawrence children can be seen as them acquiescing to their mother’s ambitions for them to rise into the middle classes.

Difference

14In his late essay “Which Class I Belong To” Lawrence explains how these attitudes helped to instil an inherent sense of inferiority in the working classes, who would have instinctively spoken dialect. But he also hints that the difference between the classes goes beyond language to a contrast in consciousness. Lawrence observes that when he went to Nottingham High school at the age of 12, as part of a small group of “common” boys who had won a free scholarship to the fee paying school, he was not aware of any “very marked snobbishness” from the “middle-class lads” who made up the majority of the pupils, nor did he feel he was “looked down on because I was a scholarship boy, of the working people.” Yet he was aware of “a difference […] a gap […] a peculiar, indefinable difference. It was as if, boys of the same race, the same locality, the same everything, still we were, in some way, different animals” (36-7). Lawrence goes on to give other examples of his experiences at school and as a school teacher before returning to the connection he sees between class and consciousness: “The mysterious difference in vibration between the working-class nature and that of the middle-class I never analysed, just accepting it as a fact. But there it was” (37).

15Significantly, it was Lawrence’s awareness of this fact, together with his bilingual flexibility, that helped establish his career, because he was able to exploit these insights when writing about class, which has long been recognised as a fundamental issue in Lawrence’s work. In his 1992 essay “D.H. Lawrence and Class,” Graham Martin illuminates the “persistent” binary Lawrence establishes between the common people and the middle classes in Sons and Lovers, which extends to Women in Love and perhaps receives its fullest examination in the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And central to this binary is the language Lawrence gives his characters to speak.

16Drew Milne reminds us that Lawrence is often considered “as more or less the only writer of working-class origins accorded canonical status” (203). But it is very doubtful that Lawrence initially saw himself as a working-class writer. In his early work, Lawrence’s use of standard English indicates his middle-class ambitions; John Worthen suggesting that Lawrence saw writing as a “glamorous middle-class profession” and his ticket out of the “working class” (2005, 39). Indeed, the image of Lawrence as a working-class writer who wrote about the dialect speaking common people was something of a construct, and one that was imposed on him by people from the middle classes.

17It was Ford Maddox Hueffer and Edward Garnett, both from middle-class literary families, who encouraged Lawrence to draw on his working-class origins in order to satisfy the demands of his predominately middle-class audience. In 1908 Hueffer founded The English Review which, Worthen notes, “had a strikingly left-wing bias.” Therefore, Hueffer was keen to publish work by working-class writers. Worthen even suggests that, initially, Hueffer may have been more attracted by Lawrence’s working-class origins than his poetry (1991, 216). However, as Worthen notes, Hueffer was disappointed by Lawrence’s prose and “felt ‘inclined to prescribe’ Lawrence ‘a course of workingmen novels’ […] irritated that Lawrence was not quite the working-class writer he had expected” – Hueffer determining that “‘Nethermere’ had almost nothing to do with working-class life” (1991, 217).

Lawrence as working class writer

18However, with help, Lawrence did become a working-class writer. It was Garnett, who also recognised the important links between language and class, who published Lawrence’s dialect poem, “Violets for the Dead?” soon after reading it. Worthen details how the three other dialect poems Lawrence wrote that year were “almost certainly” written “at Garnett’s direct instigation” and that Lawrence’s play, “A Collier’s Friday Night” and his short story “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” which both make significant use of dialect and helped establish Lawrence as a working-class writer, were probably written at Hueffer’s suggestion (1991, 217). As Worthen observes, “This was the kind of work people expected from the son of a coal miner.” Yet, Worthen importantly points out that it was “written only after Lawrence got to know his London literary editors” and that it was “by no means easy, or natural, for him to write about the colliery community” (1991, 218).

19However, having discovered his readers’ interest in the dialect speaking common people, Lawrence exploited it. Hilary Hillier’s meticulous work demonstrates how he made “extensive and significant use of the authentic dialect of Eastwood and the Erewash Valley” which “serves to define the working class mining community in which he grew up and in which these works are set” (7). In explaining the difficulty of writing dialect, Hillier draws attention to how all dialect writers “must to some extent construct their own approximations of the sounds they wish to convey,” and points out how Lawrence “had to balance a desire for authenticity in the ‘sound’ of his working class characters’ speech with the need for basic comprehension and, indeed, tolerance on the part of what was inevitably a predominately middle class readership” (31).

20Lawrence’s dialect poem, “What Ails Thee?” draws attention to this and challenges assumptions about class and dialect by playfully juxtaposing various dialects with standard English (and we should remember that Lawrence was an excellent mimic). In this poem, Lawrence’s repeated use of the Derbyshire dialect word scraight, would probably not be familiar to his middle-class reader. But possibly neither would his use of the lengthened vowel sounds characteristic of English upper-class dialect, the female speaker using “cau-auld” instead of “cold” - perhaps a subtle hint that dialect is not solely the language of the common people. A reference to Robbie Burns reminds us of a dialect poet whose work, for many readers, is hard to understand. But the female speaker’s mimicking of a Scottish accent: “leave off trying putting the Robbie Burns touch over me,” is readily understood like Lawrence’s construction of a Derbyshire dialect.

21Richard Leith sees one difference between Lawrence and “other writers who use dialect, such as George Eliot in Adam Bede or Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Ubervilles [which is] that he dramatises the confrontation between linguistic varieties” (247). And we also see this linguistic conflict when Lawrence derides standard English, or as he calls it in a scathing poem, “The Oxford Voice” where he links standard English to an excessive, baseless superiority. This connection is reiterated in his short story “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” where “The Oxford Voice” is associated with flaws in the character of the John Middleton Murry figure (WWRA 108-9).

22Nevertheless, “What Ails Thee?” also draws attention to another important aspect of dialect, its sexual attraction for the middle classes. Lawrence shows this in Sons and Lovers where, in the Morels’ mixed class marriage, Walter’s use of dialect is shown to have a strong appeal for Gertrude: “She had never been thee’d and thou’d before” (19). Like that of Lawrence’s parents, this marriage fails, but Margery Sabin, sees Walter’s dialect “as a reminder of the passion in the Morel’s marriage,” and considers Lawrence to be:

delicate and touching in the way he shows how Mrs Morel, even at a late stage in the ruined marriage, can sometimes still respond with humour and sexual pleasure to the swaggering of her husband’s voice which is part of his still intact physical attractiveness. (34)

23Their son, Paul, usually speaks in standard English. However, when he meets Clara, who is from the middle classes, he uses dialect when he is trying to seduce her. She, like Gertrude, is “thee’d and thou’d” and told “Dunna thee worrit” (356). Squires points out, that in Lawrence’s work, “thee” with only one exception, refers to a woman who is loved with passion whereas “you” does not (75). Thus Paul’s use of “thee” conveys his passion for Clara. But, his deliberate use of dialect also indicates her middle-class origins and how she, like Gertrude, would be expected to see dialect as “the exotic” and a source of sexual attraction. I will go on to explore how Lawrence expands his thinking about the visceral sexual attraction of dialect in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but first it is worth looking at how the associations Lawrence makes about dialect develop from what we see here in Sons and Lovers to a connection with blood consciousness in Women in Love.

Common people and blood consciousness

24Leith draws attention to a striking aspect of Lawrence’s use of dialect in his perception of its symbolic role in society, especially as a marker of group identity. Thus, in Sons and Lovers, we can see Mr Morel’s choice to use the Derbyshire dialect as a mark of his unity with his fellow miners and one that declares him to be part of a social group that is rooted in a specific geographical location. Leith also notes that Lawrence’s use of dialect “is linked with a complex of associations that include masculinity, physical animality, warmth, and a kind of rooted intimacy” (248). This is reflected in Women in Love when Gudrun describes her “thick, hot attraction” for Beldover’s “foul kind of beauty.” But in this novel, Lawrence goes further making a connection between dialect and his over-arching concern with blood consciousness. We are told that, on a hot evening, Gudrun and Ursula are passing by several semi-naked miners washing themselves after their shifts at the mine, in the back yards of their terraced houses in Beldover. Lawrence states:

Their voices sounded out with strong intonation, and the broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood. It seemed to envelop Gudrun in a laborer’s caress, there was in the whole atmosphere a resonance of physical men, a glamourous thickness of labour and maleness surcharged in the air. But it was universal in the district, and therefore unnoticed by the inhabitants. (115)

25Gudrun finds this both “potent and half-repulsive” but sees in it the difference between the contrasting spheres of London in the south and Beldover in the north where she experiences this “ world of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman” (115).

26This passage records Gudrun’s ambivalent response to an encounter with this different kind of consciousness; something that is “unnoticed by the inhabitants,” but which strongly affects her. Conflating ideas of sensuosity, darkness and maleness into a powerful, emotional amalgam, Lawrence alerts his reader to the connection with blood consciousness in his statement “the broad dialect was curiously caressing to the blood,” reinforcing this link in the last sentence where “mindless” is an explicit signifier of blood consciousness. Thus we get an insight into Lawrence’s thinking about blood consciousness during the time he was writing the final version of this novel in 1916, which also highlights how it has dramatically developed from the ideas he expressed in his well-known letter to Ernest Collings in January 1913 setting out his nascent ideas about blood consciousness (1L 503-4), and his further thoughts in his letter to Bertrand Russell in December 1915 (2L 470-1). Of most interest here, is the firm association Lawrence makes between blood consciousness, dialect, maleness and the common people. This is made even more explicit in version two of Lady Chatterley’s Lover when Lawrence describes Connie’s strong sexual attraction to the keeper’s use of dialect. We are told that after their last intercourse at the hut, Connie realises that the dialect, “cast a spell on her, spoken in the warm, physical, yet fatal voice he used when he was roused” and that she sees this as the “physical man in him […] in conflict with the other, personal man” (V2 168).

  • 1 It is also worth noting that Ivy Bolton tells Connie how she used dialect – “talk broad to him” – w (...)

27Whilst Lawrence also incorporated the sexual attraction of dialect into his portrayal of Mellors in the third version of this novel,1 his sexual relationship with Lady Chatterley also points towards modernist concerns with the attraction of cross class sexual experiences. In writing about the Bohemians, Virginia Nicholson point out how “sleeping with members of the working class offended every convention of the time” but suggests that “sexual and emotional intensity could be heightened by a feeling that one was breaking class taboos” (49). Miranda Seymour’s account of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s affair with her gardener Lionel Gomme in 1920, which lasted until his untimely death in 1922, is an example of this. Seymour observes “At last, Ottoline was able to enjoy the physical act of love” and notes that in 1921 Ottoline recorded in her diary “The purity of it carried away the doubts” (317). Much later, Seymour notes, recalling their affair in her journal, Ottoline stated that Gomme was “the only man that she had been able to love sexually as well as emotionally” (326).

28In her discussion about the temptation to suggest that Ottoline’s affair with Gomme may have been one inspiration for Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Seymour draws some interesting parallels between Constance Chatterley and Ottoline’s situations and notes that Lawrence, Ottoline and Frieda have all spoken about the conversations that took place between them about Ottoline’s childhood at Welbeck Hall. Although Seymour considers Lawrence “must have heard” stories of how Ottoline’s mother, Baroness Bolsover, was fond of a gamekeeper in the village by the name of Mellors and would often visit him privately taking him presents of art books, she concludes that this, together with Mark Gertler’s and Brett’s gossip about Ottoline’s affair with Gomme “would hardly have been enough to inspire the wealth of passion he poured into the book” (318). Nevertheless, Seymour makes an insightful statement about Lawrence’s empathy with cross class sexual attraction:

nobody else would have understood the affair so well or done more justice to the shock of its ending, or to the problems Ottoline had with accepting that she could know sexual happiness with a man all of her friends would have described as her inferior. (318)

29In his careful comparison of the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Squires, like Hillier, draws attention to Lawrence’s need to balance the authenticity of the dialect he used with the need for it to be understood by the middle-class audience he was aiming at. Squires also discusses how difficult Lawrence found it to write in dialect, suggesting that unlike the speech of Connie, Clifford and Mrs Bolton, it did not just flow from Lawrence’s pen. Squires judges that this was because, “the distinction between dialect and standard English did not resonate with complete naturalness in his thinking. Sometimes he had to make a conscious artistic effort to preserve it” (76). Detecting that in version one of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence attempted to depict dialect with faithful realism, Squires indicates how this led to Lawrence stressing or even exaggerating the dialect which “signifies inferior insult or working class fidelity” (73).

30In version two Squires considers that Lawrence used dialect with greater complexity and that it was in the writing of this version that Lawrence gained some “extraordinary insights” into the character of the keeper. For example, when describing Connie’s response to the keeper’s body, Squires suggests that Lawrence “discovers that the keeper’s stature must justify her response” and that “the keeper’s background must correspond to his visual and sexual power.” Thus in balancing the stimulus and the response, Squires believes that Lawrence recognised that the keeper should “exist outside class” and “should be without peer – like Lawrence himself” (73). (This perhaps brings to mind Lawrence’s declaration in his late essays of his ambition to stand outside class, which will be discussed later). Furthermore, in the writing of version two, Squires believes that Lawrence learnt how he could “juxtapose two modes of speech within a single character rather than in characters of opposing classes” (74). Thus whereas in Sons and Lovers the contrast between standard English and dialect is portrayed in two different characters, Mr and Mrs Morel, in version three of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Squires sees that Mellors’ “new bilingual flexibility demands that readers apprehend him from a perspective outside of class” and he details Lawrence’s development of the keeper’s character:

Whereas in version 1 Connie worried that he might try to leave the working class, in version 3 he has left it but then returned to it,[…] standing apart from it now, not economically but socially and intellectually. Mellors hovers between two worlds and, though uneasy proves supple enough to function in both. (74)

31We can also see how Lawrence’s thinking about the development of the gamekeeper’s social status in Lady Chatterley’s Lover has resonances with his evolving ideas about his own relationship to class.

Which class did he belong to?

  • 2 Prior to World War One England was a particularly class riven society and, although the war helped (...)

32In his 1927 essay, “Which Class I Belong To,” Lawrence firmly locates the “acquisitive and possessive instinct” within the middle classes and views this materialism as an essential characteristic that aspiring common people must possess in order to rise into the middle classes (LEA 39). Lawrence robustly claims he “cannot go into the middle-class world” yet he has “as far as circumstances go left the working-class world” (38). However, in that qualification, we perhaps see a hesitation. In this essay, Lawrence declares that he has willingly renounced both classes – rather like his creation Mellors – and that he has chosen to stand outside of class. His 1929 essay, “Myself Revealed,” seems to endorse this decision in Lawrence’s proclamation: “One can belong absolutely to no class” (LEA 180). But is that really possible – especially for an Englishman in the early twentieth century?2 “Myself Revealed,” also illuminates the consequences of not belonging to either class – Lawrence claiming that he doesn’t feel much of human success: “By which I mean that I don’t feel there is any very cordial or fundamental contact between me and society, or me and other people. There is a breach” (LEA 179-80). Thus, in Lawrence’s opinion, his attempts to stand outside of class and not to belong to any social grouping has resulted in him being cut off from all strata of society.

33In the earlier essay, there is also ample evidence of Lawrence’s continuing class confusion. He states that he could never go back into the working classes because of their blindness, obtuseness, prejudice and mass emotions. Nevertheless, he also asserts that the main obstacle to him rising into the middle classes is his preference for the immediate, more physical contact between man and man that is characteristic of the lower classes, significantly stating that he could not “adapt myself to the middle-class, to sacrifice the old, deep blood-affinity between myself and my fellows” (LEA 39). And, I suggest, this reveals the nub of Lawrence’s class turmoil. This indicates that Lawrence viewed the differences between the common people and the middle classes as not just one of class but, importantly, also as one of consciousness.

34In this light, we can see the deeper significance of the language Lawrence gives his characters to speak; it does not simply differentiate their class. By imbuing his character’s language with symbolic meaning, Lawrence elevates it to encompass the “more complex sense of class” that Martin detects in his work. Thus Lawrence’s increasing preoccupation with the dichotomy he saw between blood and mental consciousness expands and, for him, language becomes an indicator of the distinctions he saw between those two polarities; language is not only a marker of class but also of different modes of consciousness.

35In the later essay there is also a hint of envy that James Barrie and H.G. Wells, who came from the common people, are now such a success as best-selling authors. But, it is at this point, when Lawrence compares himself with these other more financially secure writers, that he finally claims insight into his own social class:

Now I know why I cannot rise in the world and become even a little popular and rich.
I cannot make the transfer from my own class into the middle class. I cannot, not for anything in the world, forfeit my passional consciousness and my old blood affinity with my fellow man and the animals and the land, for that thin, spurious mental conceit which is all that is left of the mental consciousness once it has made itself exclusive. (181)

  • 3 When Lawrence wants to denigrate standard English and its speakers he calls it The Oxford Voice. As (...)
  • 4 “His belief in the blood […] was not a theory, but a living experience […] he wanted a new awarenes (...)

36Whilst noting how Lawrence’s “writing is divided between passional and mental consciousness” Milne sees this passage as confirming why “so-called ‘swear words’ and dialect language are so significant in [Lawrence’s] writing.” However, Milne only sees these as “markers of the conflicting class registers of spoken and literary language” (202). But I suggest Lawrence actually goes further in his work, beyond language as a marker of just class, to show that dialect and the instinctive use of what are perceived by the middle classes to be swear words, are not just characteristic of the common people, but are also an indicator of blood consciousness. This then makes a clear link between language and consciousness. For Lawrence, as we saw in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, dialect is the instinctive language of passion, whereas standardised English is the mentally conscious imposed discourse.3 The above passage reaffirms ideas that we saw earlier in his poetry and prose, Lawrence firmly associating the middle classes with mental consciousness and the common people with blood consciousness. We know Lawrence prized his sensitivity to what he recognised as his own blood consciousness above all things – Frieda reiterating that for Lawrence blood consciousness was not a theory but a daily lived experience.4 Thus Lawrence could not renounce this essence of his being in order to rise into the middle classes.

37Therefore, although Lawrence may have left the working-class world, it seems he never left the common people. With hindsight, as his late essays illuminate, his experiment to stand outside of class appears neither desirable nor possible, and he finally acknowledges that he could not become middle class and sacrifice the one thing that was most precious to him, his sensitivity to his own blood consciousness. Blood consciousness was the reason Lawrence could not become middle class, could not really stand outside of class and, despite all their faults, he could not forsake the common people. Like Mellors, Lawrence was supple enough to operate within both classes but, for all his fancy talk, ultimately, Lawrence could only belong to the common people.

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Bibliographie

Granofsky, Ronald. “Class” in D.H. Lawrence in Context. Ed. Andrew Harrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Helie, Claire, Élise Brault-Dreux and Émilie Loriaux, eds. No Dialect Please, You’re a Poet: English Dialects in Poetry in the 20th and 21st Centuries. London: Routledge, 2019.

Hillier, Hilary. Talking Lawrence. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2008.

Lawrence, D.H. The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Ware: Wordsworth, 1994.

Lawrence, D.H. The First Lady Chatterley: the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Heinemann, 1972.

Lawrence, D.H. John Thomas and Lady Chatterley: the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. London: Heinemann, 1972.

Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Lawrence, D.H. Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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Lawrence, D.H. The Plumed Serpent. Ed. L.D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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Notes

1 It is also worth noting that Ivy Bolton tells Connie how she used dialect – “talk broad to him” – when she was trying to encourage her husband’s sexual excitement which was suppressed by seeing the still birth of their first child (162-3).

2 Prior to World War One England was a particularly class riven society and, although the war helped to shift attitudes a little, ingrained class attitudes were prevalent until after World War Two. The remnants of this stratification of society remain even today.

3 When Lawrence wants to denigrate standard English and its speakers he calls it The Oxford Voice. As well as his poem of the same name and his short story “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” this idea also contributes to his poems “TrueDemocracy,” “To Be Superior” and “Natural Complexion.” In The Plumed Serpent Kate’s first impression of Cipriano is of a “cocky little man” who speaks “Oxford English” (30), whilst near the start of Boy in the Bush Lawrence portrays how Dr Rackett was “losing his Oxford drawl” as he assimilates into Australian life.

4 “His belief in the blood […] was not a theory, but a living experience […] he wanted a new awareness of everything around us. Fortunately we have more ways of knowing than merely through the intellect” (Memoirs 135-6).

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Jane Costin, « Lawrence and the Common People »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 54 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 19 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3095 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3095

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Auteur

Jane Costin

Jane Costin is the reviews editor of the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies and a regular contributor to the annual International D.H. Lawrence Conference in Nanterre. Her recent publications include a chapter on Lawrence and Sculpture for the Edinburgh Companion to Lawrence and the Arts (2020), articles for the 2021 edition of JDHLS: “Lawrence and David Garnett: A Friendship Revisited” and “What was ‘Wrong’ with the Olivier Sisters.” and several articles for Études Lawrenciennes.

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