As anyone who has ever put pen to paper will know, finding titles for what you have written can be difficult.  Reading a book on Shakespeare’s treatment of old age I was struck recently by the felicity of its title.  The author had taken a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra and called his work Wrinkled Deep in Time.  Envious of this find, and wanting something for a more general work on old age and literature with which I was struggling, I thought of that speech in which King Lear announces his retirement and says that all he wants to do from then on is `crawl towards death’.  When I suggested to a friend that Crawling Towards Death might be an appropriate title to describe what I was writing, he nodded an ironical approval and commented on how quickly a title like that was likely to make the book disappear from the shelves.

Perhaps it was pique that made me then feel that the greatest writer of English the world has ever known was after all not very good at titles.  It is true that when it comes to the tragedies or histories his are at least informative and it is therefore no surprise to discover who the central characters of Richard III or Macbeth are; but this way of characterising a work is not especially imaginative and it is repeated so often that it could be described as dull and unenticing.  How would anyone unfamiliar with English literature, for example, know that Henry IV Part Two refers to one of the greatest and most enthralling plays ever written (not that Part One isn’t enthralling also)?

But it is with the comedies that inadequacy is more acutely felt.  A prime example here would be As You Like It which is a title that has nothing at all to say about why Rosalind and Celia had to leave the Court and what then happened to them in the Forest of Arden.  It as if Shakespeare, looking around for something to call his new play, grew impatient, threw his copy on the floor and said: `Call it what you damn well please’.  The problem with Much Ado about Nothing is not quite the same.  The central action in this play concerns an innocent young girl who is courted by a powerful aristocrat.  At the very public moment of her marriage, she is accused by the man she imagines is going to be her future husband of being no better than a common prostitute, a `rotten orange’.  Being a comedy, everything in this play does of course come right in the end, but the details of Hero’s humiliation are dramatized with such power that it is hard to clear them entirely from the mind.  For her at least, the episodes in which she is involved are hardly much ado about nothing.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an apt enough description of a play most of which takes place during a single night in the magical atmosphere of a wood where a good deal of dreaming does in fact go on.  It is a superb work but not quite so impressive, in my view, as Twelfth Night.  These last two words will trigger immediately in the minds of most literary people the gulling of Malvolio, the splendid double act that is Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, or Olivia’s charming exchanges with the disguised Viola.  But that is because they already know the play.  Scholars have conjectured that it is called Twelfth Night because that is the holiday occasion for which the play was written and first performed; but it is hard to imagine why anyone should want to do that or think of any other similar case.  Perhaps there is more of a clue to the enigma Twelfth Night represents in its subtitle which is of course `or what you will’ and very much from the `as you like it’ or I don’t give a damn school.

Whereas Twelfth Night is simply baffling, the titles of two of Shakespeare’s later comedies could rather be described as challenges to the critical intelligence of their readers or spectators.  There is a kind of folk wisdom in the idea that if things end happily then all the misfortunes which went before do not matter very much yet it is hard not to feel uneasy when, at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena finally secures her Bertram.  He is a count and she only a doctor’s daughter so that in one sense she has done very well for herself; but throughout the play he has been revealed as not only a snob but such an altogether nasty piece of work that it is difficult not to wonder whether he deserves Helena, and all has in fact ended as well as it is supposed to do in comedies.

There are similar, often expressed worries about the ending of Measure for Measure.  I take these words to mean something in the region of tit for tat, each according to their desserts or, more biblically, an eye for an eye.  As is sometimes the case with titles, this one occurs in the play itself where the expression is represented as the equivalent of `like doth quit like’.  But if this is indeed their general meaning, then the measures finally meted out in this play can seem very unequal.  Lucio is certainly a reprobate but his principal crime seems to have been to have made outrageous claims about the Duke of Vienna’s character to a disguised figure whom he does not recognise as the Duke himself.  He is initially condemned to marry a prostitute he has made pregnant before being whipped and then hanged.  The second part of this sentence is quickly rescinded so that all that is left is being compelled to marry but this is more punishment than any received by Barnardine, the hardened criminal who gets off scot free and is a peculiarly striking illustration of what Dr Johnson once called `stark insensibility’.  Yet it is of course among the principals that measure for measure appears to operate most unevenly.  Marianna is like Helena in being contracted to a man who has abandoned her but who is then tricked into sleeping with his legal partner, nonetheless.  That she should still want Angelo, even to the extent of pleading for his forgiveness, is likely to strike spectators as uncomfortable given what they have witnessed of his loathsome behaviour, but even more disturbing so is the way Isabella, whose burning ambition is to be a nun, looks like being nudged into a marriage with the Duke for which she will be expected to feel gratitude.  It is a prize everything we have learnt about her in the play makes us feel she would not want, and hardly a convincing case therefore of measure for measure: her young woman’s fierce virtue in exchange for his rank. Shakespeare’s Plays

Very few of Shakespeare’s comedies have titles that seem appropriate (why a winter’s tale and which part of that play’s action would it seem accurate to describe in this way?).  We don’t of course know how much control he had over what his plays were called, either when they being advertised at the theatre or then published (some of them) in those famous `quarto’ versions.  Perhaps the prestige of his theatre company, or his own, was enough to drum up a public whatever name their offerings bore?  It is nevertheless interesting to speculate that even a literary genius, and someone whose writings have since been a valuable resource for those looking for titles for their own work (Wrinkled Deep in Time being only one example among many) should have suffered the same problems so many other writers have had in trying to decide what to call their work.  One can follow that painful process in the early letters of D. H. Lawrence.  It is perhaps only from them that one can discover why his first novel should have been called The White Peacock and his second, The Trespasser, since the works themselves provide only minimal information on that score.  For a long period, he followed the Macbeth route and called his third novel Paul Morel, which is the name of its principal character; but then he discovered Freud and changed the title to Sons and Lovers which, for once in a writer’s life, hit the nail firmly on the head.

Main image: Statue of Touchstone, the Jester from As You Like It, Stratford-upon-Avon Credit: Steve Vidler / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Much Ado About Nothing. Credit: Interfoto / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Twelfth Night. Credit: 19th era / Alamy Stock Photo

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There are some historians who are inclined to ask `what if’ questions: what if the Spanish Armada had managed to land on these shores, or our air force had lost the Battle of Britain?  These speculations are known in the trade as counterfactuals and not hard to dream up.  How different would the history of Europe have been, for example, had Marshall Blücher arrived at Waterloo with his Prussians not a little but too late?  Sometimes they relate more directly to individuals and to matters more apparently trivial.  It is known, for instance, that when Napoleon arrived at Waterloo he was suffering from hemorrhoids.  Would the outcome have been any different if he had been in better health?

Jesse Chambers Wood (1887-1944)

Questions like this last one are sometimes asked by biographers but occasionally by their subjects themselves.  From his adolescence until his early twenties, the closest female companion of D. H. Lawrence was a girl called Jessie Chambers who lived on a farm three miles from the Nottinghamshire mining town in which he was born.  She was the person with whom he shared all his literary and artistic interests, and it was only to her that he showed whatever he happened to be writing.  Much later in his life, he was walking with an old friend from his home town who had the temerity to ask him why it was that he had not married Jessie.  Annoyed as he first was by the question, he then thought a little and is reported as replying with: `It would have been a fatal step.  I should have had too easy a life, nearly everything my own way, and my genius would have been destroyed.’  One can save Lawrence’s blushes here by interpreting the word `genius’ in the old sense of special gift or talent, but it does seem probable that too much devoted respect would not have suited him and that he thrived best in an atmosphere where admiration was accompanied by contradiction and conflict.  Certainly, the woman he did in fact marry, Frieda Weekley, provided plenty of both.

Marriage is a major life-choice but there are others of an apparently less important nature which can appear crucial in retrospect.  Lawrence’s father was a coalminer and he himself was only able to become the kind of writer he was because of the changes to England’s national education system which took place towards the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the next.  He was clever enough to pass examinations that allowed him both to go to the grammar school and, after a pause when he was a clerk in a surgical goods factory, follow a process which led to a course for prospective elementary school teachers at Nottingham University.  Once he was qualified, his family’s financial situation made him anxious to find a job as soon as possible and, frustrated by the lack of response to numerous applications, determined to accept a post wherever one was offered.  Eventually he was called for interview at a school in Stockport near Manchester but, for whatever reasons, he was not accepted there.  His reaction was similar to that of many of us who have applied for jobs we did not get, and he decided that he was glad he had been rejected in that Stockport seemed like a vile place anyway, `seething with strangers’.  This failure did not much matter because almost immediately he was interviewed at a school in Croydon and accepted as a teacher there.

In the meantime, he had been writing in all kinds of forms, poetry, short fiction and a first novel which would become The White Peacock.  Without his knowledge, Jessie Chambers sent off a number of his poems to a new literary magazine they had both been very impressed by.  It was called the English Review and edited by Ford Madox Hueffer who, after the First World War had broken out, changed his name to Ford Madox Ford.  He was both impressed and intrigued by what he read and invited Lawrence to come and see him in his London office.  After realising how much other work this young teacher had already written, in addition to his poems, he did all he could to promote him, publishing more of his writing in the English Review and introducing him to all kinds of literary figures.  It was because of this initial contact with Hueffer that Lawrence met Ezra Pound and was able to hear Yeats recite his poetry at a literary gathering.  He also took him to meet H. G. Wells who, as the son of parents who had met when they were domestic servants in a country house and then went on to keep a sports shop in Bromley, was the role model for those from the lower classes aiming, like Lawrence, to make a living out of writing.  It was perhaps partly because of Wells that Jesse remembered Lawrence saying at one point in this period that there would come a day when he would be making £2000 a year (his primary teacher’s annual salary was around £100).

Frieda Weekley

Another person to whom Lawrence was introduced at this time was the minor writer Edward Garnett, to whose wife Constance some of us owe our first acquaintance with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky because she was the translator of many of their works.  Garnett was very well connected in the publishing world and for a considerable period acted as Lawrence’s unpaid literary agent and advisor.  He had recently built a replica of a large 15^th century cottage in a beautiful spot near Oxted in Surrey and on several occasions invited Lawrence to visit him there.  This was quite a tricky journey from Croydon, involving a train into London and then one out again, but the point here is that it would have been far trickier from Stockport.  Had Lawrence in fact secured the post in that town, of course, it would have been very difficult if not impossible for him have accepted Hueffer’s invitation to a meeting, and a whole train of events would not have been set in motion.  In recalling his first contacts with Lawrence, Hueffer remembered having told him (via a letter to Jessie Chambers) that `a literary career depended enormously on chance’.  Lawrence himself might have felt how much good fortune there had been in his failure to secure a post in Lancashire and then his success in finding one which, while not in London itself, was in striking distance of the London literary scene.

Lawrence was familiar enough with W. E. Henley’s Invictus, with its concluding famous lines: `I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul’, to refer to it in his letters (and not ironically).  It could reasonably be argued that he was a young man of such unusual talent and energy that he would have quickly managed to become recognised whether he happened to be teaching in Land’s End or John o’ Groats.  But not getting the job in Stockport, and then finding one in Croydon, certainly made everything easier.  Few of his biographers would be reluctant to describe that day when he went to see his former university teacher, Ernest Weekley, in a leafy suburb of Nottingham but found himself instead spending time with his wife, as `fateful’; but there are more seemingly minor moments which could be considered almost as significant and his failure to please in Stockport is one of them.  Whether one ascribes these to fate, accident or luck may only be a matter of philosophical choice but a problem of bothering to consider them in one’s own life is that a single even apparently small change necessarily entails so many others.  Had Lawrence gone to Stockport, for example, he would have no doubt have had quite different life experiences which would have made him, in some sense, a different person.  This gives an air of paradox to counterfactual thinking in that the self-asking questions such as `What would have happened had I married Jessie Chambers?’, is not the same as the one who would have come into being had the contingency being considered actually come to pass.  We tend to contemplate how one change in our past would make the life we now lead better (or worse!) but that change would typically have brought in its wake so many others that the consequences become incalculable.  All of which makes counterfactual thinking something of a waste of time for individuals while not preventing them from wanting to indulge in it.  As for great historical events, so may other factors come into play that it seems doubtful to me whether it can ever prove profitable either.

Main image: Frieda Lawrence (a.k.a Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Freiin von Richthofen, Frieda Weekley and Frieda Lawrence Ravagli) in retirement in Taos, New Mexico. Credit: Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Jesse Chambers Wood (1887-1944) a friend of D.H. Lawrence and prototype for Miriam in ‘Sons and Lovers.’ Credit: Granger – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

Image 2 above: Frieda Weekley. Credit: Granger – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo.

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For those who are willing to look hard enough, there is always a centenary lurking. In November of this year, it will be a hundred years since Women in Love was first published. Along with The Rainbow, to which it was joined in its beginnings, this is D. H. Lawrence’s best novel, although not the one by which he is best known. It is true that the chapter in Women in Love in which he attempts to describe sexual intercourse (`Excurse’) is so metaphorical as to be barely intelligible and that when, towards the end of his life, he decided in Lady Chatterley’s Lover to use the four-letter words, he made much more sense. But in general, and in terms of originality or depth of human and social understanding, the earlier novel is far more impressive. In the context of Lawrence’s fiction as a whole, it is what Ulysses became for Joyce or To the Lighthouse for Virginia Woolf.

The way in which Women in Love is written might well be called experimental, although it seems to me misguided to think that we do Lawrence a favour by enrolling him among the modernists. His methods should not have seemed too disconcerting for anyone well-read in the nineteenth-century novel. I can hardly be the first to note the link between the scene, early in Daniel Deronda, where Grandcourt is tormenting his dogs and Gerald Crich’s insistence in Women in Love on holding his highly bred Arab horse close to the level crossing as a train rattles past. These indirect and quasi-symbolic methods for conveying character are common in the great 19th century novelists Lawrence knew well and he develops them considerably in a chapter such as `Water-Party’, or those episodes towards the end of Women in Love which take place in the Alps. Yet partly thanks to a knowledge of Nietzsche and Freud, which may often have come to him second-hand, he was also able to take character analysis into areas largely unfamiliar to his predecessors and (to continue to rely on the spatial metaphor common in these matters) delve deeper than they had been willing or able to go. I doubt however that it is this aspect of his novel which disconcerted some readers at the time, and may have done since, but rather its lack of the conventional plot writers such as Dickens, George Eliot or Hardy regularly supplied. Women in Love is about two young teachers from the Midlands, both versions of the Georgian `new woman’, who are each looking for a satisfactory relationship with a man in a society where the old values are being eroded without any strong sense of what will replace them. Although not set in the period of the First World War, this was when it was chiefly written and Lawrence hoped that `the bitterness of the war’ could be taken for granted in the characters. As for the `story’ in which these characters are involved, there is no more to it than that one of the young women succeeds in her search for a suitable partner, more or less, while the other very definitely does not.

It is part of the rich variety of Women in Love that there are chapters where this question of readers being challenged by the unfamiliar could not apply. In `The Industrial Magnate’, for example, there is an account of how Gerald Crich replaces his father in the running of the family mine and, in the process, abandons a paternalistic model for one based solely on a cash nexus (which Lawrence describes the miners as preferring). There are moments of acute sociological analysis here that might still resonate with those who have ever worked in a business which has been taken over and `restructured’. In a chapter called `A Chair’, one of the teachers has found a man with whom she feels she can live and is shopping with him at a local market for second-hand furniture. The two of them find themselves in competition for the attractive chair of the chapter title with a young working-class couple who are, in the conventional phrase, `having to get married’. Lawrence’s fine description of this couple is in the realist mode of his early short stories, or his memorable account of working-class life in Sons and Lovers.

There must have been a time when it was hard to meet any literary student who had not read Sons and Lovers (partly because it was often a set text in the schools). But this was in the 1960s when Lawrence’s reputation was at its height. It is possible that for a reputation to be maintained, there have to be extra-literary factors at work: that a writer needs what in the theatre used to be called a claque which can cheer for him or her whatever the circumstances, and shout down the opposition. I have friends of Irish descent who re-read Ulysses every year in much the same spirit as Bostonians celebrate St Patrick’s day. To the Lighthouse may not have survived so well if Virginia Woolf had not also written `A Room of One’s Own’. In the 1960s Lawrence would seem to have had two of these factors going for him. In the first place, he was after all the first great British writer to have emerged from the industrial proletariat and wrote so well about his social background as to remind his chiefly middle-class readers of the gross inequalities in British society, and be seen as an ally by those who, within the universities and elsewhere, wanted to do something about them. In the second place, many of his novels would seem to support sexual liberation (a major concern in the 1960s), especially for the women who often figured centrally in them.

Unfortunately for Lawrence, these two extra-literary supports turned out to provide much less reliable help than nationalism and feminism did, and still do, for Joyce and Woolf. When people began to look at his work more closely, they found it was not always on the side of the workers and that, as he developed, his political attitudes often veered towards the right. In the early 1920s, he was imagining in The Plumed Serpent a theocracy with distinctly fascist overtones even though, when he came back from America in 1925 and settled for a while in what was by then Mussolini’s Italy, he had nothing but contempt for Il Duce. In his last years, he showed signs of returning to the socialist ideas with which he had been familiar in his youth but his overall political stance is complicated, to say the least. So too is his stance on sexual liberation, especially as it relates to women. Kate Millett’s blistering attack in 1970 may have contained some crude readings, but it would be hard to deny that it delivered hefty blows to the idea of Lawrence as a champion of female liberation, in all its forms. The many places in his work where that idea seems justified need to be set against the account Mellors gives of his sexual history in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Before he began writing what became Women in Love, but after Sons and Lovers, Lawrence told a socialist friend that what he would do for women in his writing was `better than the suffrage’, of which he was never a particularly enthusiastic supporter. It would not be surprising if some women readers, having listened to what Mellors has to say, should decide that they were happier sticking with suffrage.

The falling away of Lawrence’s extra-literary support was important because he had never been fully embraced by the literary establishment, even though there was a general agreement that he was remarkably gifted. Its attitude was characterised by Lawrence himself in describing how Ford Madox Ford had once shouted at him on the top of a bus that he had genius. `In the early days’, Lawrence writes. in a wry comment, all Lawrentians remember, `they were always telling me I had got genius as if to console me for not having their own incomparable advantages’. The muted hostility to him of the power-brokers in the literary and also often (as it happened) social world became apparent in the obituaries which appeared when he died in 1930. A great writer of novels and short stories, as well as some splendid novellas and travel books (even some of his plays brush up rather well), Lawrence was also responsible for a good deal of verse. Apart from an excellent collection about birds, beasts and flowers, and some poignant poems written as he was dying, not much of this is of high quality and T. S. Eliot, an alien body who was welcomed into the British elite, is clearly much the better poet. He also thought of himself as a much better thinker. It was Eliot who in 1933 buttressed the Establishment view by talking of Lawrence’s `deplorable religious upbringing’ and, from the heights of his own Harvard and Oxford education, denounced his `lack of intellectual and social training’. This was when he also said, in what must in part have been an allusion to Lawrence’s many and varied discursive writings, that he had `an incapacity for what we ordinarily called thinking’.

In 1936 a collection of Lawrence’s sketches, essays and reviews was published under the title Phoenix. Reviewing this book in Scrutiny, F. R. Leavis called its author `the finest literary critic of our time’. How remarkable this phrase is can only be appreciated by knowing how extensively Leavis’s early work had been dominated by literary criticism of Eliot. To compare Phoenix with (for example) Eliot’s Selected Essays is awkward when literary criticism is only a part of what one finds in the former, but it has now become possible to make another comparison which may seem more appropriate. A collection of Lawrence’s letters appeared in 1932 but all of them have since become available in the eight volumes of the Cambridge edition. If one were to match any one of these against a volume of those letters of Eliot which have only recently been appearing, most qualified observers would surely have to agree that, in terms of psychological insight, breadth of interest, variety of tone or linguistic inventiveness, the contest was unequal. It may appear unseemly and mean-spirited to imagine literary reputation as a competition but as far as the Academy is concerned, where Eliot has done so well, that is of course precisely what it is: a struggle for space and attention. The centenary of the publication of Women in Love is perhaps an occasion to ponder the merits or otherwise of the decline in its author’s fortunes and, as Eliot himself several times suggested, although analysis is one of the chief tools to employ in this kind of task, the other is comparison.

After completing Sons and Lovers, Lawrence said that he would never write in that way again. Although, as `The Chair’ illustrates, he could not quite keep his promise, he is a writer who was always moving on. This can make following his career a bumpy ride, especially after the publication of Women in Love. Not everything to which he turned his hand was successful (The Plumed Serpent is a case in point), and in his discursive writing he was certainly no ordinary thinker, which one would like to believe was what Eliot really meant, although it clearly wasn’t. At times full of insight, humour and originality but at others merely provocative or offensive, he rarely allows his readers to settle down comfortably; yet in fiction, he went on producing remarkable work. Of the many excellent novellas he wrote in the 1920s, one of the best is The Virgin and the Gypsy. If I enjoy reading this tale of sexual awakening and class more than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is obviously not without its merit, it may be in part be because of a frustrating feeling that, outside the Academy, that is the text that still keeps Lawrence’s reputation alive. But to work to change this situation so that it is from Women in Love that everything else radiates, might well result in its dying away altogether.

Image: Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jennie Linden and Eleanor Bron in the 1969 film version of Women in Love

Credit: Allstar Picture Library Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

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A quarter of a century ago, I wrote an introduction to the Wordsworth Classics’ edition of Pickwick Papers. I was happy to do this because, at that time, I was puzzling over how to write sensibly about comedy (I still am!). Dickens finds myriad ways to be funny in Pickwick, several of which raise important issues. Towards the beginning of his book, for example, he describes the courtship of Mr Tupman and Miss Wardle, that traditional comic topos of elderly love. As these two begin kissing, they fear they are being observed by a character Dickens has already established as `the fat boy’, although that seems doubtful to Mr Tupman since one of the peculiarities of this individual is that he is continually falling asleep. As I hinted in my introduction, it would make a difference to our enjoyment of the episode if Dickens had suggested that the boy’s obesity as a consequence of a glandular malfunction rather than over-eating, and if there had been in his day such a well-defined medical condition as narcolepsy.

`We laugh at deformed creatures’ writes Sir Philip Sidney and it is still the case that a good deal of comedy is cruel in that it is focused on physical or mental disabilities: Dudley Moore’s well-known impersonation of the one-legged man applies to Peter Cook for the role of Tarzan would be a good illustration. The fat boy is not a complex creation but he is near the beginning of a long and splendid line of comic characters Dickens will go to invent, participating as he does so in a distinguished tradition which we can think of as beginning with Falstaff (not so slim himself), and coming right up to our own time with figures such as the pub landlord, Alan Partridge, Count Arthur Strong, as well as the magnificent Dame Edna or Sir Les Patterson. Another early character in Pickwick who is hardly complex is Mr Jingle, since he is based on a peculiarity of speech and never so funny as when he first appears and describes the perils to which tall mothers who travel on the top of coaches are exposed: `sandwich in her hand — no mouth to put it in — head of a family off — shocking, shocking!’. Jingle is a fortune hunter and it is he who runs off with Miss Wardle and is then tracked down to a London inn where we are first introduced to Sam Weller. It is possible to think of Sam as a descendant of those slaves who are cleverer than their masters in the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence but, as Dickens develops him, he becomes the very prototype of the resourceful and irrepressible cockney.

One episode in Pickwick I remember being particularly struck by involves Sam consulting his father on the composition of a valentine. What it now brings to my mind is that most familiar and, at the same time, much-derided `theory’ of comedy which in our culture is usually taken back to Thomas Hobbes and which claims that we always laugh at someone, chiefly because of how they are, or what happens to them, offers a sudden reinforcement of our own sense of superiority. According to this theory, we laugh at the boy because he is fat and sleepy (always supposing of course that we ourselves are not obese or narcoleptic), just as we laugh at Sam and his parent’s compositional efforts because, as members of the book-buying public, we have a better sense than they have of how valentines should be written, and of standard English usage:

`“Feel myself ashamed, and completely cir –” I forget what this here word is’, said Sam, scratching his head with the pen, in vain attempts to remember.

`Why don’t you look at it then?’, inquired Mr Weller.

`So I am a lookin at it’, replied Sam, `but there’s another blot. Here’s a “c”, and an “i”, and a “d”’.

`Circumwented, p’raps’, suggested Mr Weller.

`No, it ain’t that,’ said Sam, `circumscribed; that’s it’

`That ain’t as good a word as circumwented, Sammy,’ said Mr Weller, gravely.

Like most people, I find these exchanges funny but lurking behind them, as always when highly literate authors are displaying the linguistic or intellectual incompetence of those below them in the social scale, is the danger of condescension. In Pickwick, this is largely circumwented by the fact that, in matters other than the writing of valentines, Sam Weller is regularly shown to be infinitely more competent and intelligent than those around him. In the opening section of the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet (to take a rather different example!), Shakespeare is having fun with the way two poorly educated working men are handling complicated legal distinctions, but what helps prevent us from feeling condescending towards them is that their exchanges are a cover for a quite daring critique of a situation whereby society’s nobs are allowed to top themselves without religious penalty while the bodies of those less privileged individuals who have committed suicide will be thrown immediately into the unhallowed ground.

The manner in which Sam Weller is developed, once he becomes the servant of Mr Pickwick, throws light on another theory of comedy almost as well known as the one associated with Hobbes. This derives from the book by Freud which purports to be confined to jokes but which often strays into the general area of the comic. There are ideas in this book about why we laugh that are very strange. According to Freud, in a mood which could be described as thermodynamic, most humorous remarks are based on material that wells up from the unconscious and the pleasure or relief we feel when we hear them expressed or express them ourselves — indirectly, as in the manner of dreams, although not quite so obscurely — derives from the economy of psychic expenditure we make in no longer having to repress them. It is a consequence of these ideas that many commentators have been tempted to assume that all jokes, and comedy in general, must be subversive. The distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, for example, in a highly influential essay on joking rituals and jokes in general, has written: `All jokes have .. a subversive effect on the dominant structure of ideas’. But this is no more the case than that all comedy makes us feel superior. Sam Weller is not himself of course a joke, but what would be is the notion that the comedy he creates is in any way subversive. Dickens is often an open critic of his society in Pickwick, regularly inviting his readers to pour scorn on the political class or the legal system. But Sam becomes such a devoted servant of Mr Pickwick, protecting him as a mother does her child, loyally arranging to be incarcerated so that he can continue to attend to him, and generally always sacrificing his own interests (even those represented by the composition of the valentine) to those of his employer. At a period when there were more people in domestic service than in any other kind of work, and someone who could buy a book could probably also afford at least one maid of all work, master/servant relations must have been a recurrent subject of anxiety.

To have such an idyllic comic representation of how they are managed by Sam and Mr Pickwick was hardly likely to subvert any established values, or keep Dickens’s readers awake at night.

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A friend once told me that, when he was preparing for an Oxford entrance exam, he made a list of the whole of ancient Greek literature and read every book on it. I used to think how impossible that would be if he had been dealing with literature in its English variety, but then I suppose we have to assume that very many of the Greek texts have been lost. A prime example, though one that may not quite count as `literary’, is the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. A problem of dealing with lost texts is how you know they were ever there in the first place but there are apparently many references to this book although the classical scholars tend to be uncertain whether it contained a theory of laughter or of comedy as a dramatic form (two very different things). So well-known is this gap in Europe’s literary past that Umberto Eco could make it a centrepiece in his scholarly thriller The Name of the Rose.

Edith Piaff sings of having no regrets whereas Sinatra confesses to having had a few. I have to admit that, as far as the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics is concerned, I incline to Piaff’s side. This is because when I was at university I took a course on Tragedy which began with Poetics. I can still remember the struggle I had in trying to apply Aristotle’s principles, which were clearly deduced from the Greek drama he knew to Shakespeare’s tragedies, and in particular, attempting to work out which of Lear’s character flaws was the tragic one and how to make something of the key notion of catharsis. If courses on comedy were, to begin with, his lost second book on comedy then I’ve no doubt we would be similarly lumbered with principles which were largely irrelevant to plays such as Twelfth Night, The Rivals or The Importance of Being Ernest and inhibited in our attempts to work out why they are so successful.

History records not only texts which are definitely now lost but several near-misses. I have been working recently on Stendhal who started his publishing career late, well before his composition of such great nineteenth-century classics as The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. This was partly because, in his twenties, he had become an official in the administrative machinery of the Napoleonic Empire. A sign of his success in the job is that in 1812 he was important enough to be sent to join the `Grand Army’, then on its way into Russia, so that the Emperor could see and sign a number of documents, and keep in touch with business back home. This was regarded as a privilege, especially since it involved an interview with Napoleon himself; but it must have appeared an increasingly dubious one as Stendhal stayed with the army as it made its way into Moscow and was then involved in the catastrophic retreat. An indication that he had miscalculated the difficulties of invading Russia almost as seriously as his employer is that, when he left Paris, he took with him eleven ledgers in which was written down a heavily annotated translation of an Italian book on the history of painting in Italy which he intended to serve as the basis for his own work on that subject. On the way back from Moscow, these were taken from him by the Cossacks, along with almost all his other personal belongings. But once back in France, he set to work on reconstituting his painting book which eventually appeared in 1817. This is a significant and interesting early work for those already interested in Stendhal, but whether one would have ever needed to blame the Cossacks too harshly, or regret too bitterly its total loss, is doubtful.

I have the same doubts about another work from roughly this period which narrowly escaped extinction: Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. The well-known story here is that Carlyle gave his only manuscript copy of the first hefty volume to John Stuart Mill whose maid mistook its nature and used it to light a fire; but the text must have been so much in Carlyle’s mind that the indefatigable Scot was able to write it all out again almost immediately. Without wanting to claim that this young woman should be included in the pantheon of distinguished literary critics, it does seem to me that the destruction of The French Revolution would not have been a major disaster for the literary world. The truth is that there are so many books for students of English literature to read, and so many others that they have forgotten completely and need to re-read, that some minor subtractions here and there would hardly seem to matter, and would lessen the burden of guilt.

Talking of works that perished in a fireplace, however, does recall one book the disappearance of which is a matter of sincere regret. This is the memoir, entrusted by Byron in 1819 to his friend Tom Moore, who at that time was living in Paris with his family in order to avoid his creditors. In a typically generous gesture, Byron agreed that this work could be sold to his publisher Murray, in order to alleviate Moore’s financial difficulties; but only on the understanding that it would never appear in its author’s lifetime. When in 1824 Byron’s life proved shorter than anyone had expected, a group of his former friends and acquaintances met with Moore in one of Murray’s rooms in Albermarle Street and put pressure on him to have the memoir destroyed. He had in fact come there to pay back the 2000 guineas he had received from Murray so that he could regain control of Byron’s manuscript. But though he did pay back the money, he also succumbed to the pressure and stood by while the memoir was burnt in the fireplace. One of those most insistent on its destruction was a representative of Lady Byron, who had not read it but knew that it included an account of her acrimonious separation from her husband. Another was John Cam Hobhouse, who had not read it either. He had been Byron’s close friend but, already on his path to respectability, seems to have felt that publication would damage the poet’s reputation (and perhaps his own). As for Murray, he had been advised that the memoir was fit only for a brothel and may in any case have preferred to see it destroyed than taken to a rival publisher. As the son of a Dublin grocer who mixed with the aristocracy in London and was always anxious to show he could be as `gentlemanly’ as they were, Moore was ill-equipped to stand up to all these people. Describing the excessive faith which he felt Napoleon had shown in the promises of the Russian Tsar and Austrian Emperor, Stendhal once claimed that the weakness of all parvenus was to have too much respect for the class in which they have managed to establish themselves. It may therefore be that it was because Moore was so determined to show that he could behave as well as any gentleman that he stood by while one of the great crimes in literary history was perpetrated, and a text the absence of which can be a matter for unalloyed regret disappeared forever.

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Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is described as having fallen in love with a naval officer at the age of nineteen. She is the daughter of a baronet, but Wentworth (as the young officer is called) has no family connections worth speaking of, and none of that `interest’ which Austen, as the sister of two brothers who had joined the navy, well knew was very important in getting on in that particular profession. He also has no money but the date is 1806, Napoleon has just put in place his `continental system’ and the British retaliated by establishing their own blockades, encouraging their sailors to intercept as many ships bound to and from France as possible and do as much damage to French commerce as Napoleon was trying to do to theirs. This encouragement for legalised piracy is assumed rather than described in the novel and represents an ideal opportunity for an enterprising man like Wentworth to make his way in the world. He urges Anne to unite her destiny to his but she is influenced by an old friend of her dead mother, Lady Russell. In addition to looking askance at Wentworth’s undistinguished family origins, she feels he is what the insurance firms would call a bad risk and persuades Anne to break off the relationship.

When the novel opens it is 1814, the wars appear to be over and Captain Wentworth has returned to shore £25,000 richer than when he left. He is thrown again into Anne’s company because his sister has married an admiral who has presumably done even better out of the wars than Wentworth and can afford to rent the family home and estate of Anne’s father, a vain, stupid individual who has been nourishing a sense of his own importance by living beyond his considerable means. The baronet goes off to superior rented accommodation in Bath with his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, but Anne stays behind in order to help out her other, younger sister Mary. She has married Charles Musgrove, the heir to a more modest country estate in the area and a man whose younger brother had, before his death abroad, happened to have served for a while under Wentworth. This makes the captain a favourite guest of his parents in their large country house and, relatively early in the action, he gives the assembled Musgrove family an account of his first command, a broken-down ship called the Asp with which he was able to capture `privateers enough to be very entertaining’ and in which, on his way home from the West Indies, he had `the good luck … to fall in with the very French frigate [he] wanted’. Nor did his luck desert him in that, six hours after he had brought his captured French ship into Plymouth, there was a tremendous storm which he is sure the Asp would not have survived.

One hint some readers may pick up from Wentworth’s account is that Lady Russell perhaps had a point in thinking of him as a bad risk in 1806; but my concern here is with what his words tell us about how he managed to become so rich. A note in the Cambridge edition of Persuasion provides one or two clues but for a more detailed explanation you have to go to Richard Hill and his book with the self-explanatory title, The Prizes of War: The Naval Prize System in the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815. Even that, however, does not quite make clear why Wentworth should have thought capturing privately owned and operated vessels who had a license from the French (or the Americans) to prey on British merchant shipping `entertaining’. He may of course only be showing off but another possible reason for using that word is that, although privateers would be armed, they were very unlikely to be much of a match for a British warship, however broken down it may have been. What he goes on to indicate, however, is the superior significance of capturing a French frigate. As Wentworth makes clear, this did indeed involve serious fighting, but more important than the honour and renown a successful sea battle brought was the superior monetary value of an enemy frigate, especially since the Navy itself would be very likely to buy it at market prices. Hill gives the example of a French frigate captured in 1809 the total net value of which for its captors was over £28,000. A quarter of this came from the Navy’s purchase of the hull (the tonnage of captured vessels converted to British use during the wars was equivalent to over half that of new-built ships); but then there was the ordnance, the stores and £5 for every crew member, alive or dead.

Before 1808, the captain of the ship responsible for a capture such as the one Hill describes would have been entitled to three eights of this total sum, or only a quarter if he was acting under the orders of a superior officer (an admiral, for example), who would then pocket the relinquished eighth. So much to one or two individuals must have been felt to be a little unfair. Hill cites the case of a French frigate captured in 1797 by a British ship called the Phoebe under the command of a Captain Barlow. Estimating the crew of ordinary seamen on the Phoebe at 200, he calculates that each of them would have received about £17, over half a year’s salary and not bad (he writes) for `an hour’s hot work’. Not bad perhaps but obviously not as good as Barlow’s own £3535, 10 shillings. Hill reproduces in his book a well-known cartoon in which, just before the battle of Trafalgar, an ordinary seaman is shown kneeling in front of one of his ship’s cannons. When an officer asks him if he is afraid, the seaman replies that he is only praying that the coming grapeshot will be shared out according to the same formula for the distribution of prize money. In 1808 there were modest alterations to this formula which benefited the middle ranks but still made capturing another ship an extraordinary profitable business for those members of the top brass with the courage, daring, and skill to bring it off. Wentworth has clearly been one such member, and so presumably has his brother in law, Admiral Croft. It is the admiral who, relatively early in the novel, says that he hopes that he and his wife `will have the good luck to live to another war’, without any of that apprehension in his tone which the prospect of warfare usually brings. This would seem to be because, for naval officers of his kind, a war was above all an opportunity for making pots of money. Austen is of course deeply committed to an ironic mode yet as far as I can tell, there is no irony in her descriptions of the enthusiasm with which people like Croft and Wentworth talk about warfare and, startling though it may be to say about a great novelist, and putting aside Austen’s understanding of the anxiety the wives of naval officers are likely to feel when their husbands go off to war, she appears distinctly unimaginative about its human consequences. It is true that Wentworth has a friend called Captain Harville who has not been as lucky as he has and is also suffering from having been wounded. But very little emphasis is placed on his misfortunes. In the `hot work’ which capturing enemy ships involved, the number of deaths on both sides which Hill gives suggests that they tended to amount to about a fifth of the total crews. But he has no figures for the wounded. The consequences for Harville would appear to be that he is now obliged to live on half pay and in a very modest way; but for ordinary seamen they could be desperate. Anne is pleased that Admiral Croft and his wife have taken over her family home because she feels that they will prove responsible landlords and do their duty in helping the local poor. In a small village, these people may not have included many if any ex-servicemen but, after 1815, the towns at least were chock full of men lacking arms or legs who were of course from the army as well as the navy, and who often only had the charitable feelings of the general public to rely upon.

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In 1816 Lord Byron turned up in Milan, accompanied by a friend from his university days, John Cam Hobhouse. Their host was a man called di Breme who had been an important official when Lombardy was part of the Napoleonic empire. After dinner at his home, di Breme took his two visitors to La Scala where he had hired a box for the season and could introduce them to a number of friends. One of these was Henri Beyle, someone who, after having worked for Napoleon, was in the process of trying to launch a literary career (it was only sometime later that he would begin to be best known by one of his many pen names, `Stendhal’). Almost the first things Stendhal noticed about Byron was how remarkably good-looking he was. If you wanted to imagine yourself a great poet, he would write later, this is how he should look, a somewhat poignant remark given that Stendhal always regarded himself as ugly, and once expressed regret at having the features of an Italian butcher.

That Byron was so handsome, in spite of his club foot, is perhaps one of the minor reasons for his phenomenal success. No one could have better looked the part. Of more recent writers, the one whose photographic portraits correspond best to the sense we take from his work is surely Samuel Beckett. That strongly featured face, with its unusually deep and sculpted lines, would seem to be the consequence of a life-long battle with a penetratingly gloomy view of the world, and of the strenuous efforts that have to be made in order to find an appropriate literary medium in which to express it. W. H. Auden, of course, has even more lines on his face so that the photographs of him tend to suggest the devastation visited on the French countryside during the First World War; but in his case, there are also pockets of loose, sagging flesh and the general impression is not, therefore, as it is in Beckett’s, of severe self-discipline but rather of letting oneself go, of dissipation.

How common it is to `read into’ the appearance of writers and our impressions of their work is finely illustrated by Proust in one of the best-known episodes of A la recherche du temps perdu. Marcel has long been an admirer of Bergotte, a writer he imagines as a `godlike elder’ and a `Bard with snowy locks’. When he is unexpectedly introduced to him at a dinner party, he finds himself opposite `a youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail shell and a goatee beard’, and is cruelly disappointed. All the fine qualities of Bergotte’s writing appear to go up in smoke along with the image which Marcel had previously harboured of him. Yet as they begin to talk, and Marcel listens to Bergotte’s conversation, he is gradually able to re-associate the work he so much admires with the man he sees in front of him.

I can remember alluding to this ability we have when, in the days when Matthew Arnold was still a name that mattered, a friend was preparing an edition of Culture and Anarchy. He was outraged at one point on being sent by his publisher a portrait for the cover which depicted not Arnold but John Stuart Mill. I tried to comfort him by pointing out that one Victorian with sideburns looked very much like another, and that when the true believer is gazing at the bones of a saint (my friend was a Catholic), it doesn’t much matter if these have in fact been recently picked up from the local charnel house. Yet I could see he might have been right to insist on the value of authenticity when I thought about Shakespeare. There are only two portraits of Shakespeare which are authentic in the sense that they must have been commissioned by people who knew what he looked like. The first is the engraving in the First Folio. This is the work of either the Flemish engraver Martin Droeshout or his uncle of the same name and is almost certainly copied from a painted portrait. That there were such things is evident from what is known as the `Parnassus plays’, three satirical vehicles written by and for Cambridge students and performed in St. John’s college on various occasions between 1598 and 1603. At one moment during the second of these – the first part of The Return from Parnassus – a foolish and boastful character called Gullio cries out, `Oh sweet Mr Shakespeare, I’ll have his picture in my study at court’. But if Droeshout was indeed working from a picture like the one Gullio mentions, one is tempted to say it cannot have been very good, although this is a hazardous statement given the patent technical deficiencies of the engraving. It does not take much expertise, for example, to notice how the over-sized head is grotesquely separated from the puny shoulders, rather like, as Samuel Schoenbaum memorably puts it, `the decapitated Baptist being served up to Salome’ on a lace collar. The man Droeshout depicted is bald, and so too is the second authentic portrait, the half-length, life-size bust of Shakespeare which is set back in a niche in Stratford parish church and flanked by miniature Corinthian pillars. This depicts its subject writing and with his mouth slightly open so that, to borrow Schoenbaum’s words again, it seems as if Shakespeare is either `declaiming his newly minted verses’, or gawping `in the throes of creation’. It was probably the work of Gheerhart Janssen the younger, a sculptor of Dutch descent who operated out of Southwark. It is not easy to recognise these two images as representations of the same person, even at different stages of his life. If one puts aside the notion that Droeshout was simply a bad artist, for example, one would have to say that in his final years Shakespeare developed shoulders he had never had before, and that also the hydrocephalus which, on the strength of the massive forehead in the engraving, some commentators have attributed to him, had been miraculously cured.

These two `authentic’ depictions of our greatest writer have been found very disappointing — `like a self-satisfied pork butcher’ is how a well-known critic once described the Shakespeare of the bust, is a manifestation of that same, strange prejudice against the butchering trade Stendhal exhibits. The disappointment is why an unconvincing case is made from time to time for some recently unearthed portrait of an anonymous gentleman that might be thought to show the Bard in a more favourable light. But the real solution to the difficulties the bust and engraving present is offered by Shakespeare himself. In the fourth scene of Macbeth, Duncan is clearly puzzled by his failure to have recognised the former Thane of Cawdor as a potential traitor and decides `There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’, a crucial truth which would have been confirmed for him very quickly, had he been able to survive the confirmation.

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Dissimilar though they are in so many other respects, there is one way in which two of the greatest novels in English literature are very like each other. You have to be without a literary bone in your body not to be staggered by the boundless creativity in the first half of David Copperfield. As Dickens vividly evokes the childhood of his hero, engaging fresh characters to spring up everywhere: the eccentric great aunt, the repellent Murdstone’s, the Peggottys down in Yarmouth, Mr Wickfield and his attendant evil spirit Uriah Heep, the Micawbers, the sadistic schoolmaster Creakle but also Steerforth, who in his beginnings is a subtle as well as impressive concept. The list goes on and on until you begin to wonder how any one man can people his canvas so richly, and make all the varied figures with whom he presents to his reader so interesting.

The first half of Sons and Lovers is more narrowly focused and yet, with a far smaller cast of characters, Lawrence can create scenes just as absorbing as those in David Copperfield. Much of the power in both novels comes from their authors have tapped into their own childhood experiences and, in Lawrence’s case, it makes unforgettable the description of the tensions in the Morel household, the birth of Paul, his relations with his sister, the moment when he has to collect his father’s wages, his visit with his mother to the local market or to Nottingham and his early experience of the world of work. These and many other episodes paint a picture of growing up in a working-class environment which was unparalleled when it first appeared and has not been bettered since.

It is impossible to read the first halves of these two novels and not feel that you are in the presence of two great writers. But then, in the second halves, it seems to me hard not to experience some disappointment, given the extraordinarily high standard which has been set. In the case of Dickens, the problem is in part a consequence of his own remarkable inventiveness. The conventions of the Victorian novel demand that all the characters have to receive their just desserts and none should be left unaccounted for. The fact that there are so many of them in David Copperfield means that Dickens’s undoubted talent for ingenious plot construction is stretched to the limit so that even such minor figures as Miss Mowcher or Mr Mell can receive a final word; and that he has to spend more space than is comfortable on exposition. But this is only a minor problem compared with the one associated with sex. Not that there is any sex overtly present in the relationship between the elderly academic Dr Strong and his all-too-young wife Annie; in David’s own relations with his child-wife Dora and then Agnes; or even in Steerforth’s seduction of `little Em’ly’ (it is not so much his physical attributes which are described as attracting her but the possibility he offers of becoming a lady).

In part or perhaps largely because of the conventions of his time, Dickens’s touch becomes very unsure when he has to deal with matters of this kind. He teases his readers with the possibility that Annie has sought and found sexual satisfaction with her cousin Jack, who is her own age, but then makes them feel that they ought to be ashamed of themselves for entertaining improper thoughts by having her exonerate herself completely and declare how wonderful it is to have a husband forty years older than yourself (words that George Eliot was no doubt remembering when she created Casaubon in Middlemarch). `Ruined’ by Steerforth, little Em’ly can only find redemption deep in the Australian bush, where she lives a life of exemplary self-denial, while Dora proves so childishly incompetent in her marriage to David that we are glad to see the back of her so that he can finally be united with Agnes, a conclusion Dickens makes several unsuccessful efforts to persuade us we haven’t always seen coming. It’s not that there isn’t some very fine writing in these accounts (the description of David’s initial infatuation with Dora is especially brilliant), but they involve issues where he is clearly not comfortable and which fail to bring out what he does best.

By the time Lawrence was writing it was possible to be more open in describing what it is that holds men and women together, or how love and sex are related. Paul’s initial problem with Miriam is that fond as he is of her, he cannot conceive they’re ever being married. For Miriam herself, this is because of his morbidly intense attachment to his mother. The third person in the triangle is Clara Dawes who, as a wife separated from her husband, can offer him sex without the need for commitment. Lawrence handles this imbroglio well but if there is a distinct sense of drift and, if various aspects of the situation seem dwelt on too long, it is because there is no obvious solution, even after the death of the mother has been so effective because so harrowingly described. Like David Copperfield, but much more so, Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel and there is a problem with the autobiographical form which may affect both works. `Call no man happy until he’s dead’ said the Greeks and it’s hard for many autobiographers to bring their works to a satisfactory conclusion when the later parts of their lives have not (as it were) been finally settled. If Sons and Lovers move too slowly towards its inconclusive end it may in part be because, for most of the period of its composition, Lawrence does not seem to have been sure where, emotionally speaking, he himself would go next. Dickens certainly provides David Copperfield with a firm conclusion but one which feels contrived and may have been at odds with how he truly felt about his own marriage at the time of writing. Here then is just one possible reason, among many more, why it is that when people are asked whether they enjoyed either of these two novels, they are inclined to say: `Very much, especially the first half’.

For more information on David Ellis’s work, visit his website – dellis-author.co.uk

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Eastwood is not difficult to find.  If you’re coming from the London area, you drive up the M1 until junction 26 and then, instead of turning right into the sprawling megalopolis which is now Nottingham, turn instead left onto the A 610 towards Ripley, Matlock and the Derbyshire Peak District.  Don’t be surprised to find a lot of cars going that way.  Some of them may be visiting the birthplace of D. H. Lawrence, which is then only a couple of miles away, but the majority are probably heading for the Ikea store, which is also nearby.  The contiguity reminds me that there was at least one great 20th-century writer who would not have had any trouble putting together those flat packs that can drive the rest of us up the wall.

The dual carriageway takes you around the south side of Eastwood only intersecting with the town near the bottom of the hill on its extreme Western side.  To see what Lawrence described so well in his late journal article `Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, you need to take the old road into Eastwood that slopes gently up towards this hilltop.  When he talked about it in 1929, his home town was far from being wealthy and full of what he calls `scrappy, ugly mid-Victorian shops’.  He inveighed against `the moneyed classes and promoters of industry’ who condemned their workers to ugliness, claiming that `the human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread’.  Today the shops are not all of course mid-Victorian, although the most interesting of them look like survivors from the 1950s, but they are almost uniformly suggestive of a community with very little cash to spare.  Supermarkets provide the current shorthand for estimating the wealth of an area and there is no sign of a Sainsbury’s here, let alone a Waitrose.  Most of the buildings are for need not show, the one exception being a pub on the right as you come into the centre of Eastwood which has been brightly refurbished by Wetherspoons and is called The Lady Chatterley.  I rather like the evident intention to create palaces for the people which inspires this firm.  Only recently I happened to stop in Harrogate and had a drink in the truly magnificent Winter Gardens, all columns, stuccoed ceilings and Edwardian splendour.  The name of its present owner was hardly visible but evident enough in the very reasonable price of the beer, and the day-long availability of the full English breakfast.

It is if you turn right down quite a steep incline, shortly before you reach the top of the hill in Eastwood, that you come across the house where Lawrence was born.  That is now a museum and part of a whole network of small terraced houses.  Some time ago the Council did up the area, with `European’ money, and made it look quite smart.  When this gentrification has been attempted with similar areas in parts of Oxford and Cambridge, the result has been the transformation of the old two up and two downs into desirable dwellings worth half a million.  But that’s because those who bought them had well-paid jobs nearby.  The run-down look which the streets around the birthplace are once again beginning to acquire is one sign among many of a Council under financial pressure.  It has been a tactic of the central government to devolve a few spending powers to local councils so that someone else can be blamed for austerity cuts.  The latest problem to preoccupy those in and around Eastwood who take an interest in these matters is the Council’s closure of Durban House.

This is a solid, late nineteenth-century building which stands on its own grounds to the right of the road just as you are leaving Eastwood and heading down the hill towards Ripley.  It used to be known as the `D. H. Lawrence Heritage Centre’ but, despite a vigorous campaign from locals, was closed down in March.  The last time I was there the museum upstairs had an exhibition celebrating the once dominant mining industry, and on the ground floor, there was a café and rooms for meetings and talks.  It was a great facility but too costly to maintain, apparently.  What linked it to Lawrence was that Durban House was the headquarters of the coal-mining firm which employed his father and one of the many memorable episodes in Sons and Lovers has the young Paul Morel being sent to collect his father’s wages from there.  Confused with self-consciousness at having to push forward from behind the burly miners when Mr Morel’s name is called out, he is too bewildered to count the money properly and see that the `stoppages’ have been correctly calculated so that the clerk has the opportunity to ask him sarcastically what they teach him at school and someone else to call out `Nowt but algibbra and French’.  When he gets home he says he will never go there again and complains about what the clerk has said.  `They never taught him much’, Mrs Morel observes to comfort him and in a tone which is characteristic of her as it also was (I imagine) of Mrs Lawrence, goes on, `that is a fact — neither manners nor wit — and his cunning he was born with’.

The latest news about Durban House is that a local businesswoman has put in an application to transform it into a boutique beauty spa and salon.  She is anxious to keep the connection to Lawrence with an exhibition of his works throughout the building.  Interviewed about the idea on Nottingham radio, a stalwart of the D. H. Lawrence society agreed that this was better than having the building empty and deteriorating, and then wryly reminded his interviewer that Lawrence was after all a proponent of life in the flesh rather than the mind.  Part of the proposal was for a hot tub in the garden and I was reminded that Lawrence was a practitioner of this kind of relaxation well before it became fashionable.  When he was living in Taos he would go with friends to sit in some hot springs nearby (the same Manby hot springs in which Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda can be watched skinny dipping with two girls in that 1970s cult classic Easy Rider).  Perhaps, then, it won’t be long before a shapely bare arm will be seen waving to passers-by as they take leave of Eastwood, although it has to be said that the number of days when the heat might tempt you to take all your clothes off is rather less frequent in Nottinghamshire than they are in New Mexico.

For more information on David Ellis’s work, go to dellis-author.co.uk.   

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