ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Sons and Lovers. D. H. Lawrence
Читать онлайн.Название Sons and Lovers
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007382606
Автор произведения D. H. Lawrence
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство HarperCollins
D. H. Lawrence’s Motives
Some creative people possess a desire to use their chosen medium as a form of self expression to such an extent that they are perceived as dangerously subversive and D. H. Lawrence certainly fits into that bracket. Partly fuelled by his contempt for conventions surrounding the ‘done thing’, but also because he had a genuinely libertarian mindset, Lawrence could not tow the line. In his opinion, if people were offended by his writing, it was because they were too concerned about society and what others thought of them. Lawrence possessed a kind of self-confidence borne of a desire to speak his mind. What he failed to acknowledge is that societies require rules to prevent them from descending into anarchy. And to preserve those rules, it requires people to be conservative about conventions and orthodoxies. It wasn’t that those in authority necessarily disagreed wholeheartedly with Lawrence’s take on humanity, but that they felt it was unnecessary to express it, as everyone already knew that people broke the rules.
With that as a starting point it meant that Lawrence’s novels were automatically reduced to being sensationalistic prose, peppered with adolescent facetiousness by way of over-indulgent descriptions of sex and the kind of language that was the preserve of the spoken word in insalubrious circumstances.
Some have attributed Lawrence’s turbulence to his sexual confusion as a young man. It is known that he had affections for members of the same sex, but in later life took a wife, which perhaps suggests that his courage drew short of open homosexuality. It may be that this imposed behavioural censorship was such a frustration to him that he used his literature as an outlet to vent his spleen at a society that would not let him be himself.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels
CHAPTER 2 The Birth of Paul, and another Battle
CHAPTER 3 The Casting off of Morel—the Taking on of William
CHAPTER 4 The Young Life of Paul
CHAPTER 5 Paul Launches into Life
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels
“The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell Row.” Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coalminers, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.
Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place. The gin-pits were elbowed aside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron field of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared. Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’s first mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.
About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had acquired an evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away.
Carston, Waite and Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down the valleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soon there were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the sandstone among the woods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory of the Carthusians and past Robin Hood’s Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mine among corn-fields; from Minton across the farm-lands of the valleyside to Bunker’s Hill, branching off there, and running north to Beggarlee and Selby, that looks over at Crich and the hills of Derbyshire; six mines like black studs on the countryside, linked by a loop of fine chain, the railway.
To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the Bottoms.
The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’ dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby.
The houses themselves were substantial and very decent. One could walk all round, seeing little front gardens with auriculas and saxifrage in the shadow of the bottom block, sweet-williams and pinks in the sunny top block; seeing neat front windows, little porches, little privet hedges, and dormer windows for the attics. But that was outside; that was the view on to the uninhabited parlours of all the colliers’ wives. The dwelling-room, the kitchen, was at the back of the