ABSTRACT
This excerpt is taken from one of the short stories in Lawrence's second collection, England, My England, published in 1922 although written during 1919. Its setting is the industrial Midlands where Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885, grew up, and located much of his writing about the lives of ordinary people. The son of a Nottinghamshire miner and an exschoolteacher, his childhood was uncomfortable owing to the pressure on family finances of four other children, and also to the stormy relationship of his parents. Nevertheless, his mother determined that he should not follow his father into mining, and encouraged him at school. At thirteen he obtained a scholarship to Nottingham High School, but left before his sixteenth birthday to work first as a clerk in a surgical goods factory at thirteen shillings a week, and then as a teacher in Eastwood. He entered Nottingham University College in 1906 to study for a teacher's certificate, and was already writing poetry and short stories. In the three years from 1911 to 1913 he published three novels, The White Peacock, The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers, the last of these largely autobiographical.
