Lawrence’s Early Life

Abstract

In his autobiographical work, Return to Yesterday, published in 1931, Ford Madox Ford describes a visit to Lawrence at his family’s home in Eastwood. The visit would have taken place during the spring of 1912, while Lawrence was convalescing after the pneumonia that led him to resign his teaching post in Croydon. In March of that year he met Frieda Weekley, the wife of his former Professor of French at University College, Nottingham, and on 3 May Lawrence and Frieda eloped together to Germany. This is what Ford says he found:

I visited him in Nottingham and was astonished at the atmosphere in which he lived though less astonished by then as to the great sense of culture in his work. Lawrence’s father, of French extraction and great force of character, was a buttyman down the mine and one of his brothers also worked underground. His sister I think was, like Lawrence, a school teacher. Other young people from down the pit or from schools and offices drifted in and out of the Lawrences’ house with the sort of freedom from restraint that I have only seen elsewhere in American small towns. I have never anywhere found so educated a society. Those young people knew the things that my generation in the great English schools hardly even chattered about. Lawrence, the father, came in from down the mine on a Saturday evening. He threw a great number of coins on the kitchen table and counted them out to his waiting mates. All the while the young people were talking about Nietzsche and Wagner and Leopardi and Flaubert and Karl Marx and Darwin and occasionally the father would interrupt his counting to contradict them. And they would discuss the French Impressionists and the primitive Italians and play Chopin or Debussy on the piano.