CHAPTER TWO

A Disastrous
Marriage

LAWRENCE came from a family of craftsmen and composers: tailors, miners, lacemakers and hymn writers. Though he vaguely claimed a great-grandfather who came to England as a refugee after the French Revolution, his family history actually began with his paternal grandfather, John Lawrence. He was a tall, silent, strange man, famous in his district as a dancer and a boxer. Trained as a military tailor, he supplied moleskin trousers for the Brinsley mine, near Eastwood, and lived to be eighty-six. Lawrence later remembered “the great rolls of coarse flannel and pit-cloth which stood in the corner of my grandfather’s shop when I was a small boy, and the big, strange old sewing machine, like nothing else on earth, which sewed the massive pit trousers.”¹

John Lawrence had four sons. George and Arthur were considered well-to-do miners; James was killed in the Brinsley colliery; Walter was notorious for his drinking and violence. In March 1900, “Lawrence’s Uncle Walter, his father’s youngest brother, was charged with ‘unlawfully wounding and committing grievous bodily harm upon Walter Lawrence junior on the 18th March.’ After a teatime argument Walter senior had thrown at his fifteen-year-old son a sharpening steel which had penetrated the youth’s ear causing ‘brain trouble, paralysis, meningitis’ and subsequent death.”²

Lawrence’s father, Arthur, the oldest son, was born in 1846 in a humble cottage near a quarry hole at the Brinsley railroad crossing. He left school when he could scarcely read and write, entered the colliery at the age of seven and worked from five in the morning until nine at night. He sang in the Newstead Abbey choir as a boy. Like his father, he was a well-known dancer and, in his youth, ran a dancing class. Enid Hilton remembered him from her childhood as a handsome, virile man with an imposing beard and impressive bearing. She thought him a nice rather than a fearful figure, and certainly no fool.

Arthur’s coloring and voice gave Jessie Chambers an impression of richness and warmth. To her older sister, May, “he looked handsome in a rugged way: black curly hair and beard streaked slightly with silver; blue eyes smiling kindly in a rugged face, glancing over the [chapel] congregation with a friendly air; well-built and strong in figure; and a genial manner.” May added that Lawrence’s mother, by comparison, “appeared bitter, disillusioned, and austere.” In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence first explains why his mother was immediately attracted to the vital and passionate miner. He then describes how the once genial man, after years of marriage to a bitterly disillusioned wife, had been transformed into a surly brute: he was “well set up, erect, and very smart. He had wavy black hair that shone again, and a vigorous black beard that had never been shaved. His cheeks were ruddy, and his red, moist mouth was noticeable because he laughed so often and so heartily. . . . He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody.”³

Lawrence and his younger sister, Ada, accepted and propagated their mother’s version of her family history, which she invented to establish her superiority. Lydia Beardsall claimed descent from an old, prosperous Puritan family, who had fought with Cromwell and had been ruined by a depression in the lace trade. Her maternal grandfather, John Newton (1802–86), was a Methodist composer whose hymn “Sovereignty” was No. 356 in the Methodist Hymnbook. Lawrence claimed, with some significant qualifications: “My mother was, I suppose, superior. She came from town, and belonged really to the lower bourgeoisie. She spoke King’s English, without an accent.” Ada stated that Lydia’s “father had worked as an engineer in the Sheerness dockyard, and she became a schoolteacher.”⁴

Roy Spencer has discovered that George Beardsall was not an engineer, nor was Lydia a teacher, in the normally accepted sense of the words, and that she had absolutely no claim to class superiority. Lydia, one of six daughters, was born in 1851 and grew up in the slums of industrial Manchester and in the squalid streets of the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Her father, who described himself as an engineer but was actually a fitter who assembled machinery, had been permanently disabled in an industrial accident in 1870. Lydia had been dismissed for incompetence as a pupil teacher when she was an adolescent of fourteen. A school inspector’s report from Sheerness, Kent, dated July 1865, led directly to Lydia’s dismissal: “L. Beardsall’s Examination Papers and H.M. Inspector’s Report as to her qualifications for a Teacher are so unsatisfactory that my Lords have had considerable hesitation in sanctioning her continuance as a Pupil Teacher. Unless her next examination is passed with credit her name will be removed from the Register of Pupil Teachers.”

After her father’s accident and Lydia’s brief, unsuccessful career as an apprentice teacher, the Beardsall family moved to the slums of Nottingham. Lydia was slaving away in a tedious job in the lace trade when she met her future husband. Both of Lawrence’s parents were in fact “born into the working-class. . . . At the time they married Arthur Lawrence was socially superior to his bride, for his father was a settled, hard-working and respected man . . . and his mother ran a successful shop.”⁵ Though Lydia came from town, Arthur had the comparative advantage of a boyhood in Eastwood, which, unlike the urban slums of the Midlands, was near the countryside and still connected to rural life and traditions.

Ada’s description of her rather frail mother suggests that she was intellectually rather than physically impressive: “She was small and slight in figure, her brown hair, sprinkled with grey, brushed straight back from a broad brow; clear blue eyes that always looked fearless and unfaltering, and a delicately shaped nose, not quite straight owing to an accident which occurred when she was a girl; tiny hands and feet, and a sure carriage.” Jessie Chambers, who was cruelly victimized by Mrs. Lawrence, noted a tinge of patronage in her voice, though “she struck me as a bright, vivacious little woman, full of vitality, and amusingly emphatic in her way of speaking.” She also observed Lydia’s energy, sharp tongue, icy disdain and unshakable conviction of self-righteousness:

Mrs. Lawrence, though small, was an arresting figure with shrewd grey eyes in a pale face, and light-coloured hair. Her smallness was more than compensated for by her vigour and determination. . . . Her confidence in herself and her pronouncements upon people and things excited my wonder. It was new to me to meet anyone so certain of herself and of her own rightness. But she could be vivid in speech, gay and amusing; and in spite of a keen edge to her tongue, she was warm-hearted. . . .

Mrs. Lawrence, in her black dress, would sit in the low rocking chair like a little figure of fate, coldly disapproving. . . . Her prestige was unchallenged; it would have seemed like sacrilege to question her authority.⁶

Enid Hilton, who also knew Lydia from childhood, thought she was superior in name only—and even more superior when ill; and was both respected and disliked for her haughty airs. The most incisive, hitherto unpublished, account of Lydia’s character was recorded by William Ernest Lawrence. The son of her oldest son, George, he lived with his grandmother’s family at the turn of the century, when his uncle D. H. Lawrence was in high school. William Ernest stresses Lydia’s isolation in the village, her dominating personality, fanatical cleanliness, strict discipline and self-proclaimed superiority:

She was as unlike and unaccepted in Eastwood as I should imagine the devil would be in heaven. . . .

She was diminutive, but a very determined, autocratic, overbearing type. . . .

I had to be scrubbed like a ruddy cherub and my boots cleaned about ten times. I daren’t hardly breathe when I went to chapel with her. . . . She insisted on her own pew in the church, and no one on God’s earth would dare to go and sit in that pew. If they did, she stood and looked at the minister until he came and removed them like a shot. She wouldn’t stand that at any price.⁷

Lydia Lawrence also had considerable refinement and culture. She read widely, wrote verse and loved serious intellectual discussions. In “Return to Bestwood,” Lawrence’s last word on his beloved mother, he addressed her directly and adopted a mildly satiric tone when describing her naive idealism and misguided respect for the ruling class: “You were so keen on progress: a decent working man, and a good wage! You paid my father’s union pay for him, for so many years! You were at your Woman’s Guild when they brought you word your father, the old tyrannus, was dead! At the same time you believed so absolutely in the ultimate benevolence of all the masters, of all the upper classes. One had to be grateful to them, after all!”⁸

Lydia’s one claim to intellectual superiority (by association) was based on the marriage of her younger sister Ada to a man who, after an extraordinary career, became an internationally respected authority on Arabic language and literature. Lawrence’s uncle Fritz Krenkow was born in Germany in 1872, came to England twelve years later, worked for a hosiery firm in Leicester beginning in 1899 and became a naturalized citizen in 1911. Though he had no formal academic training, he taught himself Arabic, received an honorary degree from the University of Leipzig in 1929, was professor of Islamic Studies at Muslim University, in Aligarh, India, during 1929–30 and professor of Arabic at the University of Bonn during 1931–35. Though Krenkow had an erect Prussian bearing, he was completely dominated by his prim and proper wife. She made him slavishly wait on her and cut some offensive pages from Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow before she allowed the scholar to read it. She became ill when he taught in India, disliked the country and forced him to return to Europe.⁹ Krenkow, the first scholar and intellectual Lawrence had met, encouraged his nephew to use his impressive library during visits to Leicester and to retranslate Egyptian fellahin poetry from German into English. Lawrence was drawn to Germany when Krenkow was living in the Rhineland and visited him there in 1912.

Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall, though temperamentally and intellectually opposed, were distantly related by marriage. Jonathan Chambers, Jessie’s younger brother, described their meeting, their mutual attraction and the first of Arthur’s minor deceptions (quite possibly matched by Lydia’s own). He also noted that Lydia was particularly responsive to Arthur after having been disappointed in love by a “refined” young man who decided to marry a wealthy older woman:

[Arthur Lawrence] was a collier, very skilled and highly respected and already a butty, which represented the climax of the average collier’s ambitions. He was also an attractive character, lively and gay, with an infectious laugh and a good singing voice. . . . [He] was a keen dancer and it was as a result of a meeting in a dance-hall in Nottingham that he met his future wife. . . . [He] had dancing blue eyes, a long black curly beard, and [was] a lively talker, of course in the Eastwood dialect. Lydia Beardsall was also a clever and attractive woman trained as a teacher and lately jilted by a schoolmaster. They were drawn to one another from the first encounter, and he soon asked her to marry him. When she asked him what he did for a living he said he was a contractor. Now that was strictly true. He contracted to get coal.

Ada said that Lydia “was attracted by his graceful dancing, his musical voice, his gallant manner and his overflowing humour and good spirits. He, on his side, was drawn to the rather quiet, reserved and ladylike girl.” They married, two days after Christmas, in 1875, when Arthur was twenty-nine and Lydia twenty-four. He passionately loved his wife, worshipped the ground she walked on and was proud to have married a “superior” woman. Lydia, who soon realized she had been deceived by passion and had made a terrible mistake, “despised his guts.”¹⁰

Willie Hopkin, who liked Lawrence’s father, acutely observed that “Arthur Lawrence was not of the material to mould into his wife’s idea of a gentleman. He was one naturally. . . . She was a foolish woman to think she could alter her husband and force him into her ways.”¹¹ But when she realized that her rough, uneducated husband had failed to match her expectations, she ruthlessly and relentlessly made him pay for her disappointment.

In Sons and Lovers, a violent argument breaks out when the mother refuses to serve dinner to the hungry, exhausted miner. Lydia also regarded as humiliating and degrading the wife’s traditional task of washing her husband’s back when he bathed in a tin tub on Saturday night. Jonathan Chambers wrote that she never forgave him for being a common man. “She considered she had been basely betrayed; she had been lowered in her own eyes and she would punish him as she was well able to do. She had a tongue like a whiplash and laid about her with such effect that Arthur Lawrence eventually became almost a stranger in his own house.”¹²

The Lawrences were known throughout the village as an unhappy couple. Lydia had no tact or patience with her husband, taunted and provoked him, treated him with icy disdain, mocked his coarse habits, condemned his drinking, refused to sleep with him and taught the children to look down on their father. An Eastwood neighbor recalled that Arthur “had to listen to them but was never allowed to tell them what was in his mind. They were not interested in his work at all. . . . He was treated more like a lodger than a father.”¹³ If he tried to speak he would be ordered up to bed.

Arthur’s faults came from a weak rather than a malevolent character. Lawrence’s novel and his autobiographical essays portray Arthur as a handsome and vital man, a loving but frightening father, at his best when working with his hands. Though he was sometimes drunk and occasionally violent, he was faithful to his wife, worked hard and held a steady job. As a character in Lawrence’s story “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” exclaims: “If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.” The constant struggle for dominance in his parents’ marriage (as in Lawrence’s own) made children and friends nervous and uneasy. “There seemed to be a tightness in the air,” Jessie noted, “as if something unusual might happen any minute. It was somehow exciting, yet it made me feel a little sick.”¹⁴

In an unpublished autobiographical essay, “That Women Know Best,” written in the late 1920s, Lawrence recalled a vivid incident in which his father threatened his mother and insisted on domination. Though frightened, Lawrence felt this male assertiveness was entirely appropriate. But his mother undermined his father’s claim to authority with a characteristically caustic remark. Though men pretend to dominate, Lawrence suggested, women really rule:

When I was a small boy, I remember my father shouting at my mother: “I’ll make you tremble at the sound of my footstep!”—To me it seemed a very terrible, but still perfectly legitimate thing to say, and though I’m sure I wept, I secretly felt it was splendid and right. Women and very small children should by nature tremble at the sound of the approaching wrath of the lord and master.

But alas! My mother, even though she was furious, only gave one of her peculiar amused little laughs and replied: “Which boots will you wear?”¹⁵

The fiercest point of contention was drink. Lydia, a teetotaler, had persuaded Arthur to take the pledge when they married. When he broke his promise, she ruined their life with moral frenzy against John Barleycorn. Ada, though extremely sympathetic to her mother, confessed that Lydia “would wait up for him, at night, her rage seething, until on his arrival it boiled over into a torrent of biting truths which turned him from his slightly fuddled and pleasantly apologetic mood into a brutal and coarse beast.” Lawrence was undoubtedly thinking of his comparatively tolerant father when, at the end of Etruscan Places, he sympathized with the prisoner who had murdered his wife: “He had a passion for the piano: and for thirty years his wife nagged him when he played. So one day he silently and suddenly killed her. So, the nagging of thirty years [was] silenced.”¹⁶

George Neville, Lawrence’s closest childhood friend, insisted that Arthur “was no drunken reprobate” and agreed with Willie Hopkin and Jonathan Chambers that “he was quite a bit above the average collier of that district in those days.” Since Arthur was virtually driven from his own house, he naturally fled to the pubs and drank with his friends. He occasionally got drunk, but never drank on Sundays or missed work, and was certainly not a habitual drunkard.

In December 1910, a week before his mother died of cancer, Lawrence synthesized his view of his parents’ marriage and anticipated the themes of Sons and Lovers: “My mother was a clever, ironical, delicately moulded woman, of good, old burgher descent. She married below her. My father was dark, ruddy, with a fine laugh. He is a coal miner. He was one of the sanguine temperament, warm and hearty, but unstable: he lacked principle, as my mother would have said. He deceived her and lied to her. She despised him—he drank. Their marriage has been one carnal, bloody fight.” He concluded by comparing Arthur, who was deeply distressed by Lydia’s illness, to a burnt-out coal: “I look at my father—he is like a cinder. It is very terrible, mis-marriage.”¹⁷

Toward the end of his life, Lawrence adopted a more sympathetic view of his father’s character, praising the defiance of conventional behavior (a striking contrast to his mother’s rigid respectability) that he himself had imitated:

To the end of his days his idea of life was to escape over the fringe of virtue and drink beer and perhaps poach an occasional rabbit. . . .

He wasn’t even respectable, in so far as he got drunk rather frequently, [rarely] went near a chapel, and was usually rather rude to his little immediate bosses at the pit.

He practically never had a good stall all the time he was a butty, because he was always saying tiresome and foolish things about the men just above him in control at the mine.¹⁸

In the late 1920s Lawrence also told his friends Rhys Davies and Achsah Brewster that he now understood and respected his father—“a piece of the gay old England that had gone”—much more than he had when he wrote Sons and Lovers. He thought his parents’ quarrels were caused more by his mother’s malicious taunts than by his father’s drunkenness. He believed he had not done justice to his father, grieved over the hostile portrait and felt like rewriting the novel. He remembered:

When children they had accepted the dictum of their mother that their father was a drunkard, therefore was contemptible, but that as Lawrence had grown older he had come to see him in a different light; to see his unquenchable fire and relish for living. Now he blamed his mother for her self-righteousness, her invulnerable Christian virtue within which she was entrenched. She had brought down terrible scenes of vituperation on their heads from which she might have protected them. . . . She would turn to the whimpering children and ask them if they were not disgusted with such a father. He would look at the row of frightened children, and say: “Never mind, my duckies, you needna be afraid of me. I’ll do ye na harm.”¹⁹

One of Lawrence’s biographers, Emile Delavenay, writes with astonishing imperception that “in the formative years of Lawrence’s personality, his father’s influence was either non-existent or completely negative.”²⁰ On the contrary, Lawrence drew equally from his parents during childhood. From his mother he absorbed artistic sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, ambition, perfectionism, habits of study, a work ethic and a notion of bourgeois respectability; from his father, intuition, vitality, zest for life, love of nature, defiance of authority, scorn for materialism and rejection of conventional values. He married a woman whose personality and temperament were diametrically opposed to his mother’s narrow, genteel, respectable, rigid, repressed, puritanical, sanctimonious and self-righteous character. Throughout his adult life Lawrence nourished and advocated the qualities inherited from his father, just as he rejected and suppressed those traits that came from his mother.