New Light on D. H. Lawrence
By HARRY T. MOORE
IN D. H. Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire people speak of a man's origins as his " come-from." It is surprising that so little is known of Lawrence's own " come-from " despite the numerous biographies devoted to him. That Lawrence was the son of a collier and of a woman who felt she had married beneath her is well known. But the enquiry has always stopped at this point. Yet, as in the case of any other remarkable writer, the mattes of Lawrence's ancestry is of great interest, not only in relation to certain traits of temperament, but also in relation to his creative gift—for D. H. Lawrence was not the first member of his family to possess such a gift. As we shall see, his great-grandfather was a man of talent and of some little fame.
But let us consider for a moment what has been known of Lawrence's ancestry in the past. Almost nothing. The first part of Sons and Lovers is strictly autobiographical, and in it Lawrence gives a few brief hints as to his parents' background. The father is portrayed as a man who has spent most of his life in the mines —and this miner has an embittered mother. At least her daughter- in-law finds her so. This daughter-in-law's origins are lightly sketched in ; her family had lost its money in the lace markets ; her father had become an engineer ; she had taught school for a while before her marriage. Lawrence's biographers have gone no further than this, except to add that the mother's maiden name was Lydia Beardsall. Even the book by Lawrence's sister Ada (Young Lorenzo, by Ada Clarke and G. Stuart Gelder), which contains the fullest account of Lawrence's childhood, merely quotes the passage from Sons and Lovers instead of providing further factual informa- tion. The book does not even tell, for example, that before his father and mother first met one another they were relatives—they were related by marriage. For Arthur Lawrence's aunt, his mother's sister, had married Lydia Beardsall's uncle, her mother's brother. It was at the house of this uncle that Lydia met Arthur Lawrence, late in 1874 or early in 1875.
The home of Lydia's Uncle John and of Arthur's Aunt Alice was in Basford, one of the northern suburbs of the city of Nottingham. Arthur had come over from his native Eastwood (where he lived and worked in the district called Brinsley) to help sink a pit at Clifton, one of the southern suburbs of Nottingham, and in the evenings he used to visit his aunt. When Lydia came to see her uncle, she crossed Nottingham from the southern end, the Sneinton district, where most of the large Beardsall family lived.
D. H. Lawrence's eldest brother, George, says that Arthur Lawrence's father came from Nottingham too, though the general impression has been that he came from the south of England. And family tradition has it that Arthur Lawrence's grandfather was a Frenchman who fought for Napoleon at Waterloo. The friend of Lawrence's youth, Jessie Chambers, mentions this tradition in her memoir (D. H. Lawrence : A Personal Record, by E. T.). In Sons and Lovers the father's grandfather is referred to as " a French refugee who had married an English barmaid—if it had been a marriage." George Lawrence speaks today of " my great- grandfather who was killed at Waterloo."
Of Lawrence's grandfather much more is known. He went from Nottingham to become tailor at Brinsley colliery in the days When the mine-owners supplied the men with the clothes they wore in the pits. D. H. Lawrence remembered from childhood his grandfather's shop with its great rolls of flannel for the thick vests, "and the strange old sewing-machine, like nothing else on earth, which sewed the massive pit-trousers." , Ada Lawrence Clarke recalled her grandfather in his eighties as "a big, shambling, generous-hearted man whose waistcoat front was always powdered "tih snuff. He was very deaf and didn't talk much, but he never forgot to ask ' Would you like some apples, my duckies ? ' " His deafness, Mrs. Clarke said, protected him from the shrill complaints ct hi; wife, who used the front room of their cottage as a shop.
Her drapery trade had once flourished there at Brinsley, but it was declining in the 'nineties when the Lawrence children used to walk across the fields from Eastwood to see their grandparents.
This grandmother had been Sarah Parsons, daughter of Adam Parsons, once prominent in the stockings and silk industry in Nottingham ; Sarah's brother made a fortune of his own in New Zealand. The John Lawrence whom she married was a gay young man in Nottingham, an aquatic sportsman on the Trent and a noted boxer. He had huge hands, and his son Arthur (D. H. Lawrence's father) used to say that John Lawrence once. in an informal match, defeated the English champion, Ben Caunt.
Lawrence's family connections on his mother's side were also Nottingham burghers. Lawrence in all his published writings has given only a few hints about his maternal grandfather. In Sons and Lovers " George Coppard " is described as " proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter ; who preferred theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul ; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic ; who ignored all sensuous pleasure—he was very different from the miner." In a letter to Edward Garnett in 1915 Lawrence spoke of his grandfather in relation to Jesse Boot, who later became Lord Trent: " My mother's father and this grand-duke of drugs quarrelled and had a long war as to which of them should govern a chapel in Sneinton, in Nottingham. My grandfather won."
In these two brief references Lawrence has characterised for us his grandfather Beardsall, whose first name way George. This man, who died at the turn of the century, was noted not only for his capabilities as an engineer, but also for the forcefulness of his preaching and the violence of his quarrels. David Garnett says Lawrence told him that George Beardsall " was the earliest friend and collaborator of William Booth, and that he broke off with the ' General ' over their joint plans for the formation of what turned into the Salvation Army."
This George Beardsall, preacher and hymn-singer, scion of a family that had lost its money in the collapse of the lace industry in the 1830s, stands in the background of Lawrence's work. In the essay " Hymns in a Man's Life " (in Assorted Articles) Lawrence told how important the Protestant hymns were in the forming of his imagination—and it is no wonder that they were so important, for he had gospel hymns in his blood. It has apparently not been mentioned before in print that his great-grandfather on his mother's side was a famous writer of hymns.
George Beardsall had married Lydia Newton, daughter of John Newton, whom George Lawrence remembers to this day from staying with him in childhood: John Newton was an old man then. " always at his piano," and he was physically frail in somewhat the same way as George's brother, David Herbert. John Newton, who lived from 1802 to 1886, was most of his adult life a lace- maker (or twisthand, as the job was formerly called). He was also a noted choirmaster. Once, in order to pay for a book of his hymns, he walked from town to town getting subscribers and giving concerts. The resultant volume was given the rather Lawrencean title of The Pilgrim. John Newton's most famous hymn is one still sung in chapels—" Sovereignty." (He is not to be confused, of course, with the earlier hymn-writer John Newton, 1725-1807, the collaborator of Cowper.) Biographical studies of Lawrence have so far been chiefly environmentaL Certainly this approach is important for a com- plete understanding of Lawrence, for the scars of his childhood show lividly through all his work. But the influence of his ancestry must not be under-estimated. If much of his writing has a biblical quality, much of it also has a hymnal quality. Occasionally this dominates the work, as in The Plumed Serpent and in many of the poems, particularly those in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, whose very title was taken from a hymn. Perhaps from his father—towards whom he felt a confusion of love and antagonism—and perhaps from all the men who came home from the mines black-faced each day, Lawrence got his worship of the " dark " races, so marked in his later work. As for the rapturous cadences of most of his prose and poetry—certainly they must owe something to the exalted old hymns that beat in his blood.
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