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Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.'There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not.'In his quest to find his emotional and independent self, Paul Morel is torn between the strong, Oedipal bond he has with his mother and the relationships he forges as a young adult, with chaste Miriam and the provocative Clara. As Paul matures and struggles with his own and his mother's feelings towards the other women in his life, Lawrence expertly crafts a timeless and universal story of family, love and the relationships that define us.
Collins Classics
History of Collins (#ulink_35e89f27-43b4-5409-aee4-50b2b8fe1465)
In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times (#ulink_aa09777d-9093-5b63-97cc-5175bf539442)
Post-Victorian Britain
David Herbert Lawrence was a creative talent who consistently tested the boundaries of acceptability through his work. He viewed post-Victorian Britain as morally bankrupt due to the effects of industri-alization and the associated changes in social structure and was generally regarded as antiestablishment by his contemporaries. The sexual content of his literature was considered by many at the time as little more than pornography prose. While other writers merely implied instances of sexual encounter in their work, Lawrence wrote detailed descriptive accounts of his character’s sexual exploits. He also dared to suggest that class divides were crossed for want of sexual gratification and for that he became something of a social pariah.
In his third novel; Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence explores the Oedipus complex – an unhealthy affection between a mother and her sons. The analytical psychologist Sigmund Freud had coined the term in 1910 and his work on psychology was very new and enticing during that period. Lawrence wrote the book, drawing upon and interpreting his own relationship with his mother. Sons and Lovers explores how difficult it can be for cosseted sons to escape the emotional ties of their mothers. The basic theme is that the protagonist, Paul Morel, always feels that his mother owns his soul even when he breaks away and takes a lover. He can therefore never fully give his soul to a lover.
Lawrence was also reportedly sexually confused in his early life. He had intimacies with young men as well as women and although in the book there are no homosexual encounters, his use of the term ‘lovers’ does suggest that Lawrence was hinting at gender ambiguity. The book shocked polite society as it was, because the plot could be boiled down to being a contest between love and lust. The first son dies from the metaphorical crossfire between his mother and his lover, while the second is left emotional bereft and forlorn following his own battle.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence married a German divorcee named Frieda Weekley. He also publicly voiced his anti-war views which were at odds with the majority of the British Public who displayed a strong fighting spirit and will to win. The German connection and his expressed contempt meant that Lawrence and his wife were treated with a good deal of suspicion. In addition to this, Lawrence was investigated for obscenity in his writing. Everything came to a head when he and his wife were accused of spying for the Germans. They lived on the Cornish coast and were accused of signalling information to German U-boats. By 1917 the Lawrences had been forced to relocate to central England, away from the coastline, with use of the Defence of the Realm Act.
With the capitulation of the Germans in 1918 the war was ended and the Lawrences opted for voluntary exile abroad. In 1919 they moved to Italy and spent three years exploring southern Europe and a few years later in 1922 they emigrated to the US via Australia. Eventually Lawrence’s ill health forced them back to Europe where he received treatment for tuberculosis.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In his final years he drafted his most notorious novel; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published in 1928, two years before his early death at the age of 44. The book caused an absolute outrage and was banned from publication in England until 1960. It was in the Sixties that Penguin publishing house took the case for its publication to court and a trial began which helped to redefine the British attitudes to sex and literature.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was considered entirely unacceptable because it broke a number of rules. Firstly, it had a working-class man indulging in coitus with an upper-class woman. Secondly, it went into explicit detail about their sexual intercourse. Thirdly it used words that were banned from print at that time. All in all, it was too lewd for the British to even consider reading.
It has been suggested that Lawrence wrote his final novel as ‘one in the eye’ for the British in retaliation for his treatment during the war years. There is probably an element of this in his motive, but he also saw himself as a voice of truth. Having come from humble beginnings, he had a problem with the veneer of respectability that the British upheld in his day. So, his instinct was to tear it away in the only way he knew how: by deconstructing British society and exposing what he saw as the truth.
Lawrence was one of the first novelists to realize that the ability to write brings power and the ability to commit one’s views to paper imbues them with potency. It is because the ownership of those views can be passed to others and disseminated to many more. What is more, they live on independent of their originator, as was illustrated perfectly by Lawrence’s untimely death.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover demonstrated that the animal is still in us all, no matter how we may pretend to be above our instinctual urges. Our evolutionary success owes itself to our desire to procreate as organisms regardless of social factors and that is essentially the theme of the book. Lawrence felt that to address such a primal behaviour deserved the use of explicit and expletive language to drive the point home. The attempt to do this in the 1920s was perhaps Lawrence’s biggest mistake – it wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that Britain was ready for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the jury at the trial decided after five days at court that the book did not subvert morals or religion. On its first day of publication, Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold 200,000 copies.
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
Cover Page (#u1fd22f88-672e-57bd-ad80-5ce1ca199f06)
Title Page (#u9670dcda-6a6d-51e4-ab6c-06890a87c8ee)
History of Collins (#u293ad126-3a68-5cb3-b063-4a61c51a2619)
Life & Times (#u35b8f11e-81a6-58a3-96a9-d9607d95e950)
PART ONE (#ub03efb40-204c-5ae4-b6bc-70bdacd79798)
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels (#u80698038-4bce-5ed2-861d-bd54aede3385)
CHAPTER 2 The Birth of Paul, and another Battle (#ub707fef9-a70e-5844-a4c2-1af5dc08bf83)
CHAPTER 3 The Casting off of Morel—the Taking on of William (#u261c1441-3b2a-522d-89dd-c54460705540)
CHAPTER 4 The Young Life of Paul (#uada6115d-573b-5173-ab46-cfdf7f75da2e)
CHAPTER 5 Paul Launches into Life (#u161a7240-b477-52b2-a3fe-96bd3ba6af61)
CHAPTER 6 Death in the Family (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 Lad-and-Girl Love (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 Strife in Love (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 Defeat of Miriam (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 Clara (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 The Test on Miriam (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 Passion (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 Baxter Dawes (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 The Release (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 Derelict (#litres_trial_promo)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_f6292d9e-f8a1-53f4-ab91-f59ee005c3d0)
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels (#ulink_ee4e1cb9-bffb-597e-b01d-21cc710a52e4)
“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 house, facing inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the long lines of ash-pits, went the alley, where the children played and the women gossiped and the men smoked. So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury because people must live in the kitchens, and the kitchens opened on to that nasty alley of ash-pits.
D. H. Lawrence
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.'There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not.'In his quest to find his emotional and independent self, Paul Morel is torn between the strong, Oedipal bond he has with his mother and the relationships he forges as a young adult, with chaste Miriam and the provocative Clara. As Paul matures and struggles with his own and his mother's feelings towards the other women in his life, Lawrence expertly crafts a timeless and universal story of family, love and the relationships that define us.
Collins Classics
History of Collins (#ulink_35e89f27-43b4-5409-aee4-50b2b8fe1465)
In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times (#ulink_aa09777d-9093-5b63-97cc-5175bf539442)
Post-Victorian Britain
David Herbert Lawrence was a creative talent who consistently tested the boundaries of acceptability through his work. He viewed post-Victorian Britain as morally bankrupt due to the effects of industri-alization and the associated changes in social structure and was generally regarded as antiestablishment by his contemporaries. The sexual content of his literature was considered by many at the time as little more than pornography prose. While other writers merely implied instances of sexual encounter in their work, Lawrence wrote detailed descriptive accounts of his character’s sexual exploits. He also dared to suggest that class divides were crossed for want of sexual gratification and for that he became something of a social pariah.
In his third novel; Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence explores the Oedipus complex – an unhealthy affection between a mother and her sons. The analytical psychologist Sigmund Freud had coined the term in 1910 and his work on psychology was very new and enticing during that period. Lawrence wrote the book, drawing upon and interpreting his own relationship with his mother. Sons and Lovers explores how difficult it can be for cosseted sons to escape the emotional ties of their mothers. The basic theme is that the protagonist, Paul Morel, always feels that his mother owns his soul even when he breaks away and takes a lover. He can therefore never fully give his soul to a lover.
Lawrence was also reportedly sexually confused in his early life. He had intimacies with young men as well as women and although in the book there are no homosexual encounters, his use of the term ‘lovers’ does suggest that Lawrence was hinting at gender ambiguity. The book shocked polite society as it was, because the plot could be boiled down to being a contest between love and lust. The first son dies from the metaphorical crossfire between his mother and his lover, while the second is left emotional bereft and forlorn following his own battle.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence married a German divorcee named Frieda Weekley. He also publicly voiced his anti-war views which were at odds with the majority of the British Public who displayed a strong fighting spirit and will to win. The German connection and his expressed contempt meant that Lawrence and his wife were treated with a good deal of suspicion. In addition to this, Lawrence was investigated for obscenity in his writing. Everything came to a head when he and his wife were accused of spying for the Germans. They lived on the Cornish coast and were accused of signalling information to German U-boats. By 1917 the Lawrences had been forced to relocate to central England, away from the coastline, with use of the Defence of the Realm Act.
With the capitulation of the Germans in 1918 the war was ended and the Lawrences opted for voluntary exile abroad. In 1919 they moved to Italy and spent three years exploring southern Europe and a few years later in 1922 they emigrated to the US via Australia. Eventually Lawrence’s ill health forced them back to Europe where he received treatment for tuberculosis.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In his final years he drafted his most notorious novel; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published in 1928, two years before his early death at the age of 44. The book caused an absolute outrage and was banned from publication in England until 1960. It was in the Sixties that Penguin publishing house took the case for its publication to court and a trial began which helped to redefine the British attitudes to sex and literature.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was considered entirely unacceptable because it broke a number of rules. Firstly, it had a working-class man indulging in coitus with an upper-class woman. Secondly, it went into explicit detail about their sexual intercourse. Thirdly it used words that were banned from print at that time. All in all, it was too lewd for the British to even consider reading.
It has been suggested that Lawrence wrote his final novel as ‘one in the eye’ for the British in retaliation for his treatment during the war years. There is probably an element of this in his motive, but he also saw himself as a voice of truth. Having come from humble beginnings, he had a problem with the veneer of respectability that the British upheld in his day. So, his instinct was to tear it away in the only way he knew how: by deconstructing British society and exposing what he saw as the truth.
Lawrence was one of the first novelists to realize that the ability to write brings power and the ability to commit one’s views to paper imbues them with potency. It is because the ownership of those views can be passed to others and disseminated to many more. What is more, they live on independent of their originator, as was illustrated perfectly by Lawrence’s untimely death.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover demonstrated that the animal is still in us all, no matter how we may pretend to be above our instinctual urges. Our evolutionary success owes itself to our desire to procreate as organisms regardless of social factors and that is essentially the theme of the book. Lawrence felt that to address such a primal behaviour deserved the use of explicit and expletive language to drive the point home. The attempt to do this in the 1920s was perhaps Lawrence’s biggest mistake – it wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that Britain was ready for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the jury at the trial decided after five days at court that the book did not subvert morals or religion. On its first day of publication, Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold 200,000 copies.
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
Cover Page (#u1fd22f88-672e-57bd-ad80-5ce1ca199f06)
Title Page (#u9670dcda-6a6d-51e4-ab6c-06890a87c8ee)
History of Collins (#u293ad126-3a68-5cb3-b063-4a61c51a2619)
Life & Times (#u35b8f11e-81a6-58a3-96a9-d9607d95e950)
PART ONE (#ub03efb40-204c-5ae4-b6bc-70bdacd79798)
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels (#u80698038-4bce-5ed2-861d-bd54aede3385)
CHAPTER 2 The Birth of Paul, and another Battle (#ub707fef9-a70e-5844-a4c2-1af5dc08bf83)
CHAPTER 3 The Casting off of Morel—the Taking on of William (#u261c1441-3b2a-522d-89dd-c54460705540)
CHAPTER 4 The Young Life of Paul (#uada6115d-573b-5173-ab46-cfdf7f75da2e)
CHAPTER 5 Paul Launches into Life (#u161a7240-b477-52b2-a3fe-96bd3ba6af61)
CHAPTER 6 Death in the Family (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 7 Lad-and-Girl Love (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 Strife in Love (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 Defeat of Miriam (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 Clara (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 The Test on Miriam (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 Passion (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 Baxter Dawes (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 The Release (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 Derelict (#litres_trial_promo)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_f6292d9e-f8a1-53f4-ab91-f59ee005c3d0)
CHAPTER 1 The Early Married Life of the Morels (#ulink_ee4e1cb9-bffb-597e-b01d-21cc710a52e4)
“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 house, facing inward between the blocks, looking at a scrubby back garden, and then at the ash-pits. And between the rows, between the long lines of ash-pits, went the alley, where the children played and the women gossiped and the men smoked. So, the actual conditions of living in the Bottoms, that was so well built and that looked so nice, were quite unsavoury because people must live in the kitchens, and the kitchens opened on to that nasty alley of ash-pits.
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