D.H. Lawrence: Life and Background

Abstract

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885, at Eastwood, a mining village seven miles north-west of Nottingham, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The area is now more built up than it was in Lawrence’s day; at the end of the nineteenth century it was still very much a mixture of industrial and rural England. In his essay, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ — which was written towards the end of Lawrence’s life, and remains the best introduction to him and his background — he says of this area: ‘To me it seemed, and still seems, an extremely beautiful countryside … To me, as a child and a young man, it was still the old England of the forest and agricultural past; there were no motor-cars, the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away.’