Themes and Issues

Abstract

The setting of Sons and Lovers is the late nineteenth-century mining community of Bestwood which belongs to a phase of development prior to the mechanisation and urbanisation of the twentieth century. Consequently, the picture of industrial life presented in this novel is very different from what it would be today. In Lawrence’s own lifetime changes were taking place which made him feel that the world he had known in his youth was becoming a thing of the past. He comments on this in his essay, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, written in 1929; and, although there is undoubtedly an element of retrospective idealisation in that essay, it is a useful indication of Lawrence’s attitude and values.