Episode 69. D H Lawrence Birthplace Museum

SYNOPSIS

The writer David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at what is now 8A Victoria Street, Eastwood, a small mining town with ten collieries near Nottingham. It was the first of four houses in which the Lawrences lived in the small town, largely owing to the drive of his lower middle-class mother Lydia, whose marital battles with her coalminer husband, Arthur, play out in fictionalized form in his novels.

Drawing upon Carolyn Melbourne’s expertise,, the episode opens with an exploration of how the Lawrences would have used 8A Victoria Street, the children’s bedrooms being used rarely, the parlour with its piano only on special occasions, and the kitchen, with its long-burning fire, being the centre of quotidian family life. The life of a relatively prosperous miner with brass in his pocket is compared with the standard of living in the local area including agricultural labour.

Andrew Harrison then places Lawrence’s burgeoning literary career in the context of his childhood, pointing at how he bristled when his middle-class literary mentors tried to pigeon hole him as a working-class genius, despite his being better read than his early patron, Ford Madox Hueffer. It explores his declining relationship with England following his relationship with Frieda von Richthofen which led to self-imposed exile after the First World War. It moves on to his rapprochement with the English Midlands in his late novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which Andrew suggests is more about the possibility of cross-class relationships through the democracy of touch than sex itself..

GUESTS

Carolyn Melbourne is Museum and Collections Officer at Broxtowe Borough Council and runs the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, 8A Victoria Street, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire NG16 3AW, the house in which D H Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885. Dr Andrew Harrison is Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre, School of English, University of Nottingham. He is founding editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. His book, The Life of the Author: D. H. Lawrence was published in 2024.

The D, H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum is open to the public and its opening hours can be checked by accessing its website online.

Simon’s interview with Carolyn Melbourne and Andrew Harrison was recorded in the parlour at the D. H. Lawrence Museum, 8A Victoria Road, Eastwood on 23 May 2025.