2. Class

Available for over a year

Michael Symmons Roberts presents the second part of this new series on DH Lawrence, examining this time the important role that class played in Lawrence’s life and work. Lawrence was born in the Nottinghamshire mining town of Eastwood, his father a collier and his mother a former teacher with aspirations for her son. While he was keen to escape a life down the mine through his writing, when Lawrence’s success saw him taken up by the middle and upper classes, he was both attracted by their grandeur and repelled by what their substitution of polite discourse for real feeling. He railed against the establishment - “the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot” - and for many the chief obscenity of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was that it saw a gamekeeper win the love of an aristocratic woman married to a Lord. Actor Robert Lindsay describes the deep connection he feels with Lawrence having grown up near Eastwood and attended the school where Lawrence taught, while Joan Bakewell recognises in her own life the conflict he clearly felt moving between his working class origins and his new life among the intelligentsia and the well-to-do. Meanwhile writer Alison Macleod and Professor Phil Davis consider how seriously we should consider accusations of proto-fascism laid against Lawrence by Bertrand Russell. Produced by Geoff bird Readings by Michael Socha Production Coordinator: Mica Nepomuceno