Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Condition-of-England Novel

Abstract

L A D Y C H A T T E R L E Y ’ S L O V E R AN D T H E C O N D I T I O N - O F - E N G L A N D N O V E L N IL S C LA U SSO N University of Alberta JU ady Chatterley’s Lover is not usually regarded as one of D. H. Lawrence’s better novels, and it is often compared unfavourably with The Rainbow, Women in Love and even Sons and Lovers. The major criticisms of the novel are that it is misanthropic, that its characterization is schematic, and that it is too much a tract for the times and too little a novel. In my view, these criticisms are invalid because they are deduced from standards inap­ propriate for the kind of novel Lady Chatterley is. Too often critics have lamented that Lady Chatterley is not another Women in Love instead of trying to find out what kind of novel Lawrence intended to write and then judging how well he succeeded. The criteria by which Women in Love is rightly pronounced to be a great novel are not those by which Lady Chat­ terley, which is a very different kind of novel, ought to be judged, and once this fact is recognized we can begin to appreciate Lawrence’s last novel for what it is rather than condemning it for what it is not. Lawrence’s position as a twentieth-century inheritor of the nineteenthcentury tradition of criticism of industrial society is widely acknowledged, and it is to Carlyle more than any of the other Victorian prophets that Lawrence is most often compared. Raymond Williams, for example, says that “ Lawrence takes over the major criticisms of industrialism from the nineteenth-century tradition, on point after point, but in tone he remains more like Carlyle than any other writer in the tradition, then or since.” 1 It is certainly true that Lawrence’s tone is often reminiscent of Carlyle’s, and nowhere in his fiction more so than in Lady Chatterley. Yet however much the prophetic tone of the novel reminds us of Carlyle, its form and structure are indebted to the innovative novels of one of Carlyle’s contemporaries, Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1844 and 1845 gave the classic formulation to a new genre of fiction, the condition-of-England novel, which addressed the same issues as Carlyle’s non-fiction writings. In Coningsby, or The New Generation (1844) Disraeli alludes to “that Condition of England question, of which our generation hears so much,” 2 and the novel deals with this question, by examining the condition of English politics and political parties. E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , vni, 3, September 1982 But it is to Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), in which Disraeli offers a comprehensive vision of Victorian civilization, that the line of descent of such later examples of the genre as George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880), H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) can be most clearly traced. The remarkable similarities between Sybil and Lady Chatterley indicate just how firmly Lawrence’s novel is rooted in this tradition of fiction. From Disraeli to Lawrence a major theme of the condition-of-England novel is its threefold attack on the worship of Mammon, the physical and moral degradation of the working-classes, and the sheer ugliness of indus­ trial society. According to the narrator in Sybil, “since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To ac­ quire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of w e a l t h and t o i l , this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.” 3 In Lady Chatterley Lawrence similarly attacks the worship of...