Reproducing the Home in Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

Abstract

This paper examines a central concern in the texts of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) and Sons and Lovers (1913)—the figure of the home and the mother within it. Situating the author's preoccupation with the domestic interior alongside contemporary social concerns about the houses of the working-classes and the nature of the familial relations that went on within them, I argue that the ways of seeing into the house in these texts are intimately related to the place of the embodied author. Tressell and Lawrence's habitation of the class structure—their lived relation to the places of class—determines their reproduction of the working-class home and accounts for the different ways in which it is used in each of the novels, as symbol of the body politic and site of psychological longings respectively.