He was born twenty-seven years ago in a coal-miner’s cottage at the little colliery town of Eastwood, on the border line between Nottingham and Derbyshire. The home was poor, yet not without certain aspirations and refinements. It was the mother who held it together, who saved it from a still more abject poverty, and who filled it with a spirit that made it possible for the boy—her youngest son—to keep alive the gifts still slumbering undiscovered within him. In “Sons and Lovers” we get the picture of just such a home and such a mother, and it seems safe to conclude that the novel in question is in many ways autobiographical.
At the age of twelve the boy won a County Council Scholarship—and came near having to give it up because he found that the fifteen pounds a year conferred by it would barely pay the fees at the Nottingham High School and the railway fares to that city. But his mother’s determination and self-sacrifice carried him safely past the seemingly impossible. At sixteen he left school to earn his living as a clerk. Illness saved him from that uncongenial fate. Instead he became a teacher, having charge of a class of colliers’ boys in one of those rough, old-fashioned British schools where all the classes used to fight against one another within a single large room. Before the classes convened in the morning, at eight o’clock, he himself received instruction from the head-master; at night he continued his studies in the little kitchen at home, where all the rest of the family were wont to foregather. At nineteen he found himself, to his own and everybody else’s astonishment, the first on the list of the King’s Scholarship examination, and from that on he was, to use his own words, “considered clever.” But the lack of
