4 - D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God

Summary

D. H. LAWRENCE was brought up in the Congregational Church in Eastwood. His mother Lydia was a passionate, forceful character, who regularly attended chapel herself, and believed firmly that her children should also be brought up in it. Nonconformist culture at the turn of the twentieth century was such that the chapel often constituted almost all of its members’ social lives, with activities and meetings every night of the week, and for most of each Sunday. Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s close friend throughout his youth, wrote, ‘The chapel at Eastwood became the centre of our social life.’ In The Lost Girl, Lawrence writes of the novel’s heroine, who grows up in a fictional version of Eastwood:

For social life she went to the Congregational Chapel, and to the functions connected with the chapel […] She entered the choir at chapel, she attended Christian Endeavour and P. S. A., and the Literary Society on Monday evenings. Chapel provided her with a whole social activity […] It is hard to overestimate the value of church or chapel – but particularly chapel – as a social institution in places like Woodhouse.

Lydia Lawrence was ‘deeply religious’, according to Lawrence’s sister Ada, and Jessie too recalls that she and Lawrence ‘regarded our mothers as deeply religious women’. Lydia’s faith was perhaps not entirely orthodox, though, despite her passionate belief in the value of chapel. Jessie recalls her telling her mother that ‘she looked forward more to meeting her son Ernest in heaven than Jesus Christ Himself’. Jessie’s sister May recalls that, when the young Lawrence began a fight with her brothers, Mrs Lawrence urged them to hit him back, telling May’s mother, ‘I believe in retaliation. This “bear and forbear” gospel is too one-sided for me!’ Based on an interview with the daughter of one of the chapel deacons at the time, John Worthen writes, ‘[Lydia] was not […] active in the chapel; the doctrine of self-improvement she found at the Women’s Co-operative Guild at its Monday night meetings was rather more important to her’, and this seems to be true.