Lawrence and the Common People

Like Paul in Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence was born into the “common people.” However, both artists’ work offered them the opportunity to climb the social ladder into the middle-classes. But Paul shocks his ambitious mother by declaring “I don’t want to belong to the well-to-do middle classes […] I belong to the common people.” In his essay “Which Class I Belong To” (1927), Lawrence summarised his own position as, by choice, of belonging to neither class. Nevertheless, these texts demonstrate Lawrence’s sustained interest in class and how he saw language as fundamental to class distinction. In his work only the “common people” speak dialect, whereas the middle-classes speak “the King’s English” also known as “the Oxford Voice,” something Lawrence mocked in his poem of the same name.This paper will look at these works, together with Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), to explore how Lawrence used language to not only differentiate between the classes but also to signify the characteristics that he associated with these two classes of people. In addition, it will consider Lawrence’s relationship with the “common people” and question whether his declaration of his classless state was realistic - or wishful thinking.