Welcome to the Official Website of Dr. Dipak Giri: Would you consider Sons and Lovers a working class novel? Answer with close reference to the text.

Would you consider Sons and Lovers a working class novel? Answer with close reference to the text.

Answer: D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” is a semiautobiographical account of the life of the Morel family, focusing on the relation between the mother and the father, and in the second part, the life of Paul Morel. Set in a miner’s village in Northern England, it “portrays the sexual and emotional struggle of Paul Morel, caught between the women he attempts to love [...].” This can be seen as the most important theme of the novel; though the way the Morel family coped with the characteristics of living in a working class setting is also a major theme, mostly developed in the first part of the story.

The ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ describes Lawrence’s novel as “a psychological study of the familial and love relationships of a working-class English family.” The emphasis on the determiner ‘a’ helps us in how we can discuss the social relevance of the novel. Contrary to popular belief, “Sons and Lovers” isn’t about the working class in general, it is a novel about a working class in a mining village in Northern England, told from the viewpoint of a family who happens to be different from other families in quite a number of ways. To discuss the novel as just an example of what is considered to be the working class in England during the last decade of the 19th century would thusly give us the wrong impression.

But how should we approach “Sons and Lovers”? It is fair to say that in an economical way, almost all of the members of the Morel family more or less are working class. The problem in a lot of discussions about the class system in Britain, is that too much emphasis is being put on the economical side of the class system. As George Orwell states in his travel account “The Road to Wigan Pier”: “[...] the essential point about the English class-system is that it isnot entirely explicable in terms of money.” The classic example is that a miner, who is considered to be working class because he earns his living by manual labour, can have a higher salary than for example a hotel clerk, who is considered to be lower-middle class.