According to my principle that if you read a work before you were twenty, that first time doesn’t count, I am now (re)reading two masters of early twentieth century English fiction, Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. Not exactly beach reading, but what you grab at random from your old schoolgirl bookcase as you head out the door. Both writers were obsessed with class, both borderline misogynistic. One of them, Lawrence, bonafide working class; the other, Maugham, bourgeois, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. In his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s mercilessly mocking parody of Cockney underclass accents, tastes, and mores comes across today as shockingly snobbish and judgmental. Their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbesian terms. They drink and procreate “in the double digits.” The men beat their wives and even their lovers, and the women have hair-dragging, face-clawing catfights. And yet Maugham is not entirely unsympathetic. His eponymous heroine, Liza, high-spirited and coquettish as she is, starts off with her own code of conduct. Maugham presents her downfall as an inevitable consequence of her circumstances rather than due to an inherent vice.
Lawrence also transcribes the Nottinghamshire dialect of his coal miner milieu with its “thee” and “thou” but without caricature or irony. He is equally aware of the ready brutality of the men, and the hard lives of the women, but he sees their lives as essentially tragic, and worthy of dignity. Lawrence himself escaped the “downpit” life he was born into, but the humiliation and class resentment transpires through all his work.
