Sons and Lovers
by D.H. Lawrence
Contents
CHAPTER I
THE EARLY MARRIED LIFE OF THE MORELS
“The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell Row”. Hell Row was ablock of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on GreenhillLane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fieldsaway. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled by these smallmines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in acircle round a gin. And all over the countryside were these same pits, some ofwhich had been worked in the time of Charles II., the few colliers and thedonkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and littleblack places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of thesecoal-miners, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms andhomes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village ofBestwood.
Then, some sixty years ago, a sudden change took place, gin-pits were elbowedaside by the large mines of the financiers. The coal and iron field ofNottinghamshire and Derbyshire was discovered. Carston, Waite and Co. appeared.Amid tremendous excitement, Lord Palmerston formally opened the company’sfirst mine at Spinney Park, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.
About this time the notorious Hell Row, which through growing old had acquiredan evil reputation, was burned down, and much dirt was cleansed away.
Carston, Waite and Co. found they had struck on a good thing, so, down thevalleys of the brooks from Selby and Nuttall, new mines were sunk, until soonthere were six pits working. From Nuttall, high up on the sandstone among thewoods, the railway ran, past the ruined priory of the Carthusians and pastRobin Hood’s Well, down to Spinney Park, then on to Minton, a large mineamong corn-fields; from Minton acros