The Final Manuscript: Principal Materials from
"Nethermere I"
Most of "Nethermere I" was written on Type B paper. The quires are
usually between twelve and fourteen pages long. Such consistency suggests
that they were written as part of a regular routine, as Lawrence later
remembered: 'I must have written most of ["Laetitia"] five or six times, but
only in intervals. . . . But at Croydon I worked at ["Nethermere"] fairly
steadily, in the evenings after school'.[12] The name Worthington (later
corrected to
Saxton) occurs frequently in these pages. A number of literary references
help to date the writing. Page 461, for example, where reference is made
to H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, cannot have been written
before
December 1908 to March 1909, because Wells's novel was first published
as a serial in the English Review over that period. Similarly,
Stephen Reynold's story The Holy Mountain (referred to on
page 509) was published in the English Review over
April-July
1909. Finally, the
earliest that Lawrence is known to have read Dostoevsky (page 461) is May
1909.[13] The text written on the B
pages is a mixture of new material and revised passages copied from
"Laetitia II", as can be seen, for example, when pages 157:31-158:14 of the
Cambridge Edition are compared with the extract of "Laetitia II" printed in
the appendix (WP 348-349:5). Another example is the age of
Mr. Saxton. On page 406 of the manuscript he is said to be forty-five years
old, as his original Mr. Chambers would have been in 1908. Lawrence
probably copied this detail from "Laetitia II" without correction, because
during his 'thick' 1909 revision (see below) he updated Mr. Saxton's age
to forty-six (see Note to WP 186:5).
