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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).
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