DH Lawrence discussion

2 things about LCL that I didn't know before reading Worthen's bio of Lawrence:

Lawrence wrote it after his tuberculosis became active and a doctor told him he didn't have long to live. (He survived several more years but his health declined steadily during that period.)

He self-published it -- and consequently made more money on it than on all his other writing combined up to that point.

Interesting. Dickens also self-published the work he's probably best known for -- "A Christmas Carol".

Yes! I've read somewhere that self-publishing wasn't an uncommon thing -- picked up a stigma only in the 20th century when it became associated with the vanity publishing of crap.

It pretty much goes without saying I suppose that in Lawrence's case he did it in large part because he'd been branded a pornographer. Bookshops were refusing to carry him and he'd frequently come under pressure from his publishers to edit his work to take out the bodily function bits. He also painted, and and around the same time mounted his first & only exhibition. It was raided (teh pubic hair! teh pubic hair!) -- he had to promise to remove them from England forever or the authorities would have destroyed them. Hard to imagine, really.

It all pissed him off :-)

So he self-pubbed partly out of necessity, and partly out of disgust at the "system" that reacted to his work so prudishly.

But what's cool is that he made money at it! Nobody deserved it more (or needed it more, at that point) than he did . . .

Dickens self-published "A Christmas Carol" because he was dissatisfied with the royalties he was getting from his regular publisher. "A Christmas Carol" was well-received critically and commercially -- it sold out many printings -- but didn't make the profits Dickens was hoping for mainly because of the cost of producing the volume to his standards. It sold for the equivalent of $30, which seems awfully high.

Wow, that is high! Around $650 in today's money if you can believe the online inflation calculators.

I suppose it was a kind of collector's item . . .

Also, I meant to mention: one issue that did plague Lawrence w/ regard to Chatterley was piracy.

Some things never stop remaining the same.

Kirsten wrote: "Wow, that is high! Around $650 in today's money if you can believe the online inflation calculators.

No -- I was unclear. I already did the conversion into today's currency. $30 was the modern-day equivalent of what it sold for back then. Still high for such a slim volume, even though it had four colored illustrations.

Oh, got it! Right.