the jolly roger
receive the reply “O! ma! - but we do it every day!”. And so the thousand Florence copies entered history. Of all the multitude of pirated Lady Chatterley’s, it is the Florence Thousand that have value. In 2015 a copy made $10,000 at auction. For a collector coming to it from a di V erent angle there’s the fron- tispiece to Eric Gill’s Clothing without Cloth ( London 1931). This wood engraving depicts Mellors, the gamekeeper, for which Gill used himself as the model. Two copies of the engraving were sold for $2,125 at auction, lettered ‘CC’ with ill’s initials signed in reverse. Does anyone still care about Lady Chatterley’s Lover? The baggage that it’s acquired since publication has rendered it somewhat risible when compared to that other great tale of sexuality, Lolita . One view of Lawrence is that he’s a writer who is barely read nowadays, not least because he is seen as misogynist, male-orientated and pa- triarchal. In Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, she calls Lady Chatterley’s Lover ‘ largely a celebration of the penis of Oliver Mellors’. On the other hand in Women in Love Rupert Birkin, Lawrence’s alter ego, argues that men and women should be ‘two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force’. And in Sun Juliet (or Rina Secker) ponders the choice between her absent husband and the muscular peasant she feels drawn to, but then thinks ‘Why should I have to identify my life with a man’s life?’. She is tempted to meet the peasant for an hour to make love to him, but only on her own terms, for ‘as long as the desire lasts, and no more’. There is a D.H. Lawrence Society, based at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, where he was born, whose declared purpose is ‘to promote knowledge and understanding of the life and work of a man who was unarguably one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century’, and a Birthplace Museum at 8A Victoria Street. There is a Lawrence Collection of manuscripts and correspondence at Nottingham University, and his poetry and travel writing are more appreciated than ever (some place them higher than his fiction in terms of literary excellence). In Italy the Villa Bernarda at Spotorno is now a block of flats. But the street it stands on, high above the sea, has been renamed Via David Herbert Lawrence, and a plaque on the wall reads ‘The
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