Information
Before D. H. Lawrence visited Thanet, he no doubt had a mental image already associated with it and most likely it was this which prompted his comment to a friend whom he told of his impending visit: ‘Oh dear, oh lord, Margate !’.
It was actually Kingsgate, properly speaking within the boundary of Broadstairs, where he and Frieda Weekly stayed for nearly three weeks in July 1913. He even made a point of emphasising the correct postal address in his letters, which tend to dwell disconsolately on the bourgeois character of the place. However, three years later, when working on the introductory chapter to ‘Women in Love’, called the Prologue, which he later abandoned, it was probably his original image of unrefined, even vulgar, qualities which he evoked when using Margate to convey Birkin’s acknowledgement of his attraction to a certain kind of man.
Quotations
Yet, every now and again, would come over him the same passionate desire to have near him some man he saw, to exchange intimacy, to unburden himself of love to this new beloved … How vividly, months afterwards, he would recall … a young man in flannels on the sands at Margate, flaxen and ruddy, like a Viking of twenty-three, with clean, rounded contours, pure as the contours of snow, playing with some young children, building a castle in sand, intent and abstract, like a seagull or a keen, white bear.
Place | Extract |
| Kingsgate | Nonetheless they had quite a lively social life with visits from Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry and Edward Marsh, through whom they were introduced to Herbert and Cynthia Asquith, also staying nearby, in Marine Drive... |
| Margate |
It was actually Kingsgate, properly speaking within the boundary of Broadstairs, where he and Frieda Weekly stayed for nearly three weeks in July 1913...
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