Postwar period

The Postwar period is presented less as a settled aftermath than as a struggle over what kind of life can follow the war. In the mining district around Tevershall, old collieries are losing ground to economic contraction and machinery; for Clifford Chatterley, the same industrial crisis becomes an opportunity to recover a sense of power. Oliver Mellors’s return from military service offers a contrasting postwar experience: not renewed authority, but estrangement and an attempt to live without ambition or connection.

Historical Setting

The period’s pressures emerge through the uncertain future of the pits. Tevershall and New London are the district’s two collieries, but Tevershall’s prosperous past has ended, while New London is vulnerable even in ordinary times and is now among the operations most exposed to bad trade. Mrs Bolton reports that men have left for work at Stacks Gate and Whiteover, where new works opened after the war. At Stacks Gate, chemical production at the pit-head has altered the shape of mining itself: its by-products are said to earn more than coal, and its workers’ new houses are described as almost mansions.

The apparent promise of this newer industry stands against the prospect of closure at home. Tevershall is called a sinking ship, with New London expected to go first and Tevershall possibly to shut within a few years. The landscape of abandoned workings makes that threat tangible: New England and Colwick Wood have closed, and at Colwick Wood bushes overrun the pit-head while the railway lines rust. Mrs Bolton remembers a time when Tevershall was the country’s best pit and men counted themselves fortunate to work there; the contrast makes industrial decline feel like the disappearance of a familiar world, not merely a change in employment.

Work, Mechanization, and Insecurity

The postwar crisis is also a contest between labor and machinery. Miners distrust the deeper, more mechanized workings and call the coal-cutting machines iron men; they fear that machines will displace the men who once cut coal by hand. The economic calculation is stark: what is lost as waste in mechanized production can be more than recovered in wages saved. Mrs Bolton recalls that people once feared the loss of work when stocking frames replaced older methods, yet also observes that more machines seem to bring more people. The novel leaves that apparent contradiction beside the immediate fear of workers whose jobs and communities depend on the pits.

The younger miners’ leisure does not erase their economic vulnerability. Mrs Bolton describes them riding motor-bikes, going to Sheffield or Nottingham, dancing, and betting on races; when they have no money, she says, they may listen to radical speakers, though she doubts their seriousness. She sees prolonged bad trade as the circumstance that could make them politically unsettled. Her account links political discontent not to an abstract doctrine but to insecure wages, limited prospects, and the need to find work elsewhere.

Clifford Chatterley’s Industrial Turn

The changing mines give Clifford Chatterley a new direction. Mrs Bolton’s talk helps him feel that he belongs to the mining world and is its real boss, even as the pits themselves face decline. He recognizes a division between popular success and success in work: while his stories have catered to an audience of pleasure, Tevershall has been going to the wall. The novel sharpens that contrast through the image of the bitch-goddess of success, whose appetite for literary flattery differs from the harsher industrial struggle for money and material production.

Clifford acts on this new interest rather than leaving it at the level of theory. He returns to the mines, is lowered in a tub, and is taken into the workings, where an underground manager shows him a seam by torchlight. He resumes technical reading, studies government reports, and examines research on coal, shale, and their chemical possibilities. Then he visits the pit day after day, pressing the general, overhead, and underground managers and the engineers with questions and demands. His attention to technical methods is accompanied by a growing sense of control over the managers and the hundreds of colliers. What he experiences as renewed life and a possible means of pulling Tevershall out of trouble is also a concentration of authority over the work and workers of the pit.

Military Return and Social Conflict

Oliver Mellors’s recollections give the postwar period a more personal, unsettled dimension. After joining the army in the spring of 1915, he served in India and Egypt and returned to India. He remembers a largely unreflective life with horses, his affection for a colonel who loved him, the colonel’s death from pneumonia, and his own narrow escape from death and damaged health. After several years as an officer, with a fair chance of becoming a captain, he left the army and returned to England as a working man. His experience among officers and civil servants had left him cold toward the middle and upper classes and without a desire to advance within them.

The political argument around the mines exposes a further division in how the postwar order is described. Clifford says that properly managed pits will make strikes as good as impossible. When Connie Chatterley objects that the miners live the life of Clifford’s coal mine, he answers that no man is forced to work for him. Her counterclaim—that their lives, and the lives of the wealthy too, are industrialized and hopeless—makes the dispute about more than management. In this account of the aftermath, industrial power may promise renewed purpose to an owner, but it does not resolve the insecurity, constrained choices, or social gulf experienced by those whose labor sustains it.