‘It is astonishing how little literature has to show of the life of the poor’: Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review and D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction

Ford Madox Ford’s founding (but short lived) editorship of The English Review from 1908-1910 inspired and provided an early publication venue for the young D. H. Lawrence, who wrote several of his early stories and sketches to please his new literary mentor as he began to move in metropolitan literary circles. This chapter identifies a consistent focus on working-class themes across contributions to The English Review and outlines Ford’s interest in the conte, or what he termed ‘the real short story’, which was in Ford’s eyes best modelled by Henry James and the nineteenth-century European tradition of Maupassant and Balzac. These were writers Lawrence also admired and Ford deemed Lawrence’s earliest regional stories to be apposite for his cultural journal which called for more working class voices, an insight into the life of the poor and greater experimentation in the short form by English writers. The chapter also considers that Lawrence’s production of several (little-known) short sketches on his experiences as a schoolteacher in Croydon were intended for Ford’s journal.